Hello, and, er, happy Tuesday! This correspondence is arriving fashionably late to your inboxes because I spent much of last week covering the German elections with a great cohort of American journalists. In the run up to Wahltag, as Germans call Election Day, we traveled between Berlin and Cologne, speaking with candidates, campaign officials, pollsters, and more.
This was a landmark election for Germany in large part because it was the first not to include an incumbent in the history of the Federal Republic. After 16 years on the job, Angela Merkel is stepping down as chancellor. And while she wasn’t necessarily on the ballot, she was still at the top of many voters’ minds. After all, Mutti (or mother, as Merkel is affectionately known) remains a popular and trusted figure in the country—so much so that one of her past campaign slogans was simply, “You know me.” One common refrain I heard throughout my visit was that Merkel is the kind of politician you would trust to pilot your airplane.You know you’re going to arrive safely, I was told, but you just don’t know where.
The German election is over, but the country doesn’t know where it’s going, or who will be flying the plane, just yet. All of that will be subject to coalition talks between the main parties. To understand the state of play, check out these two great primers from Jen Kirby at Vox and Zach Basu at Axios.
In podcast news: I joined The Bunker this week to discuss the German election, Britain’s gas shortage, and the fact that I’ve never seen a Bond film… 🤫 You can tune in via your favorite podcast app (find yours here).
What I’ve written
“We are working very hard on respect. Recognition is a question of how we live together in our societies,” Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrats’ chancellor candidate, told me and a small group of reporters following his final campaign rally, in the West German city of Cologne. What mattered, he said, was that Germans all felt a degree of responsibility for the future, and that none thinks “they are better than the others.”
This message of respect was at the center of Scholz’s campaign—one that he crafted after closely studying two of the left’s biggest political failures in recent memory: the United States’ 2016 presidential election and Britain’s Brexit referendum. And it might have just worked. Keep reading here
Four years ago, many worried that the AfD would eventually win power. Now that its support has flatlined, it would be easy to write off the party as having failed. One could think that perhaps Germany has proved the limits of far-right populism. I wrote about why the reality is not so simple:
By claiming a share, however small, of Germany’s political real estate, the AfD has forced the country’s mainstream parties to broaden their tents and, in some cases, even normalize far-right positions. It has also forced them to consider more cumbersome coalitions that not long ago might have been unthinkable, complicating the math of forming a government in a country where a single party rarely wins an overall majority. Keep reading here
I wrote about the United States government’s decision to relax its travel restrictions on vaccinated visitors from Europe and elsewhere, and what the decision revealed (spoiler: America’s travel ban made no sense)
The White House sought to downplay the timing of the announcement, telling reporters that the decision was based “on science,” not diplomacy. Though that certainly may have been true earlier in the pandemic, when vaccination rates in Europe were low and the threat of variants was high, it certainly isn’t now. After all, under the current travel rules, Americans can travel to and from Europe largely without restriction. The only way that a vaccinated European can do the same is if they first spend two weeks in a third country, such as Turkey or Mexico, that is not subject to the same travel restrictions despite having comparable, if not higher, case rates and lower rates of vaccination. Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This fascinating essay on cancel culture and its impact on democratic discourse (The Atlantic)
The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized apologies, the public sacrifices—these are rather typical behaviors in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes, enforced by heavy peer pressure. This is a story of moral panic, of cultural institutions policing or purifying themselves in the face of disapproving crowds. The crowds are no longer literal, as they once were in Salem, but rather online mobs, organized via Twitter, Facebook, or sometimes internal company Slack channels.
This insightful long read on why Democrats are losing Texas Latinos (Texas Monthly)
Hispanic residents of our state are much more likely to identify as white than Hispanic residents of cities elsewhere in the country. With roots many generations deep in lands that were annexed from Mexican control to that of the U.S., many also actively reject being cast as immigrants. In 2020 ignorance of these facts embarrassed state and national Democrats. While Hispanic South Texans are proud of their Mexican heritage, many do not consider themselves to be “people of color” at all.
This piece on what the end of the Merkel era means for the world (The New Statesman)
Merkel has been a strange chancellor, an inscrutable “other” in her own party, in German politics and among other world leaders. That very otherness is inseparable from her vision of history and her distinctive political method. It is responsible for the mixed record of her chancellorship: of stability coming at the cost of stasis; prosperity at the cost of complacency; maturity at the cost of passivity; continuity at the cost of unfinished business; and welcome decency at the cost of anything approaching the greatness of an Adenauer. Yet precisely this otherness, precisely the complexity of a record neither overwhelmingly positive nor overwhelmingly negative, demands a certain Merkelian humility before history itself.
What I’m thinking about
Whether you can get fired for bad puns (asking for myself).
Until next time,
Yasmeen