Germany’s New Conservative Leader Gives Trump/Musk The Finger
There are 630 seats in Germany's parliament, the Bundestag, and the country’s new Nazi Party, the AfD, supported by South African-American Nazi Elon Musk, won the second biggest cache of seats:
Right of center CDU/CSU- 28.52% (208 seats +11 seats)
Nazi AfD- 20.8% (152 seats +69 seats)
Left of center SPD- 16.41% (120 seats -86 seats)
Left of center Green- 11.61% (85 seats -33 seats)
Left-wing Die Linke- 8.77% (64 seats +25 seats)
Independent (minority Frisian Danes) SSW- (1 seat)
Basically, the Nazis won the old East Germany. The conservative business party FDP didn’t win enough votes (5%) to be admitted to the Bundestag so they went from 91 seats to zero seats. The other party that nearly got to 5% but failed by just a handful of votes is the kind of crackpot populists BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht) which winds up with no seats.
The most likely government will be a “grand coalition” between the CDU and the SPD, since no one— other than JD Vance, Musk and Trump— would agree to be in a government with the Nazis. In fact, one of the headlines from the election was that Chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz was that Germany will keep its distance from Señor Trumpanzee… despite this:
European Politico reported that “The Trump administration does not care about Europe and is aligning with Russia, said Merz, who is on course to become Germany's new leader. The continent, he warned, must urgently strengthen its defenses and potentially even find a replacement for NATO— within months. Merz's comments mark a historic watershed: They reveal how deeply Trump has shaken the political foundations of Europe, which has depended on American security guarantees since 1945… ‘My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,’ Germany's chancellor-in-waiting said. ‘I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump's statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe… I am very curious to see how we are heading toward the NATO summit at the end of June,’ he said. ‘Whether we will still be talking about NATO in its current form or whether we will have to establish an independent European defense capability much more quickly.’”
The perspective in The Forward was very, very different from what ypu’ll feel from reading U.S. coverage of the election, calling the results devastating for Jews. “The AfD’s rise,” wrote Benyamin Cohen, “isn’t just another ripple in Europe’s growing nationalist tide— it carries deeper echoes of Germany’s past. Some of the party’s leaders have ties to neo-Nazi rhetoric and have downplayed the Holocaust. Perhaps most alarming is the party’s growing support among younger voters, many of whom are increasingly disconnected from the country’s reckoning with its role in World War II… For Jews in Germany, the AfD’s surge has painful historical resonance. While the party publicly denies antisemitism and even brands itself as pro-Israel, some of its leaders have undermined Holocaust remembrance efforts. [Björn] Höcke, for example, referred to Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial as a “monument of shame,” sparking outrage… While most German Jews oppose the AfD, a small minority has been drawn to its strong anti-Muslim stance— a sentiment that has intensified in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. ‘The AfD is trying to position themselves as the only one that protects Jews against Muslims,’ [historian Meron] Mendel explained. ‘And they have radical ideas: for example, remigration, which means to send migrants back to their homelands. And for some Jews, it seems like an attractive answer’… For Jews in Germany and around the world, the election results are a reminder that history’s darkest chapters can resurface in new forms. ‘The wish to get rid of the past was always part of the German discussion,’ Mendel said. ‘But these voices are now coming from the second-largest party.’”