Merkel will try and wash her hands of it all, but I think they will throw her under the bus nevertheless. People need some level of closure and you can really only move on and do something different if you draw a firm line behind the mistakes of the past.

The entire credibility of the CDU depends on whether Merkel's successor can pull that one off and assure people that things are under control and take some visible measures to clean things up, or whether it will be some weasel like Schäuble who will just make things worse. Typically in situations like this you have one chance to fix things, not two, so if the CDU fail to turn the situation around there goes their credibility.

I can see why:
http://www.welt.de/vermischtes/artic...-AfD-Frau.html

"Damit meine ich, dass das Gerücht war, dass sie nach Chile oder Südamerika geht." Wow!

Because they might have an honest debate. Looks like the whole AfD may be the Donald Trump of Germany. Salient points, but I suspect they don't have their act together either.

I think that was supposed to be her attempt at a joke. As in, deposed German dictators seem to be magically attarcted by South America. Erich Honnecker and his wife went there. Many Nazis went there. So to suggest Merkel belongs there is to imply she's in that category.

Interesting of course how the journalist pretends not to see the joke and is acting offended that somebody should imply that Merkel should have to end her days in such a place. Anybody who thinks such a thing will ultimately act on it, you know. Reminds me of the Merkel on the gallows thing a couple of months back. The German left and establishment really needs to get a thicker skin.

Great analysis.

The result is disaster whenever a politician is looking to establish their "legacy".

And whatever corrective action is taken will be too little, too late. Demographers are pointing out that Germany will be a majority or near Muslim country in just a few generations.

There was a Belgian king who said that if you want a legacy you must either start a war or build a palace. Pity Merkel didn't take a leaf out of Erdogan's book.

Impact is even more immediate than that, in the mood of civil life, and the extreme right. I use to boast how civilized Germany is with so little police presence. I use to let my children wander around on their own. But now its even sensible to exercise a little bit of rational paranoia against marauding foreigners as well as neo-Nazis. I don't find that fun at all. Why, that is like.... I dunno.... Queens or Brooklyn?

This has been said about the U.K. many times over the decades and found to be false. What they did find is that when immigrant families assimilated, they tended to have smaller families, in line with the rest of the populace, so the growth was more proportional.

And most of the people yelling "Ding-dong, the witch is dead", weren't even alive when Thatcher was in power (and if they were, they were toddlers).

What you and your people had to go through was terrible. Sadly, such disruption was also inevitable. To paraphrase an economist: When something can't go on forever, it won't. Such is the situation we live in now (although less dramatic and concentrated in one point in time), where the generation just before us has been able to cash in on generous pensions and the appreciation of their homes. None of that cash and equity will be waiting for us upon our retirements (at least in the US and most of the West - maybe the UK will be different somehow).

There's little that can be done about that anyway.
The demographic projections (for the next 30 years) point to a massive reduction in population and a quasi-inversion of the age-pyramid (lot's of old people, some middle-aged and very few young people).
This development is irreversible. Even if the current (Christian) population started to reproduce like crazy (and I mean Mormon-type crazy), the damage is already done.

Unfortunately, the German social security system is a bit of a Ponzi-Scheme and requires a constant influx of new contributors to pay out the current recipients.
How one working employee is supposed to pay for one retired person (as that is the current projection for 2040-ish) is anybody's guess.

Personally, I give most Syrian refugees the benefit of the doubt - most of the problems come from crooks from the Maghreb (we already had those in Switzerland about two or three years ago). Their home countries aren't too keen on taking them back - go figure.

BTW: states from the Near and Middle East have an age pyramid that is the exact opposite of what we have in Germany (or Europe).
Historians have shown that the dynamic of population growth directly correlates with the dynamic of economic growth a decade or two down the line.

In the UK I think the appreciation of real estate is going to continue simply because with net positive immigration there are more people competing for limited real estate.

This is tough on young people and first time buyers but benefits those who are on the ladder. This is the strange thing about the UK. Jobs can go out of the window and lots of bad things happen to the economy but people are still getting richer because their houses are appreciating and people are getting rich by doing nothing. At some point of course too many people will be priced out of the market and something will have to give, but we're not there yet and probably won't be for at least another generation.

Germany on the other hand hasn't seen much real estate appreciation. People's homes aren't part of their pension plans in the way they are in the UK. I guess Merkel thought it was time to do something about that.

This may be outdated thinking. Historians look at Henry Ford and Northern Indiana and see men in cloth caps bolting tin lizzies together for 14 hours a day.

That same site today, three or four generations later is deepest rust belt, while the money is being made some other place by different people. Today the ability to create wealth doesn't correlate as directly with the number of people you employ. Politicians missed the signs and failed to push ahead with automation as hard as they could. They're trying to fix the 21st century's problems with the 19th century's solutions.

The conversation is shifting, and the deck is being reshuffled. It needs to happen from time to time.

Me too. Went the whole hog, marches and all.

So I completely understand the leftist way of thinking. In fact when I look at the left today I see myself as I was all those years ago.

But to quote Clemenceau, if a man isn't a socialist when he's 20, he has no heart. If he's still a socialist when he's 40, he has no brain.

You make a good point about predictions (especially regarding demographics). However, in this case the numbers are more concrete than the UK scenarios. For instance:

"Uwe Brandl, the President of the Bavarian Association of Municipalities, has been running the numbers:

Germany's Muslim population is set to nearly quadruple to an astonishing 20 million within the next five years, according to a demographic forecast by Bavarian lawmakers.

The German government expects to receive 1.5 million asylum seekers in 2015, and possibly even more in 2016. After factoring in family reunifications -- based on the assumption that individuals whose asylum applications are approved will subsequently bring an average of four additional family members to Germany -- that number will swell exponentially. This is in addition to the 5.8 million Muslims already living in Germany.

So from 5.8 million out of a population of 81 million, Muslims will now number 20 million out of a population of some 95 million.

Germans have a fertility rate of 1.3 children per couple. European Muslims are estimated to have approximately 3.5. Let's keep the math simple with nice round numbers:

Total population: 100 million.
Native Germans: 80 million.
Muslims: 20 million.

The 80 million Germans will have 52 million children and 34 million grandchildren. The 20 million Muslims will have 35 million children and 61 million grandchildren. So in two generations there will be twice as many Muslims as Germans. And that's without a single new immigrant after December 2016[...]

Herr Brandl calls this "a demographic shift of epic proportions, one that will change the face of Germany forever"."

Cite: http://www.steynonline.com/7272/mani...-new-wild-west

and...

"The German Chancellor cut to the chase and imported in twelve months 1.1 million Muslim "refugees". That doesn't sound an awful lot out of 80 million Germans, but, in fact, the 1.1 million Muslim are overwhelmingly (80 per cent plus) fit, virile, young men. Germany has fewer than ten million people in the same population cohort, among whom Muslims are already over-represented: the median age of Germans as a whole is 46, the median age of German Muslims is 34. But let's keep the numbers simple, and assume that of those ten million young Germans half of them are ethnic German males. Frau Merkel is still planning to bring in another million "refugees" this year. So by the end of 2016 she will have imported a population equivalent to 40 per cent of Germany's existing young male cohort. The future is here now: It's not about "predictions"." [My emphasis added.]

Cite: http://www.steynonline.com/7428/it-s...ography-stupid

Good points all. Which means that blue collar workers are completely screwed (unless they live in Switzerland?).

Note that this is not happening in Eastern Europe nor Russia. So what makes it inevitable in Germany?

I would say it is the wealth, but that is finite. Furthermore, the wealth is generated through intellect, and less on its natural resources. What happens when the generation of that wealth stops?

Also, is the assumption here that Germans will be wearing hijabs and issuing the Adhan from the Alexanderlatz Fernsehturm? I somehow doubt you can get a people to change cultures so easily. What is more likely to happen is a Germanicized expression of other cultures. Who knows, they may come out with an expression of Islam that is peaceful, acceptible and serve as a model practice for the rest of the world.

Although the germans sure behave like they really want to do themselves in. Who knows, they might actually succeed in obliterating themselves.

"There are lies damned lies and statistics."