Good morning from London, which enjoyed its rainiest day in months yesterday: proper pleasure and pain. There’s more news below — including the outcome of a match at the U.S. Open that ended, like, four hours ago. But today I want to start in Germany.
On the rightYou may have missed it. I almost did, amid the pleasures of a long weekend: The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party won big in a small state election on Sunday and could become the first far-right party to govern a German state since the end of World War II. How big a deal is that? Our Berlin bureau chief, Jim Tankersley, offers one way of looking at it: The AfD’s win puts the mainstream conservative who is the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, into a fight for political survival. Merz is supposed to hold power until 2029, and his allies aren’t trying to get rid of him. But pressure is rising on his right flank, and more regional elections this month may show that voters see him “the wrong man for the job at this time,” as a major German newsmagazine put it. The AfD’s success, however isolated, is clearly a problem for Germany’s leadership. It is also a problem for Germany, my colleague Katrin Bennhold wrote yesterday. I appreciated the wide view she took: When I was growing up in Germany, the conventional wisdom was that the far right would never again gain a meaningful foothold in our politics. Our Nazi past, the argument went, had immunized voters against the appeal of such parties. And our post-Holocaust constitution had powerful tools to help prevent it. The rise of the anti-immigrant, far-right AfD over the past decade has made clear the first argument was wrong. The second? We’ll see. Katrin crunched some numbers. On Sunday, the AfD didn’t just win more than twice as many votes as its nearest rival. It also won with the biggest regional voter turnout that Germany has seen since reunification in 1990. In a lot of places, those facts would add up to a mandate to govern. But not in Germany, which has for nearly eight decades used a kind of firewall to prevent the rise of parties that the political mainstream deems extreme. It doesn’t want another authoritarian, another Hitler, to gain power. But now it faces a question. Here’s how Katrin put it: Are these efforts to sideline the AfD in the name of democracy actually undermining democracy?
AfD’s riseIt’s an interesting question, perhaps a scary one. The AfD came into being in 2013, a year when Angela Merkel, the center-right chancellor at the time, went back into coalition with her party’s traditional opponents on the center left. That meant, basically, that whatever party a German voted for would result in the same government. The AfD, with its angry, nationalist, populist stance, represented a protest vote — functionally meaningless. No longer. Its ranks swelled in number and passion. Now it’s the most popular party in the country. In other words, the firewall could be falling. And that, Katrin writes, suggests that the AfD’s victory on Sunday could mark a new phase in German politics, one “in which mainstream parties accept that the way to defeat the AfD is to offer voters a platform they actually want to vote for.”
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This week, a container ship is finishing a journey across the top of the world. It’s part of China’s plan to shave two weeks off the Asia-to-Europe trip — a plan that requires special vessels and higher insurance premiums. Many experts say that’s not commercially feasible. But climate change and instability in the Middle East could change their calculations.
Charlie Greene’s father died on United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11. The solidarity he saw in that day’s aftermath demonstrated what a country that comes together can look like, he writes. A new child care policy championed by JD Vance shows that he doesn’t want to help married parents so much as hurt single mothers, Jessica Grose argues. The Anniversary Sale is on: Morning readers, enjoy our best offer. Celebrate 175 years of The Times with savings on unlimited news, puzzles, recipes, sports and more. $1/week for your first year. Save now.
We’ve made these links free for you. You just need to log in. Virtual taekwondo: Is it anything more than a glorified video game? Gaping hole: A sinkhole opened at Nicolas Cage’s home in Malibu. See the photo. Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about Senator Roger Marshall, who as an ob-gyn sued more than 700 of his patients for debts.
$3,000— That is how much money, per book, Anthropic must pay to authors whose works it pirated in training Claude, its chatbot. Authors would split the proceeds with their publishers. Which is a nice windfall when you weren’t expecting to be flush this weekend, but lemme tell you: It’s a pittance in reward for writing a book.
It was the latest-running night in U.S. Open history. After nearly four-and-a-half hours of play, Ben Shelton, an American, beat the defending champion, Carlos Alcaraz of Spain, at 3:33 a.m. Eastern. It was a big day for the Americans. Frances Tiafoe came back to defeat Alex Michelsen. Tiafoe will face Shelton in a semifinal Friday, guaranteeing that an American man will reach the final. On the women’s side, the top seed, Aryna Sabalenka, retained her No. 1 ranking by beating Linda Noskova. She’ll next face Jessica Pegula, who won her own all-American match against Emma Navarro.
I had an outrageously good dinner at Ballymaloe in Cork, Ireland, this past weekend, and now all I want to do is hack a recipe for the restaurant’s blini with dressed Ballycotton Bay crab. Or, at least, I want to make | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
