Alas, poor Europe, I knew it well. A continent of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment?

With apologies to William Shakespeare, Europe is faring only a little better than the dead court jester, Yorick, whose skull Prince Hamlet holds when he recites the correct version of the above lines in the Bard’s famous play.

Germany held its Bundestag (parliamentary) elections last weekend. Unsurprisingly, the Social Democrats — currently in control — did abysmally, obtaining only 16.4% of the votes, and thus Chancellor Olaf Scholz is on his way out. The Christian Democrats, led by Friedrich Merz, obtained 28.5% of the votes cast; the largest number but not a majority, which means that Merz’s party will have to form a coalition with one or more of the other parties’ representatives.

Equally unsurprising — at least to anyone paying attention — the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, led by Alice Weidel, came in second, with more than 20% of the votes cast. AfD is castigated in the media as “far-right” (intending to evoke the specter of fascism or Nazism), but the cornerstone of AfD’s platform is a safe and prosperous Germany and — most notably — an end to the mass migration that the past few German governments — including Scholz’s and his predecessor, Angela Merkel’s — have permitted, with the blessing of the Brussels Eurocrats.

Germans are beyond frustrated with the levels of migration into their country, particularly from Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa, and the corresponding increases in crime and violence. According to a 2024 article from Politico, foreigners are 15% of the population of Germany but account for fully 41% of crimes.

Recent high-profile crimes in Germany have only increased public outrage: A Saudi immigrant plowed his car into the Christmas market in Magdeburg in December, killing six people and injuring nearly 300. A toddler was stabbed to death by an immigrant in Aschaffenburg last month, as was a German man who intervened, trying to save the child’s life. An Afghan national rammed his vehicle into a crowd in Munich just days before the Bundestag elections. And the day before the elections, a Syrian refugee stabbed a tourist at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, proclaiming that he wants to “kill Jews.”

Given that background and the groundswell of support for AfD this year, one would think that Merz and his Christian Democrats would be eager to work with Weidel’s party to reach a majority in the German parliament. But Merz has made it clear that he has no such intention, preferring instead to unite with the weakened Social Democrats, whose policies German voters just resoundingly rejected.

In this respect, regrettably, Germany is following in the footsteps of England and France, whose citizens are thoroughly fed up with the problems caused by unfettered migration, as well as oppressive regulations and globalist power grabs.

England voted to leave the European Union (“Brexit”) in 2016, but its citizens have suffered through a series of feckless prime ministers, none of whom have been willing to do what’s necessary to give the country the political and economic sovereignty its citizens are demanding. Its current prime minister, Keir Starmer, has a 61% disapproval rating and seems to stand for little, except blocking inquiries into foreign rape gangs and prosecuting English citizens who protest mass migration.

Similarly, when France held its own parliamentary elections last year, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party — which ran on a platform of eliminating mass migration and restoring peace and order to France’s major cities — was denounced as “far-right” and fascist. It gained a significant number of seats but was blocked from taking power when French President Emmanuel Macron’s “centrist” Renaissance party and several left-wing factions agreed to withdraw certain candidates to avoid further splitting the vote.

Europe is slowly committing suicide. And yet in country after country, the so-called centrists are scrambling to retain power, to find some way to appease and distract irate citizens, while proceeding merrily along their present path to destruction.

Germans will soon discover what millions of the British and French have realized: that you cannot “moderate” your way back to sanity when the forces aligned against you are hell-bent on your destruction.

European countries have imported millions of people from countries whose values and cultures are completely antithetical to that of Western civilization. Their energy production, economic expansion and agricultural capacity are being throttled by absurd regulations intended to ameliorate “climate change” and fulfill pipe dreams like “net zero” and “15-minute cities.” Their governments fail to protect their own citizens from crime but seem to have no problem accommodating violent and misogynistic conduct by immigrants from other countries.

Even where the populist party wins elections, it is a struggle to effectuate the will of the public. In Italy, for example, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d'Italia, or FdI) party won the 2022 parliamentary elections, making Meloni the first woman prime minister in the country’s history. But FdI’s immigration reforms are being stymied by activist judges claiming that EU regulations supersede member nations’ laws, and this issue is currently before the European Court of Justice. (In a very interesting twist, the European Commission just this week announced its support for Meloni’s position. As Brussels journalist Tamas Orban writes in the online publication European Conservative, “What this shows is that the EU Commission can no longer ignore EU member states’ demands for properly addressing the migration crisis.”)

It’s unclear at this juncture how the ECJ will rule on the issue of Italy’s control over migration within its borders. But what is clear is that far too many of Europe’s political leaders are in denial about the dangers their own countries are facing. It remains to be seen whether they will find the political will to reverse course before the Europe we’ve all known is reduced to a skeleton of its former self.

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