Germany has reached a new low in election rigging

Local officials in Lower Saxony are blocking AfD candidates from running, using intelligence reports instead of courts or due process. Today’s Germany is a grim, unhappy place. Thirty-six years after West Germany’s take-over of the former East Germany (polite term: re-unification), which was supposed to herald a golden age of national fulfilment, citizens are in a very foul mood.According to Ipsos, one of Germany’s go-to pollsters, their morale is at a “historic nadir,” and they are “losing confidence about the country’s future.” As of last month, fear of poverty and inequality was “clearly increasing,” with 37 percent of all respondents picking it as their number-one angst, followed by “migration” (31 percent), “inflation” (30 percent), worries over the healthcare system (26 percent) and “criminality and violence” (25 percent).Note that all top five anxieties focus on what is going wrong at home. That doesn’t mean, though, that Germans are optimistic about the world or Germany’s place in it: 24 percent of the Ipsos poll respondents fear “military conflicts between states.”If the mood is sour, it’s very good reasons: Germany’s abysmally, unprecedentedly unpopular and embattled chan...