The apparent calm of the election belied the real concerns of the German public, concerns evident in the election results. Merkel began her campaign late and then barely campaigned; she gave plain speeches that rarely mentioned her opponents. To the eyes of the public, the two major parties seemed nearly identical. This provided the AfD with an opening to be the opposition. If people turned to a party that said the unspeakable, it was partly because very speakable things weren’t being said at all. [...]
“Merkel and Schulz: they agree,” read a headline after the one TV debate of the election season, in which the two candidates seemed to bat canned answers back and forth. The four other parties that will enter the Bundestag, or Parliament—in addition to the AfD, the economically liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Greens, and the far-left Die Linke—were relegated to a follow-up show the next evening. Merkel and Schulz barely discussed the eurozone. Education and NATO spending did not come up. [...]
The central issue of the campaign, migration, barely came up at all in most of the speeches by Merkel and Schulz. Merkel herself hardly mentioned the subject in her campaign, as if hoping the issue would simply go away. The CDU’s “strategy was to not talk about it, hoping in vain that voters wouldn’t realize it,” Dr. Timo Lochocki of the German Marshall Fund told me.
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