This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 26, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown. Elections in Germany will leave Angela Merkel as

Chancellor, but the government will now have a new party to contend with the alternative

for Germany party, which has been decried as far right. Marion Tupi a policy

analyst at the Cato Institute comments on the elections outcome. What's the best

takeaway that people can take from the German elections? Well, I think the best take from the German election is the return of the free Democrats

back to the Bundestag, to the German Parliament. In 2013 the Free Democrats who are broadly speaking

market-friendly center-right political party in Germany. They've been kicked out of Parliament. They didn't meet the 5% threshold to make it to Parliament because they supported Mrs Merkel's decision to bail out Greece and they were

punished by the electorate.

But now in 2017 they were returned with a very handsome 11.3% of the vote and 80 seats in the

Bundestag and they are very likely to form a part of the governing coalition that will

take Germany from 2017 to 2021. All right so what's the worst takeaway with respect to the party makeup in Germany now?

Well, the worst takeaway, it depends on who you're talking to. Obviously the German establishment got a bit of a

fright out of the outcome of the German elections. The Chancellor gained only 33% of the vote which means that it's one of the

the worst election results for Merkel's party, Christian Democrats,

C, Z-E-U, Z-S-U.

And the social Democrats who used to be either the first or the second party in Germany are now down to 20%.

So all of these disenchanted voters have moved to the left.

The Linche, the hard left party now has about 10% of support.

The Greens are also on about 10%.

And of course, the main story that has unsettled so many people

is the entry into the German Parliament of the

alternative for Deutschland, alternative for Germany, which gained roughly 13% of the

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