This is just a crushing defeat for Germany’s ruling party – from AFP:
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives lost power in their German heartland after nearly six decades, initial poll results showed Sunday, with the Greens likely to lead their first state government.
Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) have ruled Baden-Wuerttemberg since 1953, but anger over her nuclear policy in light of the Japan crisis as well as decisions on Libya and the euro drove away voters in the run-up to the poll.
The anti-nuclear Greens claimed about 24 percent of the vote — about 12 point higher than five years ago — and were likely to form a coalition with the Social Democrats, who garnered about 23 percent in the rich state…
Merkel’s party still scored, by far, the largest share of the vote, but not enough to prevent the Greens from emerging as part of victorious coalition. Baden-Wuerttemberg is the base of Germany’s CDU…to illustrate, what happened in Baden is akin to a socialist coalition out polling the GOP in Utah….or a conservative/libertarian coalition beating the Democrats in San Francisco. It just isn’t done. It just isn’t possible…except, it is.
To be sure, recent events regarding nuclear power – and Merkel’s pandering on the issue – played a role, but I doubt as much a role as the MSM wants us to believe. My bet is that the Germans are getting madder and madder about having to bail out the European Union. Remember, the next move in the European bail out was just agreed to…and now the politicians have to go back home and convince their constituents that they should tax themselves in to poverty to pay bonded debt to bankers who made idiotic investments. Merkel’s constituents were just first off the mark in the ability to register their feelings about all this.
Merkel’s only bit of luck right now is that the national government doesn’t have to face the voters for two more years…but the spreading electoral revolt over bail outs (Ireland a couple of weeks ago utterly crushed the ruling party which had negotiated a banker bail out with the EU) hasn’t even got rolling, yet. And, in the end, the people are right about this: heck with a bunch of bankers and career politicians. Bail outs only help the entrenched – and it was the entrenched people who made the mess. Time to clean house…we got 1/3 there in 2010, we’ll finish the job in 2012…hopefully everyone around the world will soon turn out the idiots who got the world in to such a screwed up condition.
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