Comment on "The Twilight of Angela Merkel" Roger Cohen NYT SEPT. 25, 2017

The Twilight of Angela Merkel

by Roger Cohen, NYT,  SEPT. 25, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/merkel-election-germany-populism.html?comments#permid=24210261

As someone born in Germany in the waning days of Hitler, and someone educated in Germany under the guiding principle that "this must never be allowed to happen again", then watching Germany from both the outside and inside slowly change from a pacifist, inner-focused country into one of the enduring champions of European unity, the rise of the AfD is truly a scary phenomenon. The fact that this is part of a world-wide rightward shift is no solace: Germany has a special responsibility to keep nationalist, racist tendencies at bay.

The main hope is that, just as Berixit will prove disastrous for the UK and Trumpism will be shown to be a disaster in the US, these nationalist, racist movements will discredit themselves worldwide, and the trend will be reversed.

However, there are important lessons to be learned by the "mainstream" political forces from this rightward shift. They, the mainstream parties, have been blind to the real problems experience by large minorities within their constituencies. They have been lazy (or fearful) to acknowledge, that there are massive shifts going on in how the world operates, and they have, by and large, acquiesced to letting "the markets" determine how to deal with these changes, resulting, at the national level in an ever widening gap between the haves and have-nots, while (interestingly) spreading "wealth" in the world as a whole more evenly (if you can call the fact that few people are starving as "wealth").