Is the end night for Angela Merkel and her disastrous EU?

By Professor Arthur Noble

‘Après moi, le déluge’

The EU is in chaos after German Chancellor Angela Merkel, once dubbed ‘the most powerful woman in Europe’, stormed out of the Bundestag on 22 February 2018 when Dr Alice Weidel, the new (though in her personal life controversial) leader of the anti-EU and anti-Islam Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD), blasted her for threatening to “punish” the UK over Brexit and for squandering German taxpayers’ money to finance “her” [Merkel’s own] EU project. The speech drew huge applause.

In her fiery address,¹ Weidel demanded that Merkel should “stop issuing threats” against the UK: “The EU wants to make an example of Great Britain, a punishment beyond any economic or political reason. This is not how one treats a European partner.” She pointed out that the predicted recession in the wake of the Brexit vote did not happen, but that on the contrary the British economy showed growth. Rodney Atkinson, who is well known for his incisive analyses and accurate predictions, has summarised the already positive results of Brexit for the UK even before it happens, and its negative effect on the EU.²

Weidel then denounced the Chancellor’s refugee quota system for immigrants and refugees; but it was a comment by the AfD co-founder, Alexander Gauland, that provoked Merkel’s hasty flight from the chamber: “Countries want to decide for themselves whom they take in. There is no national duty with regard to multiculturalism.”

Money

Weidel warned that the European Commission was planning to restrict Britain’s access to the single market, even during the transition period, specifically because of the fear that other countries in Europe could follow suit and “take back their sovereignty”: “By supporting these plans to ostracise Germany’s biggest trading partner in the EU, you [Merkel] are taking free trade and competition hostage and establishing a failed EU ideology. The good trading relationship with Great Britain and the rest of the Continent must be maintained; otherwise Europe will be disadvantaged in global trade.”

The speech also attacked Merkel’s plan to transfer “more money and sovereignty” away from the Europe’s nation states to Brussels because Brexit has drained the financial coffers of the EU and would leave “a huge financial black hole” in its budget, which she said should be “cut” instead. In fact, the EU Statistics Office Eurostat has discovered and admitted that the EU already has a debt of “at least 21.5 trillion Euro”.³

Brussels is now trying to solve its looming post-Brexit financial bankruptcy by targeting Central and Eastern Europe countries (the so-called Visegrad nations – the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary) with drastic cutbacks on agricultural subsidies. Czech State Secretary for European Affairs Aleš Chmelař says that this will put the whole EU project at risk. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in an angry confrontation with the EU elite, is demanding a massive refund of 1bn Euro from Brussels’ coffers as compensation for his country’s having been on the front lines of the EU’s borders and forced to build a wall to keep migrants out.⁴

Revolt

The rise of populist movements across Europe has been slow but steady. The recent spate of electoral defeats which they inflicted on the EU actually started with Merkel herself, where the AfD gained record electoral support and won seats in the Bundestag for the first time in the January 2018 election, severely damaging her and her CDU. The AfD is now more popular in the polls than the Social Democrats (SPD), with whom Merkel is desperately trying to form a Grand Coalition. Recent elections across Europe nevertheless testify to her coming demise as Chancellor.

Despite the narrow defeat of the National Front’s (FN) Marine Le Pen by the EU’s globalist plant in the French Presidential elections, she did beat the two major French parties. Her niece Marion Maréchal Le Pen, who is “waiting in the wings” to become FN leader, has blasted the EU and proposed that France should follow in the footsteps of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump by putting “France first”.

The Austrian People’s Party’s (ÖVP) Sebastian Kurz took his country’s electorate by storm to form a rightwing coalition with the Freedom Party’s (FPÖ) Heinz-Christian Strache in a centre-right coalition government for the first time since World War II – a coalition which Deutsche Welle says “threatens the EU”.⁵ In the Czech Republic, the ANO’s Andrej Babiš, who rails against EU migrant quotas and has repeatedly stated that Euroscepticism would grow in his country, garnered 30% of the vote to defeat seven other candidates, while Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has consistently expressed his uncompromising defence of national sovereignty and his opposition to so-called ‘political correctness’, built anti-immigrant razor wire fences with water cannons stationed on his borders and denounced Merkel’s demand for the rest of the EU to follow her unilateral opening of its borders as “moral imperialism”.⁶

Similar revolts have occurred in the Netherlands, where, in the opinion of The Atlantic,⁷ Geert Wilders with his Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) actually “won by losing”, and “still poses a grave threat” to the EU with his demographic warning that ‘the bell tolls for Europe’ as Muslim immigration is in danger of replacing Europeans.⁸ Finland’s right-wing populist party True Finns has had great success with its Eurosceptic programme and is now urging Helsinki to hold a Brexit-style referendum reflecting a growing anti-EU backlash across Brussels.

In 2017 Spain reacted with brutality when the Catalan regional Parliament became the first area of the EU to declare actual independence from the staunch EU puppets in Madrid and therefore symbolically from Brussels, while referenda in the richer regions of northern Italy – Veneto and Lombardy – revealed overwhelming support in favour of more autonomy if not outright secession.

Auf Wiedersehen, Angela!

Merkel’s hasty exit from the Bundestag on 22 February may well become a potent historical symbol of the break-up of the EU. The populist revolt against her disastrous policies make it more difficult, if not impossible, for Germany to dictate to the rest of the EU in the way that she and her globalist supporters like Tony Blair and global mischief-maker billionaire George Soros want. The latter interfered with a donation of £400,000, and when criticized contributed a further £100,000, in a last-ditched attempt to thwart Brexit and overturn the democratic will of the British people.

As the de facto leader – or rather ‘misleader’ – of a Union which is disintegrating under the weight of her dictatorship, Merkel can now no longer convince or win with her policies of ‘more Europe’ which are the very cause of the Europe’s disintegration. Europeans have rejected her policies on security and immigration, making it impossible for a bankrupt EU⁹ to provide debt relief for countries such as Italy and Spain or to secure control over the EU’s insubordinate eastern members.

Merkel has suffered a series of deadly blows from which she cannot recover, and yet, obviously oblivious of reality, she continues to parrot the same incessant rant about her plans to create an EU superstate. She calls it “a new dawn for Europe”, but it is nothing but the old one dressed up like the legendary Emperor in his new clothes. Speaking ahead of the most recent EU summit, symbolically unattended by the UK, she said rather laughably: “We want to have a Europe capable of action that is in solidarity and has self-confidence.”¹⁰ It clearly has neither. “To achieve this we must be ready to strengthen Europe where a European solution is better than a purely nationalist one.” There you have it: ‘Nation states are out; the European model must prevail.’ No change then!

FOOTNOTES

1 https://youtu.be/uTNAr_k4k9M

2 http://freenations.net/massive-eu-losses-of-no-deal-brexit-german-industry-expects-free-trade/

3 http://www.eutimes.net/2018/02/eurostat-discovers-that-the-eu-has-at-least-e12-5-trillion-debt/

4 https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/923338/EU-finances-Viktor-Orban-Hungary-Brussels-450m-border-protection

5 http://www.dw.com/en/opinion-a-right-wing-coalition-in-austria-threatens-the-eu/a-40962645

6 https://www.politico.eu/list/politico-28/viktor-orban/

7 https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/03/geert-wilders-won-by-losing-netherlands-vote/519834/

8 http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/06/02/wilders-europeans-danger-replaced/; http://www.eutimes.net/2017/06/wilders-surgingdemographic-

change-means-europeans-are-in-danger-of-being-replaced/

9 See fn. 3

10 https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/922389/Angela-Merkel-EU-latest-news-Germany-coalition-SPD-EU-superstate-Bundestag

Photo by Glyn Lowe Photoworks.