Merkel — and Davos — rebuked in Germany
It's been a tough era for Davos Man, the personification of the great and the good who meet in the World
Economic Forum in that Swiss ski resort every January.
The rebukes just keep coming. The
European debt crisis. Brexit. Donald
Trump. And now, and once again unexpectedly, Angela Merkel's failure to form a German government.
For a dozen years, European elites who have recoiled from George W. Bush and swooned over Barack Obama have regarded Merkel as a rock-solid firmament of good sense. Her considerable internal political skills, her seeming unflappability and her upholding of conventional wisdoms, both well- and ill-founded, have made her a favorite at Davos.
Merkel has been the pillar of the European Union and seems to have been the dominant force behind the multiple responses to each of a succession of euro crises. It helps, of course, that Germany has Europe's largest economy, one mostly unscathed by the 2008 financial crisis — though that owes much to the Thatcherish labor law reforms of Merkel's predecessor, the Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder.
By standard political science rules of thumb, Merkel and her Christian Democrats should have been a big winner in the Sept. 24 elections. The national unemployment rate is 3.7 percent. Inflation, the bugaboo of Germans since the 1920s, is low. The Social Democrats' leader is untested in national politics.
Yet the CDU and its Bavarian partner, the CSU, got only 33 percent of the vote — their lowest percentage since West Germany started voting in 1949. The SPD, arguably the world's oldest social democratic party, plummeted to 21 percent. The two major parties thus barely topped 50 percent, compared with 76 to 77 percent from 1992 to 2002 and the high 60s from 2005 to 2013.
This, like Brexit in Britain and Trump's victory in the United States, was a slap in the face of the political, media and business establishment.
The reason is not hard to grasp: The establishment hasn't been performing very well of late. You don't have to be as harsh as former media baron and Franklin Roosevelt biographer Conrad Black, who wrote regarding the 2016 presidential election, "The previous 20 years of government had been utterly and bipartisanly incompetent, in the White House and the Congress," or The New York Times' sorta-conservative columnist David Brooks, who put it more succinctly: "Our elites really do stink."
You just have to look at what has been happening — in this case, in Europe — and how Angela Merkel ("a skilled and unideological dealmaker," says The Economist) has been
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