From Townhall. I wanted to preserve it for posterity because it's so wrong that they may end up scrubbing it themselves in embarrassment. The folks at Townhall appear to have persuaded themselves that the spirit of Ronald Reagan is taking over the entire European continent, and it's not happening:
1. The CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union and its Bavaria-only sister party, Christian Social Union) has not won yet, big or otherwise. Votes are only 50% counted as I write (about an hour after the Townhall story came out).
2. If the CDU/CSU is able to govern without a coalition, it will be because it has to; because it no longer has any allies in parliament. One election result that is already clear is that their traditional partner, the FDP (Free Democrats, liberals in the 19th-century sense) is coming in under the 5% threshold and will get no seats at all.
3. As a ruling group, if they have a parliamentary majority it will be of a single seat (compared with a 21-seat majority in the current coalition with the FDP). That sounds like the opposite of a big win to me. Their ability to play rough will certainly be hampered.
4. It's not really a conservative party in the American sense in any case, and has not been since the end of World War II at least. It backs one of Europe's most generous welfare states (one of the best single-payer health systems, good government pensions for all, six-week paid vacations, and much much more) and is irrevocably committed to non-nuclear renewable energy. We associate these things with Germany's Social Democrats and Greens, but the CDU/CSU has never dared to pull back on them, if it even wants to. Some of those socialist programs (health care, free public education) go back to the first reunification and the überconservative chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
5. Merkel likes Obama better than Bush. She may be conservative, aber hat sie doch auch Geschmack.
Yup. It was Reuters that ran the "romp to victory" headline, and now Reuters is first to run projections according to which CDU/CSU has not won a majority and will be unable to rule without a leftwing coalition partner. The news agency seems not even slightly humiliated, but they should be.
