GOOD NEWS FROM EUROPE: THE GREAT AWAKENING? OR TOO LITTLE TOO LATE?

NYTIMES:

As anti-immigrant sentiment continues to sweep across Europe, generating a right-wing populist wave from the shores of the Mediterranean to the chilly reaches of Scandinavia, there is growing concern that such politics could take root here, too, in the fertile ground of financial uncertainty, rising anti-Muslim sentiment and a widening political vacuum left by the misfortunes of the once mighty Christian Democratic Union.

Thilo Sarrazin has a best seller blaming Muslim immigrants for “dumbing down society.”

While the Swedes this week elected an anti-immigrant party to Parliament for the first time, and the French are busy repatriating Roma, Germans continue to debate a best-selling book blaming Muslim immigrants for “dumbing down society” and have heard a prominent conservative ally of the chancellor, Angela Merkel, suggest that Poland helped to instigate World War II.

“Uncertainty is widespread over German society,” said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin. “That is always a good base for those who tell the people all their problems can be solved by simple methods, by solutions that the others wouldn’t dare to do, like throw out the foreigners.”

Since the end of World War II, German laws, political elites and social conventions have prevented right-wing parties from earning enough of a following to win seats in Parliament. The last time a far-right party came close to reaching the 5 percent threshold was in the 1970s, experts said.

But the nation’s political geography is being reshaped by strong gusts of discontent blowing in from different directions. Public resentments toward Europe were fanned by the German-led bailout of Greece, which Germans saw as paying for the profligacy and irresponsibility of others. At the same time, Germans, particularly younger generations, are feeling less constrained by their history and more comfortable in their national skin than at any time since World War II.

Into that environment came the book by the banker Thilo Sarrazin, “Germany Does Away With Itself,” which argues that the nation’s generous social benefits have attracted large numbers of Muslim immigrants who have refused to integrate. The book does not address any of the endemic obstacles to integration, like discrimination in employment and mediocre schooling, but instead labels Muslim immigrants as genetically inferior.

The book and its popularity — it has already sold about 600,000 copies in little more than a month — represent the one issue that seems to have unified the European public: hostility to foreigners, especially Muslims. Recent polls here said that a right-leaning party could now receive up to 20 percent of the vote, which would put it in Parliament, according to reports in the German Press Agency.

“It would be hard to cover all of this under one theme. Xenophobia? Not really. But it could turn into something like it,” said Michael Naumann, editor of the monthly political magazine Cicero in Berlin, about the regional political developments. “The search for scapegoats has started.”

IT ISN'T XENOPHOBIA.

EUROPEANS WANT EU8ROPE TO REMAIN CULTURALLY EUROPEAN.

THEY WANT OUT OF THE LEFTIST-MUSLIM DOWNWARD SLIDE.

THE BLAME LIES WITH THE POLITICAL RULING CLASS WHO PERMITTED RUNAWAY IMMIGRATION OF MUSLIMS.

IMMIGRATION AND ASSIMILATION WILL BE TIGHTENED.

AND THE LIBERAL POLITICIANS WILL BE PUNISHED, ELECTORALLY.

I HOPE SOON - FOR EUROPE'S SAKE.