Christian Democrats No More?

Don't trust the FDP on Afghanistan. They are a party of both economic and social liberalism. People like that always believe in spreading it at the barrel of a gun. Sometimes they are open about this, sometimes they are not. But press any of them hard enough and you will get it out of them eventually.

Their position is also very militantly secular, as the FDP is entirely explicitly, coming as it does out of a specific German tradition of strident irreligion. So don't trust, either, its apparent attitude when it backed the Pro Reli cause in Berlin. I think that the Pro Reli campaign was ill-conceived, since the alternative to Reli was not Ethik, which was already compulsory, but rather the sports field or the ice cream parlour. What could have been better than having Reli students in Ethik classes, and indeed vice versa? What could have been worse than making those already in that position choose between the two and thus necessarily let one of them go? But even so.

Merkel or no Merkel, the CDU still backed Pro Reli, mindful of its own name and heritage, and doubtless moved by the fact that global events have rather overtaken the decidedly anti-Christian and anti-democratic forces of capitalism and warmongering. The more Reli to inoculate people against those two, the better.

What is more, Pro Reli was also backed by Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Anyone from the SPD who backs something like Pro Reli really does believe in it. He really is in the same tradition as those Labour Council Chairmen in places like here to whom it would simply never occur to cancel the Christmas carol service, whatever might go on in a handful of London Boroughs to whose eccentric Labour Parties the Berlin SPD corresponds.

A contest between two at least nominally Pro Reli candidates, but one of whom was like that while the other was Angela Merkel, was really no contest at all. It looks as if the good guy has lost. Which is bad. But which will be made even worse when his party's replacement in coalition is the FDP.

And in that event, how much longer could the CSU associate with what still purported to be the CDU? Every cloud...