Angela Merkel should quit soon

IT HOLDS HARSHEUADADEUCDUAD views about immigrants, worries loudly about racial purity and detests the European Union (). For all these reasons, the Alternative for Germany (f), a far-right party, is considered toxic in its own country. Any mainstream German politician who dares get too close to it is tainted. Nonetheless, many are tempted, for the f is popular, particularly in the disadvantaged east of the country, where in each of three state elections last year it took around a quarter of the vote. To many voters there, the party’s claims that immigrants, liberals and the are to blame for Germany’s problems sound plausible. Many centre-right politicians would like to woo the same voters with watered-down versions of the same arguments. Some even think that it would make sense to do a deal with the demagogues.They are wrong, as recent events reveal. In Thuringia, an eastern state, two of Germany’s most respectable parties, the Christian Democratic Union (), which leads the national ruling coalition, and the much smaller Free Democrats, are now plunged into crisis (see ). Their chapters in Thuringia went along with a plan to wrest the state government from the ex-communist Die Linke and install a Free Democrat as premier. Yet this could work only with the help of the local f, a particularly nasty branch of the outfit.