The Atlantic: Angela Merkel Reorients Germany

Why was Angela Merkel just elected to a fourth term as German chancellor? Ahead of Sunday’s election, the German journalist Robin Alexander offered one explanation. Since the economy is thriving and the nation’s politics are relatively placid despite the disruptive rise of a far-right populist-nationalist party, many Germans think they’re living on a “ship of stability and around us it’s very stormy.” Consider: Vladimir Putin changed Ukraine’s borders by force; Donald Trump, who “in German eyes behaves like a madman,” was elected president of the United States; Britain voted to exit the European Union; and France, had Marine Le Pen won this year’s presidential race, might have left the bloc as well, destroying the entire EU project. [...]

The United States has served as a model for German democracy and as a guarantor of German security, both through NATO and America’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. The European Union has allowed Germany to become a leading power in Europe while maintaining good relations with its neighbors—as Puglierin put it, “to breathe and to feel well in our own shoes.” In Brexit, the EU will lose its second-largest economy and its strongest link to the United States. In Trump, Germans have confronted a leader across the Atlantic who has wavered on defending NATO members, demanded that Germany pay more for U.S. military protection, challenged certain aspects of liberal democracy, championed the very nationalism that European integration was designed to transcend, and dismissed the EU as a “vehicle” for German power. At first, after the one-two punch of Brexit andTrump, Germans had “the impression that our world crumbled,” Puglierin said. [...]

In a telling debate before the German election, representatives of the country’s six main parties were asked which of four nations—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Turkey—was Germany’s closest partner. Two chose the U.K. in a show of European solidarity. Two picked the U.S. because transatlantic relations were most important, though they explicitly excluded Donald Trump, the “outrageous U.S. president” who “is insulting the whole world and endangering the world with his tweets,” from the partnership. One—the emissary from Merkel’s party—wondered why he couldn’t pick France. Another made no selection whatsoever. When the moderator asked whether any audience members thought Trump was a “reliable partner for Germany,” two lonely hands went up.

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Financial Times: The end of the Chinese miracle

The School of Life: On Still Being a Virgin

Our era of sexual liberation encourages us to have sex; but at the same time, hugely stigmatises those who don’t have it, from choice or circumstances. It’s time to liberate the idea of lingering or ongoing virginity from the shame it’s currently surrounded by. 

The Atlantic: Masculinity Done Well and Poorly

It’s possible to overanalyze these sentence fragments. The jumping from one topic to the next without completing a thought makes it so Trump rarely says enough to escape plausible deniability. This manner of speaking has been noted in objective linguistic analysis to be consistent with the sort seen in early stages of cognitive decline. Though at least some of the pacing here was the result of interruption from wild applause from a crowd that would not likely have reacted with such approval to a man apologizing for the stagnant health-policy situation.

Instead he drew cheers for projecting toughness and bravado—for saying his catchphrase, “You’re fired!” The crowd responded well to the shared sense of superiority over the more familiar other: black NFL players who protest the power structure. The crowd cheered for the days when men were men and they hit each other hard—when there was no discourse on the harm that could be done from head injuries, just as there was no concern for “safe spaces” for trauma victims or “political correctness” to call attention to divisive rhetoric. This was the time when America was apparently great. [...]

In all of these statements Trump could reasonably be—and widely is—said to be engaging in racial demagoguery for political gain. Over the weekend he would go on to praise the largely white NHL and NASCAR while calling for black athletes who protest state abuses of power to be fired. He is also quite possibly not so calculating as to consciously weaponize racism and authoritarianism, but is engaging in a sort of demagoguery fueled firstly by his own impulse to gain approval. His code of masculinity dictates that this is done by saying things that incline people to perceive him as a powerful man.

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Financial Times: Germany’s election results in charts and maps

More than 1m voters shifted away from the CDU/CSU parties to the AfD — but even more went to the FDP. 

The SPD lost votes in nearly equal measure to the FDP, the Left, the Greens and the AfD.  The AfD was the big winner, drawing votes from all the big parties, especially the CDU/CSU bloc. Even more important, though, was its ability to mobilise previously disengaged voters and those who before voted for minor parties.

The FDP was the main beneficiary of the swing away from the CDU/CSU parties, while the Left offset losses to the AfD with gains from the SPD elsewhere. The Greens benefited from the decline of the SPD. [...]

Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, DIW said: “The SPD has lost its classic working-class voters and this explains its constant struggle in the past elections.”   

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