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May 23, 2005
Schroeder: The End Of The Rope?
German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his Social Democratic Party have gotten a lot of mileage out of the anti-American vituperation they've been spewing for the last few years. But the well just ran dry. John Fund reports in today's WSJ OpinionJournal:
Three years ago, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder cynically used opposition to liberating Iraq to play an anti-American card just before elections in which he trailed his Christian Democratic opponents. [...] Yesterday, facing a likely loss in elections in Germany's largest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, his Social Democratic Party's union backers played another anti-American card, this time depicting U.S. investors as blood-sucking parasites. [...] This time, the tactic failed. Mr. Schoeder's party went down to a stunning defeat, losing the largely working-class state, home to one out of five Germans, for the first time in nearly 40 years.
And the numbers could not be spun: the partners of Schroeder's Social Democrats, the Greens, also failed miserabley--along with the other left-wing alternative parties. Faced with these hard facts, Schroeder has now called for a national election no later than this fall, a year earlier than expected.
Bad news for Mr. Schroeder is also good news for America. The Christian Democrats have announced that Angela Merkel, their pro-U.S. party chairman, will be their candidate for chancellor in the fall elections.
Ms. Merkel is a physicist who lived in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. While cautious, she is the closest thing German politics has to a Margaret Thatcher. When asked earlier this year if she detected any similarities between her ideas and the reforms that Britain's Iron Lady carried out in the 1980s, she told the Independent, a British newspaper, "My whole life was changed by reunification. I have experienced change as something good, not something to be avoided."
This is wonderful news. Now let's just hope the EU constitution is rejected.
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