Das Neue Herz Europas?

What does it mean that Baden-Württemberg has kicked out the CDU and its FDP allies, and has instead put in the Greens, with the SPD as their coalition partners?

In part, it is in reaction against nuclear power after the disaster in Japan. If the SPD takes either its name or its history remotely seriously, then it will have no part in such scaremongering, and will instead insist on the use of the fully panoply of government action in order to secure high-wage, high-skilled, high-status, unionised work such as safeguards independence from despotic regimes and volatile regions.

But it was just as much because the CDU had ceased to take its name or history with any real seriousness at all, and had largely become a carbon copy of the far less popular FDP. This or any other old heartland of the staunchly Catholic Centre Party, from between the Wars and before the First one, does not want neoliberal economics, social liberalism, and neoconservative foreign policy. Staying out of Libya, though welcome in itself, has proved to be too little, too late.

Baden-Württemberg is not the only State where people are thinking like that. Nor is Germany the only such country.