Der Spiegel on the elections last Sunday in three states in Germany:

"There is another factor at play here too: the unmooring of conservatives in Germany. Just because the CDU has shifted left into the center of society doesn't mean that people who are suspicious of immigration, homosexuality and the entirety of the post-modern era have disappeared. Only the Christian Social Union (CSU) -- the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's CDU -- has been able to retain the loyalty of such voters while still managing to keep the enemies of democracy at arm's length. You don't have to like CSU leader Horst Seehofer, but he is reliably playing his role in the country's political spectrum."

Read the article here.

Aha, we need the CSU outside Bavaria as well.

But I'm not convinced. It's not so much conservatives who flee from traditional parties to rightwing, populist movements, it's also disappointed leftists who have discovered their nationalistic and xenophobic tendencies, they feel at home among the extremists. Some people need an enemy in order to feel safe, preferably a weak enemy.