One regular viewer of my interviews on ‘Judging Freedom’ always leaves a comment to the effect that I have just delivered his weekly quota of depressing news and he will go straight to a bar for comfort.
Today, on the contrary, I am pleased to share some very encouraging news, encouraging to those of us who believe that the future is unknowable with any degree of certainty and divine intervention can save our necks at any moment.
The news from Saxony-Anhalt of an electoral victory by the so-called Far Right party Alternativ fűr Deutschland (AfD) was not unexpected, but the level of its support was much higher than predicted – 44% of the vote in conditions of high voter turnout. Meanwhile, Chancellor Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) lost half its electoral support since the last elections, holding only 18% of the electorate.
Major media are uncertain what comes next. Will AfD form a coalition government, which it is determined not to do? Or will, by default, government formation fall to the right-of-center CDU and the left-of-center Social Democrats, with several smaller parties? The FT puts its bet on the AfD coming to power, most likely by attracting defections from other parties. They also hold out the possibility of its agreeing a cooperation, not a coalition, but an informal alliance with the so-called Far Left party of Sarah Wagenknecht, assuming that the final tally of votes puts her over the 5% threshold for receiving seats in the legislature.
The bigger picture, of course, is what this latest development means for the rest of Germany. Two other states have elections before the end of the month, one of which is the Berlin region. The still bigger picture is that the long held policy of a cordon sanitaire around the AfD by the other German political parties to exclude them from governance is seen to have been a failure and possibly counterproductive at that, since it was in effect a denial of democracy, a refusal to listen to the voice of the people.
And the biggest picture as regards the readership of these pages is that it brings us the hope that Friedrich Merz will now be removed by his own CDU party for this electoral catastrophe which comes against a background of widespread dislike within his party for his management style and for the very poor economic performance of Germany under his stewardship. Even if the CDU itself holds onto power until the next federal elections, the removal of the neo-Nazi Merz will be a big step forward towards pragmatism and decency in German politics. It will take us back from the brink of WWIII, back from remilitarization for the sake of prosecuting a war on Russia in 2030 or before.
I have spoken above about the so-called Far Right. But the likely return to parliament of Sarah Wagenknecht on the so-called Far Left is also a step towards sanity in German politics. Like the AfD, Wagenknecht wants to restore normal relations with Russia and is no friend of NATO or of the gang of thugs headed by Ursula von der Leyen who run the European institutions on behalf of the German CDU-SD grouping.
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The success of the AfD is not just to the credit of its present leadership under Alice Weidel or to the backing she received before the last federal elections from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. It is the long-awaited revenge of East Germany’s former elites and broader population against the shabby treatment they received from the reunification with West Germany. Yes, billions of euros in financial assistance were given to the East, for which ordinary German citizens in the West paid by supplemental taxes and by reduced services from their government. But the bigger impression in the East resulted from the dismissal of whole strata of East German professionals who were fired summarily and lost their chance to regain respectability and employment appropriate to their education and experience when hordes of West German carpet-baggers descended on the East and took over. That humiliation was never forgotten and set the stage for what we witnessed in the state elections yesterday.
I have written about this aspect of German politics in essays going back several years which are available in my websites’ archival section.
There is not much to hope for in British politics, where a rapid succession of prime ministers held to the Russophobe politics set out most clearly by Boris Johnson. In France, we have to wait another year for the removal of Emanuel Macron by ballot, though the CIA is once again preparing for the elections its own fair-haired boy to continue the vehemently anti-Russian policies of Macron and his predecessors, who all were installed thanks to CIA machinations as I have written in past essays from the time of his election to his first term. And so, by process of elimination, our hopes must be concentrated on return to sanity in German politics.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026
Very well said!, the interesting point is that the mainstream talks persistently about ''far right'' no longer the case and likewise as in France the ''Rassemblement National'' is also earmarked as ''far right, yet no longer the case judging their program!
Merz time in office is a real scandal, the way he got approval with intervention of the past (Scholz) parlement before his starting in the Kanzler office for a state loan of € 900 bn to rearm Germany to reconstitute the strongest army in the EU Union!, we will be lucky he will be out soon!
For France hopefully we will have a strong character for the upcoming presidential election, as the French State needs to retake back its ''sovereignty'' from the EU Union, by taking back this issue and removing all the deep state supporters of Macron in France, the country is ''than'' free to start reforms, which are absolutely needed!
The story of how the EU Union was formed in deep secrecy by the CIA/Roosevelt with the help of Monnet (French), Schuman (more German than French) and Walter Hallstein (ex-Nazi adherent and professor in law) with the intention of forming the United States of Europe is an illegal and absolute horrible even dreadful story, the EU Union law has priority above any national state law in the EU Union and the Union has become a non-democratic dictatorial ''monster''! Hope the near future will correct this situation.
Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.