No, it couldn't be that, It's just this war and that lying son of a bitch, Johnson!

was is passiert?

Over on Powerline, John Hinderaker has a good analysis of this weekend’s doings across the sea in Vaterland. Worth reading in its entirety, but here are a couple of excerpts:

The German Election: Green Dreams In the Dustbin

…. Germany’s political class thought that it could have an industrial economy based on pre-industrial sources of energy like wind and solar. For a time, Russian natural gas allowed them to live that fantasy and lecture those who did not share it. The fantasy is now over, and it turns out that switching your economy to pre-industrial energy sources switches you back to a pre-industrial economy. Germany’s energy-intensive industrial production is now at a level even below those it fell to during the pandemic.

The country hasn’t seen significant economic growth in five years and 2024 was the second year in a row where Germany’s economy actually shrank.

…. Hence the outcome of today’s election–while, to be sure, murders committed by “migrants” also played a significant part. There are lessons here for Germany, and also for the U.S. and other industrialized, or formerly industrialized, countries:

In recent years, policymakers across the West, including the United States, have argued for and enacted costly policies to shift from cheap and reliable energy sources to expensive and unreliable ones. Voters have been told that, if everything goes right, not only might this come at no economic cost, but it might even usher in some “Green Revolution.” The fate of Germany’s economy — its entirely self-inflicted crippling in pursuit of a fantasy — exposes the folly of this argument. No government should follow its example and anyone who says it should ought to be dismissed as a crank.

Hinederaker concludes with this:

In Germany, as in the U.S., an “extremist” is someone who thinks the lights should go on when you flip the switch; who doesn’t want energy costs to triple or quadruple; who thinks it desirable for domestic manufacturers to be able to compete in global markets. If our elites continue to define the sensible as “extreme” and the absurdly fanciful as “moderate,” we will see more and more “extreme” results, as in today’s German election.