[Skybird]

Three things I never have forgotten about her:


She comes form a family of a protestant clergyman who led his family from the relative freedom of Westgermany back into the socialist GDR. Voluntarily. The protestant church'S relation to the regime was none fof ame and no busioenss it could be proud of. Questionable and dubious, at best.


Merkel was in the youth oirganisaiton of the SED state party, the FdJ (Freie deutsche Jugend). So far, so good, every young boy and girlwas, if they wnated to not ruin their future chances to be allowe dto study and become academics or make a career otherwise, by Eastgerman standards. Pure opportunism, only few dared to resist, and paid for that. But Merkel did not just board the trian everybody wa sriding on - she made career in the FdJ and made it to the ranks of a chief secretary of the FdJ for agitation and propaganda, responsible for the universities and the academy of science. She was not even a fully grown up girl back then, anbd already had arranged herself with the regime and set the m akr needed to make potlicla career inside the regime.


As a teenage girl, she participated in the spying on and guarding of profiled dissidents and regime critics, another action that the oridnary opportunistic FdJ member did not end up in, only convinced, trusted, regime-loyal people. Havelmann is the most prominent case to be named here.



This socialisation must have left traces in her maturing and mind and thinking. And it show, it shows so very clearly. A merciless lack of principles to not allow any princple ever come in her way. A Machivellian understanding for playing the claviature of power. An instinct-driven talent for talking content-free propaganda babble. An aim for socialist political goals: under her reign, the CDU has turned into the SPD, and what was the CDU before her now is territory claimed by he Green who became a bit more conservative. Merkel is the personification of the term "opportunism".



In Merkel and her understanding of "Europe", there is more of the old Eastgerman GDR tyranny and its mentality, then there ever was about freedom, modenr dmeoctracy, and the heritage of the - now dead - old CDU principles and values. Pure opportunism of hers. And a poltical self-undersdtanding that mirrors that of the old party grandees in the SED and the heads of ther GDR state.


There is an old bitter joke about her, expesially known in Eastgerman federal states: Merkel is the executioner of Erich Honnecker's late revenge against the FRG. This descritpion fits her perfectly. No other political survivors of the old Warsaw Pact regimes that collapsed in the late 80s, was as successful in hiding their real nature and making a new career, like her. And all of Germany and all of Europe believed her showact - and still do.



My antipathy against her roots much deeper than most of you people here can imagine. I do not exaggerate when I said in the past that to me she is the worst political desaster in Germany's history since 1933 and the 12 dark years following that year.


-----


Interesting it will be what the AfD now does. Merkel was their prime argument: "Merkel must go", that was the slogan that kept the AfD going. Now that Merkel is almost "gone", at least off the radar screen, what 'S next for the AfD?