Well more German voters want her gone rather than serve another full term.

Hope finally to get the EU train back on a disciplined track.

If Merkel goes away centrist Germans will finally get out of her spell and go back to voting for the SPD.
That would be a good long term gain, despite the short term pain of having some real right-wing as Chancellor.

Are you assuming people vote CDU/CSU because of Merkel? I thought the hemorrhaging of voters to AfD showed they voted despite of Merkel. I bet they come back if Merkel leaves.

Clearly, Germany lacks a credible conservative or center-right political party, and only has poor choices at the moment.

With Schulz and Nahles?

Centrists vote CDU/CSU because of Merkel and they give her the victory.
Conservatives will always vote conservative, leftists will always vote left, the centrists decide who wins.

Ideally not Schulz, but to be honest he is a fine SPD politician and certainly better than any CDU/CSU leader, with good ideas about Germany and Europe.

I beg to differ, with a similar reaction

Not sure if you are aware of this or choose to not acknowledge that the Germans purposely try to negate their own right-wing shadow out of guilt for history. So they have a skewed political spectrum that is not normal, because a lot of what they are purposefully denying is just normal rational thinking

But it is bound to surface in one form or another. Look at Austria's government today. I think it is a truer reflection of the the democratic will of the people than Germany's artificial consensus. I don't think they can keep rational thinking bottled up indefinitely without adverse effects.

Total nonsense.
Germany had a perfectly normal political system for decades, where right-wing and left-wing governments were elected every few years.
Their right-wing party was a perfectly normal right-wing party, pro-business, pro-religion, anti-human-rights, etc. Until Merkel came to power.


I believe that the example of Austria actually proves my point, so thanks for bringing it up.
Centrist Austrians voted Left a few years ago, now they voted Right, in a few years they will vote Left again. This is how things are supposed to go.
This normal process stopped in Germany when Merkel came to power.
So I am willing to get 3 years of a real Right-wing chancellor if this is the price for a real SPD government to come back to power.

__________________
Moving in and out of Switzerland (because it's fun).
Currently away. Miss the Alps.

You've got me curious, lewton. Why do think a SPD government would be better? There was a time I was interested in their policies and watching quite a bit the news and everything seems like empty rhetorics to me now.
So what's your take on them? I'm willing to revise any political view I may have held at one point or another.

I believe that the Centre-left has the best ratio of good to bad policies, especially in countries where it is a serious Centre-left (for example not in France!).
The German SPD among other things set the German economy in the current path by adopting the Agenda 2000.
I really want to see them back in power.

I might actually be wrong but I will never know it while Merkel is running the country.

Self contradictory statement. Merkel is NOT conservative nor right wing by any measure other than by name. CDU/CSU people are conservative, but is misled by Merkel. If you take Merkel off the scene, you should experience a correction of her distorting effect.

Fortunately, Germany is doing well economically, and it can subdue discontent. Yet that has not always been the case, and it is not guaranteed to be the case in the future. Should Germany start to decline economically, I think you would see a lot less political patience.

Agenda 2010 is the reason the SPD is where they're at (in the polls and in parliament).
Most (remaining) members want it rolled back.

The remainder of their ideas is horrible, ideological, unfeasible, short-sighted or simply serving low urges like jealousy etc.

The current head (Schulz) is an idiot who should have remained in the EP, where he couldn't do much damage.

The only reason they put him into his current position is that nobody wanted to foot the bill for the defeat last year.

The SPD paid the price for fixing the German economy and Schulz is indeed not the best candidate they could have but a willing fool.
Still I would rather have him running the country than Merkel (but please refer to my previous post where I wrote that ideally it won't be him).

To be honest, I think you are better off without a government.

In fairness I agree with a part of that - the Hartz IV reforms reducing unemployment benefit increased German competitiveness substantially - a fact which it seems many on this forum dispute irrationally :

Merkel has unquestionably been the worst chancellor in many many generations :

SPD is behind the politics that made the workers salary as stagnant as in USA in the last 20 years, and these two countries are at the bottom of OECD countries in this respect. So the big economic reforms of agenda 2000 made the choice of keeping the workers costs down in increased global competition with low labor cost countries.

Now SPD makes it a condition for the great coalition to allow family reunification of the refugees. Which is interesting knowing that the US 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act favoring family reunification greatly accelerated the ethnic shift in US.

BTW: an interesting article: NYT: What Happened to Germany’s Social Democrats?

Right on time this article in New York Times..

Which is a strange logic.

Sometimes an election where the incumbent is doing extremely well and seems unassailable can also be an opportunity to bounce ideas around that aren't going to win here and now, but where in the longer term people will remember you for them and may help rebuild your party. You can say things that need to be said but that you wouldn't say if you actually had a fighting chance because in the short term you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.

I place Oscar Lafontaine vs Helmut Kohl in that category for example.

Or McGovern vs Nixon.

Or Goldwater vs LBJ

The German SPD could have selected a visionary strategist and run a campaign that people would have remembered for all the right reasons. Instead they ran a clown who people only remember for mistakenly thinking a Kapo is a type of SS officer, and having failed to counter Berlusoni's jibe in kind (which with all of Berlusconi's failings, surely doesn't take a first class comedian).

In other words a blathering idiot who had amply proven himself incapable of standing up for Germany, incapable of standing up for the EU, incapable of admitting his own mistakes, but who was somehow magically going to do everything right going forwards.