Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Plenty of kids feel that their gender identity and their assigned sex don't match. What to do about that has become fully subsumed into America's culture wars. We look at the attempts to curtail some of the options and the woeful lack of research on the topic. And you've probably heard that Blue Monday, the third Monday in January, is supposedly the deepest trough of the winter blues.

We've got data that suggest otherwise.

It's what people listen to that may indicate when the mood is bluest.

But first, after a tumultuous week, German politics is in disarray. Chancellor Angela Merkel's succession plans lie in ruins, after her heir apparent Anagrette-Kramkarenbauer

announced yesterday that she would step down as leader of the ruling Christian Democratic Union,

or CDU. Meanwhile, the party continues to grapple with a resurgent far-right in the form of the

alternative for Germany or

AFD party. The recent troubles began last October with an election in the eastern state of

Thuringia. Back in October, they hold a state election in the small eastern state of

Thuringia, and it produced a badly hung state parliament.

Christopher Lockwood is our Europe editor.

Nobody was able to form a majority, and in the end, what happened rather unexpectedly,

was that a tiny party, the free Democrats who had barely 5% of the vote,

cobbled together a government, and the way that they did that was by relying on the support in the confirmation vote,

not only of the CDU, and here's the controversial part, but also by the right-wing alternative for Germany,

a party that has been accused by many people of harboring neo-Nazis within it.

That's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it's clearly a xenophobic party well to the right

and regarded as untouchable by all mainstream parties in Germany until now.

So this was the first time that a government had been formed with the support.

And it's important to say with the support,

...