One is the feeling that Germany is in good shape and that it is ordinary citizens’ turn to get some benefits after years of bailing out the fat cats in finance. Now that voters have pushed the free-market Liberal Democratic Party out of the Bundestag, the German Parliament is left with four parties that are either socialist or social democratic: the radical Left party, the leftist Greens, the Social Democrats and the conservative Christian Democrats, whom Ms. Merkel has taken so far to the left that their economic and welfare policies today, in American terms, would put them to the left of Bill Clinton.

That is the irony of today’s Germany: It is a country that rides the waves of the global free market better than many other countries of the developed world, but its Parliament is full of parties that believe that state activism is the right answer to real (and imagined) problems of German society. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/opinion/merkel-germanys-risky-populism.html?ref=opinion&_r=1&