(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. La senda de los mazazos)

The European People’s Party is on edge for many reasons. The first is, of course, the panic of its German component, the CDU/CSU, which is heading with an already failed candidate into an election it believed it had won hands down and which is approaching on 23 February like a nightmare. The CDU believed it could keep a good grip on the situation created by the fall of the three-party government of socialists, greens and liberals, the worst government in the history of the Federal Republic, which has brutally aggravated the already very precarious situation of all these years of social democratic and green consensus under Angela Merkel, a chancellor who has in the end turned out to be, and few apart from her now dispute it, a curse for Germany and for Europe.

In any case, Friedrich Merz has shown himself to be as weak now as he was when Merkel crushed him as a rival in the succession to Helmut Kohl. If, because of the failures of the three-party government of the inept social democrat Olaf Scholz, his party enjoyed a comfortable lead and majority of almost twenty points over the second most voted party, that gap with the second party today is seven points.

What is terrifying for them is that this second party is Alternative for Germany, the only party that has a programme for a change of policy for Germany. Merz would not be worried if the socialists or the greens were closing in on him, because he has already said that he is going to govern with one of those two parties, both increasingly left-wing and both resounding failures. Or with both, if the numbers do not add up. An alliance with the socialists and the greens would bring the same policies as the government that has just collapsed for causing the worst economic, political, social and security crisis Germany has suffered since 1949.

In any case Merz has solemnly announced that he will not make a pact with Alice Weidel, the candidate of the Alternative (AfD), which with its collective leadership has run an excellent campaign, has put the party in order and under discipline, and has not allowed the secret services or the lies of the press to mount another operation against them in a campaign orchestrated by a media landscape even more monolithic and more submissive to the orders of social democratic consensus politics than the Spanish one. That being so, the AfD’s message has been delivered by the CDU itself: if you want change in Germany you have to vote for Alternative for Germany. Because all the others are going to end up governing together, doing the same thing as until now.

If you want a vote to put an end to the incentivised invasion, to open up spaces of freedom and deregulation for people and for businesses, to restore freedom of opinion, to expel from the country those who live in a massively parasitic way and are the protagonists of the main crime and violence, so that common sense is restored as is happening in other countries and especially in the United States, you have no choice but to vote for Alice Weidel. And the CDU’s suicidal message is taking hold, and it is already clear that even if it beats the AfD by a few points and forms a government, when that government dies an ignominious death like the previous one, the AfD will be close to an absolute majority.

Hence the panic in Europe, which takes shape in all kinds of absurdities such as now, in an unprecedented resolution on Venezuela in which the People’s Party members have been left practically alone with Maduro’s accomplices, who are the Spanish socialists.

The People’s Party in Spain is an expert at falling into these traps that now grip all the parties of its group and the CDU in particular. It already allowed itself to be led into a trap by the socialists and by its own fears, complexes and ghosts, a trap that cost Alberto Núñez Feijóo the leadership of the government. That was in that ill-fated July when the soothsayers and the advisers on polls and radio convinced him that he could destroy Vox and keep all its votes for a government on his own. Ambition burst the sack, and that opened the door to the criminal government we have today under Pedro Sánchez.

Beyond the national tragedy of having a government dedicated exclusively to its own survival in power in order to prolong its impunity through the criminal cover-up of its earlier offences, the PP failed in its struggle to destroy Vox. That has come at a high price, because it means the total failure of Feijóo’s in itself pathetic strategy of seeking to destroy the only conservative force in Spain from positions that are increasingly social democratic and close to the left. The hammer blow to the PP that is the unstoppable rise of all the parties to its right, which sooner rather than later will confront it with the existential dilemma of division, has been redoubled by the hammer blow of the victory of Donald Trump, whom they attacked, defamed and despised just as much as the socialists and communists did.

And another simultaneous and terrible hammer blow is the great victory in Austria of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), Vox’s partner in PATRIOTS. After an attempt by the whole consensus brigade to form a government of three parties against the winner of the election, which was the FPÖ, they have had to acknowledge their failure, and the head of state, the sectarian green Alexander Van der Bellen, has had no choice but to comply this time with the constitution and entrust the formation of a government to the FPÖ leader, Herbert Kickl.

Within a few weeks we will foreseeably have in Austria a government in which the FPÖ will be the leader and by far the largest party, and the People’s Party will be the junior partner, which, given the results but above all given the subsequent polls, will have little chance of halting a policy of real change. The FPÖ, which won the election with 28 per cent, is already approaching 40 per cent. The PP keeps falling. This hammer blow from Vienna, like all the others, ought to advise the members of the European People’s Party to reconsider their attitude in the face of their catastrophic results. Since that is not happening, one must assume that they will carry on down this road of hammer blows that they bring upon themselves for having chained their fate to the parties of the left, which are already going down the drain of history.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.