Albion’s Alchemist

I have before me an email from Fräulein Merci H, Alchemy correspondent in Germany. It is not so joyful as I believed it would be.

For those of you who still do not know, Angela Merkel is now Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany – or at least she will be by the middle of next month. We knew this would happen, or at least Fräulein H told me that it would and I believed her. However earlier this year it was intimated to me that Merkel’s CDU would win by a small landslide (if’ee see what I mean). As the date of the election approached though, Merkel’s lead slipped, until the incumbent Schroeder was almost level with her.

Truth be told Fräulein H is rather venomous about her countrymen – blaming those who voted for Schroeder despite his crimes (her words) for hobbling then new Chancellery.

Fräulein H is a thorough Merkel supporter, and has sung her praises on a number of occasions, though fewer than the occasions on which she has derided Schroeder.

Angela ‘the knife’ Merkel acquired her nickname from the way she treated her former mentor Helmut Kohl. When he was accused of financial impropriety (the little scamp) it was Merkel who was his most vociferous attacker, and it was she who brought down Kohl’s names successor taking the job herself.

Certain parties have expressed doubt as to her ability to solve Germany’s crippling unemployment, a task which will be made harder yet by the fact that Schroeder’s Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands still control the Labour Ministry. One idea floated is to increase the size of Germany’s armed forces, Fräulein H informs me that I ought think twice before making any ‘humorous’ comment about this – the thought never even crossed my mind.

The German Home Office is under Merkel’s Christlich-Demokratische Union as is Defence and economics. But with the two main parties so evenly split, every decision made by the new Chancellor will be fought through the Bundestag. Fräulein H intends to lay all future national woes on those Germans who voted for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and thus prevented Merkel from achieving a decisive victory.

Merkel is the first female woman to lead Germany in a little over a thousand years. Lesbians with short hair and dirty finger-nails are making a big thing of this, at least that is how Fräulein H reports it. Your Author subscribes to the theory that, even in our modern age, for a woman to rise to high power, she must be twice as big-and-bad as a man, and that this is no bad thing in a leader. Look at our own Mrs. Thatcher – The Knife and the Iron Lady are two for a pair and I envy the Federal Republic her new leader. Merkel has a strong sense of national interest (do’ee remember when Albion had a leader with any national interest at all?) and is, as we have seen, not the sort to let personal feelings get in the way of the job at hand. She’s not going to put up with Europe co-opting her nations freedom, and she ain’t going to use Europe to co-opt Albion’s either.

Now it is of course true that distance can masque incompetence, and under the leadership of TB, almost any other government looks preferable, but I shall say it again, I envy Fräulein H her new leader.