Al Jazeera: Imagining a post-Merkel Europe

Then there is the added Merkel factor: During Merkel's 12 year-reign, not a single coalition partner has emerged strengthened out of a coalition with the chancellor. So, small wonder that the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the SPD are both traumatised by dramatic electoral defeats following an alliance with Merkel, and are very hesitant to enter another coalition with her. [...]

The bigger danger is that the compromises necessary to form governing coalitions, in a more fragmented party system, will not lead to the necessary reforms that Germany needs to undertake, in the face of the digital transformation of its industrial base, competition from the US and China, as well as the demographic strain on its social systems. [...]

To be sure, Merkel's experience and stature as a crisis manager would be a big loss. During the Ukraine crisis, her political standing and her ability to bridge the divide between anti-Putin and more accommodating forces within the EU were key to managing the situation. This allowed Europe to play a crucial role in the crisis. [...]

The biggest foreign policy mistake a new German government could make would be to close the door on Macron's proposals for reforming the eurozone and the EU. In Germany, the only two parties clearly positioned against Macron's eurozone proposals are the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the FDP.

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Jacobin Magazine: Will the Saudis Go to War?

What he and his advisers (read: yes-men and sycophants) will decide is unknown. But three things seem clear. One is that the Saudis give all signs of gearing up for a showdown with their rival across the Persian Gulf. A second is that while the kingdom enjoys certain key advantages, the odds will turn increasingly against them if an actual shooting war erupts. The third is that if MbS loses, the royal family will likely lose too — bigly. Monarchy doesn’t go well with modern warfare, as a slew of royal families beginning with the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs, and Ottomans discovered in World War I and after. The issue now is whether the House of Saud will join such half-forgotten dynasties in the great royal graveyard. [...]

The kingdom finds itself surrounded by a ring of fire of its own making. But Saudi Arabia is not only destabilizing others — it’s destabilizing itself. Power in the kingdom essentially rests on a three-way social compact among the House of Saud, the general population, and the Wahhabiyya, which is to say the overgrown religious establishment. The first is allowed an absolute monopoly on political power as long as it shares a portion of its oil wealth with the broad masses in the form of jobs and social benefits. The people, in turn, are allowed to collect such benefits as long as they grovel, keep quiet, and do not disturb the status quo. As for the mullahs, their job is to drum up support for the House of Saud as long as the royal family returns the favor by safeguarding shari‘a at home and promulgating the kingdom’s austere, violent, and women-hating version of Islam abroad. [...]

It also has the advantage of some 120 miles of water lying between it and its enemy, not to mention Kuwait and Iraq. A major air or sea assault across the Persian Gulf appears beyond Iranian capabilities while opening up a land corridor with a couple of sovereign states in the way is presumably a non-starter. So while Iran’s manpower reserves are greater, it has no clear way of delivering them to the battlefield. [...]

As a consequence, the relationship between the people and the state is completely different. Where King Salman and Muhammad are isolated not only from the masses but even from other members of the royal family (with whom they’re effectively at war), Iranian president Hassan Rouhani was re-elected in June with 57 percent of the vote, seven points more than he received four years earlier.

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The Atlantic: The Architect of the Radical Right

Why does all this matter today? Well, we might begin with the first New Yorker elected president since FDR, a man who has given new meaning to the term copperhead (originally applied to Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War). Lost amid the many 2016 postmortems, and the careful parsing of returns in Ohio swing counties, was Donald Trump’s prodigious conquest of the South: 60 percent or more of the vote in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia, with similar margins in Louisiana and Mississippi. And the message is still being missed. We’ve heard much about the “older white men” in the administration, but rather less about where they come from. No fewer than 10 Cabinet appointees are from the South, in key positions like attorney general (Alabama) and secretary of state (Texas), not to mention Trump’s top political adviser, Steve Bannon, who grew up in Virginia. [...]

Today we remember ferocious civil-rights struggles waged in Birmingham and Selma. But ground zero for the respectable defense of Jim Crow was Virginia, where one of the nation’s most powerful politicians, Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., ruled with the authority of an old-style feudal boss. His notorious “machine” kept the state clenched in an iron grip; the oppressions included a poll tax that suppressed black voter turnout so that it was on a par with the Deep South’s (and kept overall turnout under 20 percent). Byrd had allies in the president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, and the newspaperman James Jackson Kilpatrick, who, long before his lovable-curmudgeon TV role on the “Point-Counterpoint” segment of 60 Minutes in the 1970s, was a fanatical and ingenious segregationist. [...]

That was Buchanan’s view, too. It wasn’t enough to elect true-believing politicians. The rules of government needed to be rewritten. But this required ideal conditions—a blank slate. This had happened once, in Chile, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. A vogue for public choice had swept Pinochet’s administration. Buchanan’s books were translated, and some of his acolytes helped restructure Chile’s economy. Labor unions were banned, and social security and health care were both privatized. On a week-long visit in 1980, Buchanan gave formal lectures to “top representatives of a governing elite that melded the military and the corporate world,” MacLean reports, and he dispensed counsel in private conversations. But Buchanan said very little about his part in assisting Chile’s reformers—and he said very little, too, when the country’s economy cratered, and Pinochet at last fired the Buchananites.

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The Atlantic: This Isn't the End of the Merkel Era

The most alarmist of these doubts are overstated, according to Peel, who noted that while Merkel “is clearly wobbled and ... clearly weakened,” it’s still a far cry from her being replaced at the helm of German leadership—in part because she lacks a clear successor within her party, but also because she remains extremely popular among the German population. “She survived as her party’s champion as long as she was a winner,” Peel said, noting that more than half of Germans would prefer for Merkel to remain chancellor. “The moment she looks like no longer being a winner, the rebels will start to mutter. And that’s where you’re getting this muttering coming from, I think. But they’ve got no alternative candidate.”

Merkel’s confidence that she will not resign suggests she knows this. But it could also stem from the fact that she’s weathered crises far worse. “This is definitely a challenge and this has weakened her as a leader, but it’s not as big as the refugee crisis,” Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel, told me in reference to Merkel’s 2015 decision to open Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees. That move prompted similar predictions of her political demise. “When the refugee crisis was unfolding, there was a legitimate fear … that Merkel was going to fall.” [...]

If Germany were to take the drastic step of holding another round of elections, there’s no indication it would lead to Merkel’s fall. If anything, polls suggest it would result in the same divisions delivered by the first election—an outcome that would force the parties back to coalition talks where they started. Dirsus said this could be avoided if the SPD withdrew their refusal to join the government for another grand coalition—a move the party’s leader Martin Schulz has thus far ruled out. “There is now a lot of pressure on the Social Democrats to at least start coalition talks with Merkel because people are reminding them of their responsibilities to the country,” Dirsus said, adding that: “there is no guarantee that [Schulz] would be the candidate again if there are new elections, so he doesn’t really have an interest in new elections.”

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Political Critique: Poland broke my heart

This march showed a rift that I didn’t know was there. My mom emailed me expressing her fears. My dad defended it as a hijacked gathering of nationalists. They marched with signs calling for a white Europe. For a second holocaust. For the removal of ethnic minorities. This wasn’t hijacked, it was meant to be this way.

The day after, we Poles had to condemn the march. Anything less would be a tacit acceptance of its message. I was confident that Catholic cousins would stand up for me. None of them did.  I asked my grandmother about the march. She felt that it was overblown and it would be unfair to categorize everyone there as fascist. I was stunned. And now I’m angry. [...]

The main obstacle for me aren’t the fascists themselves. It’s Poles who watched the march and did nothing. It’s my relatives who insist that those who march behind racist banners and shout anti-Semitic slogans are actually just guilty of being tricked. It’s the political cover granted to fascists marching with children. It’s people who don’t want to recognize that Poland has a problem with racism.

I can’t pretend that I saw the march like everyone else. Unlike foreign Jews, I didn’t think that this march represented Poles or even the vast majority of Poles. And unlike Catholic Poles, I couldn’t see this as a small, irrelevant nationalist demonstration. Both of my identities saw it as fascists staking their claim in the heart of Poland. They wanted to define what Polish patriotism looked like and both groups, Jews and Poles, let them. By reacting with fear and derision, Jews abroad are fuelling fascist ideas of an isolated Poland. Similarly by providing them with excuses and cover, Poles are letting fascists operate with impunity.

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