28 March 2018, Germany, Berlin: Olaf Scholz, Federal Minister of Finance (SPD), and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) attend a cabinet meeting at the Federal Chancellery. Gregor Fischer/Press Association. All rights reserved.
To fix the topic, recall 18 months of recent electoral shocks, in reverse order. Last autumn in Germany’s national elections, the Alternative für Deutschland broke out from the fringes and won 94 seats in the federal parliament, a seventh of the total. Not since the early 1950s has Germany’s hard right won national representation and never in such strength. A year ago, Marine Le Pen at the head of the National Front advanced to the second round of France’s presidential election, beating conventional parties of center-left and center-right. Although she lost the run-off, Le Pen won 34 percent of the second-round vote, a popular breakthrough for a party previously contained at the extremes. In the 2016 US election, the New York property developer and television showman Donald Trump, running a right-wing “America First” campaign as a maverick Republican, won the presidency with a minority of the popular vote but a large majority in the electoral college. And not to forget, in June 2016, 51.9% of those voting in a nationwide referendum called for Britain to leave the European Union without specifying an alternative to membership and despite the near-unanimous collective finding of mainstream politicians left and right, business leaders, economists, historians, scientists, military specialists, and foreign-policy experts that withdrawal would prove an economic, social and strategic blunder.
Four countries, four frameworks, four results, all different and each telling its own story.
