The Greens are the new "Party for the higher-income earners".


Their voter-share pretty much equals the public expenditure quota.
That's not coincidence.

No matter how good or not, in my view party leaders should be time limited.

Only higher earners can afford to maintain their life styles with the results of implementing Green policies

Also, if your a civil servant, your income is pretty much isolated from the state of the economy.
You're almost unfireable, you get a raise regularly...


A lot of teachers joined SPD in the 60s and 70s (with Brandt and Schmidt as Chancellor). They are slowly dying out. Also, the "classic worker" does no longer feel represented by the politics and politicians of SPD (and neither is he in reality). So, the SPD is clearly going extinct.
CDU is only marginally better in this respect, BTW.



Teachers these days vote Green (or AfD, depending on which school they teach...).

I hope some hard-line conservative replaces her.
Time for the centrist voters to go Green or at least back to the SPD.

And step down as chancellor in 2021.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46020745

Whoever replaces her is going to have a gargantuan task of turning the party around. It's not just a case of, let's pretend all this never happened and go back to being the CDU of some imaginary former golden age. Even if some people on the right fringe of the party seem to believe there is a magical switch to make just that happen.

I fear things are going to get far worse for the CDU before they can get any better. Even if they get new leaders today.

Imagine if Merkel would have gone in late 2014 or early 2015, people would be talking about her now as the greatest German Chancellor ever, certainly the greatest world leader of her generation. Now however she's like a punch drunk boxer that goes on fighting too long, with every day longer spent in the job doing irreparable damage to her legacy. Three more years now as the lamest of lame ducks.

Whoever follows her is likely only going to make it worse.

Maybe.

But I think Germans have a way of whitewashing the legacies of past leaders (at least as far as post war ones are concened).

Helmut Schmidt hat to step down after he messed up badly on a broad range of topics leading to his coalition breaking apart. But people mostly remember him for the good years as well as being a voice of reason in more recent years.

Helmut Kohl similarly lost his position over a nasty scandal involving accepting questionable donations, something that was never fully exposed, but people mostly remember him for the good stuff.

Willy Brandt had to step down over allegations that he was protecting a guy in his office accused of spying for a foreign power. But that detail is largely forgotten today and the man is considered a hero for his courage and the good stuff he achieved.

Maybe Merkel is smililarly hoping for the leniency of collective memory.

Only the mess she is leaving behind is far bigger.

What mess?
Approximately 28 percent of the working-age people who immigrated after 2014 to Germany were employed in June 2018. If this trend continues, it will be likely it will increase to 33 to 36 percent until the end of 2018.

Source

Economy is healthy
Unemployment rate: 3.4% (Aug 2018) better than the US 3.9%!
It has the largest national economy in Europe, the fourth-largest by nominal GDP in the world, and fifth by GDP which is growing 2.2% annually.
It has the world's largest trade surplus.

They even had to rewrite the immigration law this week to attract more non-EU immigrants because of the difficulty in filling open jobs.

What was your expectation?

It's good for the economy but as we could see in other parts - e.g. UK it puts a lot of pressure on social services i.e. health care, education etc. so there are always downsides to mass immigration. It has its benefits but it always comes with some (social) costs and not everyone, I suppose, is so keen to welcome this phenomenon. Far right is taking these aspects and is debating them hysterically as nauseam and there you go - their popularity is growing. In the end if there's no balance on each side everything could backfire some day.

Schmidt had to go because his views were unpopular (NATO Double Track decision) in large parts of his party.


Kohl was voted out of office because he was viewed as being unable to achieve anything.

The whole "little black suitcase" scandal came on later and tainted his legacy. I'm still a fan, somewhat, because if you hear longer interviews with him, you realize that at least in the political landscape, his understanding was unparalleled. And that's the reason why sometimes heads-of state on visit to Germany would talk him longer than to Schröder and why everybody there was so glad that scandal finally surfaced....

Schröder alienated his voter-base (it's gone now, for good)

Brand stepped back because of the East-German spy in his bureau. He's considered the "last honorable politician German had" these days, mostly because of this.
His countless affairs with women (a voracious sexual appetite, not unlike Kennedy's) are largely ignored. Weinstein would look like a boyscout next to him...


Merkel blurred the profile of the CDU to a degree that few of the core-voters recognize it - in order to attract new voters (gays, greens, young people).

A risky move, but at least it prevented the bottomless fall into irrelevance that the SPD has been experiencing.

Two week ago a girl was gang raped by migrants just across the border in Freiburg. 5 years ago this would have been unheard of, now people are barely surprised. There's your mess.

or to put it more simply.

There is more to life than money.

Why doesn't Merkel just step down now? She knows she's toast. Everyone knows it. What good will hanging around 3 more yeas do for anybody?

She will be remembered as die Füherein "Mama Merkel" ..."wir Schaffen das"...the one who opened the gates and divided Europe. The most influential German leader in Europe since 1945..

Helmut Kohl? All I remember of him was a bumper sticker I saw that said "sex, drugs and Helmut Kohl"

Health care in Germany has not got any significant pressure from the inflow of immigrants and refugees. The reason is that we are all paying a % of our salary for healthcare and the government cannot touch that money as it goes to independent health insurance organizations. More people paying into the system => more money for the system.
Don't try to generalize whatever bs comes from the UK, where the government decided to reduce funding for NHS in order to subsidize crap like tax cuts for the rich. In the UK the Healthcare system does not have its own funding, so the government can decide to increase or decrease funding. In Germany it is completely separate from taxation.

Education somehow yes, if you have kids, it might be tough to get them in pre-school (not in a school though). This only affects people with kids at pre-school age, so not really a game changer in politics.

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

Yep, 5 years ago the rapists were only blond with blue eyes, so alles gut, nothing to see there, at least the baby would not be brown.

I absolutely agree with this, but using it to in the context of an imaginary strain on German healthcare services is ridiculous.

5 years ago there were no gang rapes in Freiburg. 10 years ago neither.