The analysis of the columnist Guido Salerno Aletta on the elections in Bavaria on October 14
The deep crack that threatens the European Union does not lie in the English Channel because of Brexit, and even less in the dissidence of the countries of the Visegrad Group. Italy’s yellow-green government is just an annoying pimple to squash with the spread. The real earthquake for Europe can be unleashed from the industrial heart of Germany, from Bavaria:here the unresolved problems of the Union come to a head, first of all the irrepressible immigration that has already shaken Italy. It has destabilized the richest area of ​​Germany, just as poverty in the eastern Lander is polarizing the consensus towards xenophobic and sovereign formations. A rigid social order, unable to become concave in the face of the unexpected entry of thousands of foreigners, is shattered. Even the mechanical solutions recently put in place by the federal government, with the increase in the minimum wage of precarious workers, have been balanced by the reduction in hours worked. The political locomotive, even before the economic one of the Union, is thus torn apart internally,with a progressive disintegration of the consensus towards its two traditional political pillars, the CDU-CSU and the SPD. A process that has already affected all the European political families that have represented the pillar of the second post-war period. However, the Bavarian elections on October 14 will mark the end of the Merkel era, already severely tested by the disappointing electoral results of September 2017. There is much more at stake than the political continuity that its governments have ensured through the large coalitions with the Social Democrats, set up starting in 2005. We are divided on three themes, and on their respective polarities: integration / identity; financial accumulation / environmental sustainability; regulated work / social insecurity.In Bavaria, the well-established polls are merciless in predicting that the CSU will lose an absolute majority of Langstad’s seats for the first time since 1962, after having governed continuously since 1946. Compared to 2013, it would go from 47.7% of votes to 33. %%; the Greens would sharply increase the consensus going from 8.6% to 18%; the Social Democrats would halve their jobs from 20.6% to 11%. The FPD, the liberal party, on the other hand, is credited with just 6%, compared to 3.3% in the previous round. The Afd, the party that collects xenophobic and sovereign tendencies and that worries everyone so much for the growing consensus it manages to aggregate, would stop at 10%. We are already looking to the aftermath, and not only in Bavaria, especially in terms of generational change.The reference point is the European elections next May, which could definitively shake the already precarious equilibrium on which the third Chancellorship of Angela Merkel was built. The least disruptive traditional alliance in Bavaria would be an agreement between the CSU and the FPD.Always assuming, however, that these two parties collect together the number of seats sufficient to have a majority. But such an agreement would leave room for the two social oppositions, the Greens and the AfD, which in the spring would reap even greater support for the Europeans. Two specular deficiencies are at the basis of the tensions: on the one hand, the CDU-Csu has not been able to address the issue of uncontrolled immigration; on the other hand, the SPD has not been able to solve the problem of wage poverty and insecurity. The Greens and the AfD take advantage of this double dissatisfaction to propose themselves as a system alternative. The German crisis lies even more in a lack of alternatives to the mercantilist model adopted so far,which requires absolute discipline from the point of view of work, absorbing almost every other social vitality in it. The denatality crisis in Germany can be explained by an ever shorter horizon in which to place existence. The fear of the future looms: the continuous, hammered, reference to the precarious sustainability of debts, to the uncertain profitability of investments, to the dubious resilience of retirement annuities, has made the even substantial income result frustrating. And, what is more serious, there is no alternative, neither of economic nor social policy, which can remedy a system in which present prosperity and fear of the future become inseparable. The unsustainable German restlessness lies in financial accumulation,used abroad: the cooperation of the debtor, who must ensure the income and the integrity of the capital, is an indispensable, but elusive, condition. The austerity imposed on them to ensure financial stability conflicts with the German growth system, which thrives on commercial asymmetries, accumulating surpluses that correspond to as many deficits.
The knots of a decade of unsolved European crises are tightening, even in Bavaria.
(article published in the newspaper Mf / Milano Finanza)

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