You Can Take the Girl Out of East Germany, but You Can’t Take East Germany Out of the Girl

Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor of Germany who served 15 years and transformed a high-social-trust society with an economy the envy of Europe into a declining economic and social power riven by crime, social unrest, and seemingly irreversible economic decline, is deeply saddened by the AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt.

Perhaps the least-known fact about Merkel, and conceivably the most revealing, is that she was born in West Germany but grew up in the communist East, where her pastor father chose to take a position in a nominally atheist country. 

I may be reading too much into this biographical quirk, but at the very least it symbolizes the bizarre psychology that led Merkel to work as hard as she did to ruin a once-great country. 

Germany’s second-most-regrettable chancellor, Angela Merkel, is devastated by the electoral success of the Alternative for Germany party.

She’s also responsible for it. | @AStuttaford https://t.co/ckzopwAuVx

— National Review (@NRO) September 10, 2026

Merkel served as German Chancellor for over 16 years, a term only 10 days shorter than the longest-serving postwar Chancellor, Helmut Kohl. Kohl oversaw the end of the Cold War and Germany’s reunification, helping transform it into the colossus it became as the most important country in the European Union. 

It’s hard to believe her chancellorship is already five years in the rear-view mirror, since her legacy and policies still dominate European politics. 

Merkel, in her 16 years, set her country on the path to decline, and as such she is responsible for the backlash that created the AfD and the election victory that makes her heart “bleed.”

Angela Merkel has said her “heart is bleeding” after the Alternative for Germany (AfD) state election victory in Saxony-Anhalt.

The former German chancellor said the hard-Right party’s win was “a real watershed in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany”.

In an interview at the Digital X trade show in Cologne on Tuesday, she said: “You see the polls in the days leading up to it, but when the result comes in black on white, it is deeply shocking. As a CDU member, my heart is bleeding.”

Analysts have accused the former chancellor of paving the way for the AfD with her migration and economic policies, and her decisions to make gas deals with Vladimir Putin while blocking Ukraine from Nato.

The AfD formed during her term as Chancellor, but while it is best known for its hardline stance on immigration, its founders were economists who opposed her industrial policies, which they believed were setting the stage for economic decline — and they were right. Immigration wasn’t even on the map yet, just Merkel’s turn from free-market economics and rational energy policies.

It’s unsurprising that at the time the AfD was a small and hardly influential party, and certainly not one that could have been (wrongly) accused of fronting for National Socialism. But when Merkel added her preference for mass immigration from MENA (Middle East/North Africa) countries, the AfD began its rise to becoming a powerful force in German politics. 

The AfD was born as the “professors’ party” founded by two free-market economists and others opposed to the eurozone bailouts made possible by Merkel. A preference for a more restrictive immigration policy was a secondary strand in the AfD’s platform, but that changed after Merkel’s narcissistic and reckless decision to throw open Germany’s doors in 2015. The free-market strain can still be found here and there within the AfD, but Merkel’s refusal to countenance serious dissent to her policy within the center-right created an opening of which the AfD, transforming itself into a party of the populist right, took full advantage.

And the AfD only benefited further when Merkel, infuriated by popular opposition to her folly, became one of the pioneers of online censorship. As I noted in an essay in National Review in 2018:

The mainstream media had enthusiastically echoed the chancellor’s Willkommenskultur narrative of kindly Germans cheerfully greeting the migrants, but establishment unanimity was not enough for the instinctively authoritarian Merkel. Her less “welcoming” compatriots had found an audience on social media. That would not do.

Merkel thus endorsed a new censorship law, with the catchy name Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz. By doing so, she undermined her already tatty democratic credibility and reinforced the ability of the AfD to distinguish itself from the Kartellparteien (“cartel parties”).

Under Merkel, Germany abandoned fiscal responsibility, energy security, and stability by shutting down nuclear power plants, committing to green energy, and adopting a policy of relying on Russian gas. They she topped it all off by opening the floodgates to millions of Syrians and other Third-World migrants. 

Merkel’s vision was a Germany that would never be the same, and she got her wish. Not in the way she wanted, of course. She no doubt believed in her vision of a paradise built on open borders, infinite cheap and green energy, and the peace and harmony that come from building a worker’s paradise.

That doesn’t mean Merkel is a communist. In fact, the party she led, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is nominally center-right — the same party Helmut Kohl led for decades. Nobody could have predicted that Merkel, a quantum chemist with a sharp mind, would become the strongest proponent of policies that have destroyed Germany. Everybody expected a slightly softer version of Kohl, appropriate to the twenty-first century. 

What a mistake. It turns out that the same impulse that led her father to immigrate to the atheist East Germany to preach Christianity lay hidden within her. A firm belief that reality has no sway over the course of history, perhaps, or a misplaced sense that social justice and social good can come from ignoring basic facts. 

You would think that a smart girl who grew up as an up-close witness to the disastrous results of East German policies would have learned the lesson that reality has a power all its own, and the battle to overcome it leads only to decline and tyranny. 

Apparently not. Her impulse was to replicate East German policies in the West. 

You can take the girl out of East Germany, but apparently you can’t take East Germany out of the girl. 

Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it’s spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there’s nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.

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