Finally, voters are connecting the dots:
(Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives suffered a crushing defeat on Sunday in an election in Germany’s most populous state, a result which could embolden the left opposition to step up its criticism of her European austerity policies.
The election in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), a western German state with a bigger population than the Netherlands and an economy the size of Turkey, was held 18 months before a national election in which Merkel is expected to fight for a third term.
She remains popular in Germany for her steady handling of the euro zone debt crisis, but the sheer scale of her party’s defeat leaves her vulnerable at a time when a backlash against her insistence on fiscal discipline is building across Europe.
According to first projections, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) won 38.8 percent of the vote and will have enough to form a stable majority with the Greens, who scored 12.2 percent.
Israel’s political class is also in crisis. Last week the Congress gave Israel $1 billion dollars in emergency money to keep its economy afloat. (Nice to know that we have so much extra money laying around.) Neo-con (Zionist) columnist Charles Krauthammer, a purveyor of nonsense, would have us believe that Netanyahu brought the Kadima Party (the breakaway less right wing portion of the Likud Party) into his government only to gain broader support for a pre-emptive military strike on Iran. What a load of crap. Netanyahu knew that he would lose the elections that he called for in September. And he would lose them overwhelmingly. So he cobbled together a “new” government to save his own political hide. Egomaniacs always form an “alliance of cowards” to save themselves.