All must have prizes THE German chancellor, Angela Merkel, may be the West’s de facto leader in the Ukraine crisis, a quasi-hegemon in the European Union and unassailably popular in opinion polls. But her centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has growing weaknesses, as Hamburg, one of Germany’s 16 federal states, showed on February 15th.
The CDU was the big loser in a regional election that had several winners. The Social Democrats (SPD), led by a colourless but reliable mayor, Olaf Scholz, triumphed with 45.7% of the vote and will stay in power, probably with the Greens. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), a Eurosceptic party founded in 2013, got into its first assembly in west Germany after breaking into three eastern parliaments. Even the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) returned, with 7.4%.
The kingmaker of German governments for much of post-war history, the FDP has of late seemed moribund, ejected from the federal and several state parliaments. A cranky Green politician, Jörg Rupp, tweeted that the FDP succeeded “with tits and legs instead of content”, intended as a swipe at the party’s leading…
