When Angela Merkel first became Chancellor of Germany, her counterparts were George W. Bush and David Cameron. Surely such longevity is the mark of political genius. Not so, says Peter Franklin in UnHerd. Rather Merkel “bungled one election after another” and survived only due to her ability to hold together failing political alliances, both at home and in Europe.

The Frigid Isle
Íris Erlingsdóttir shines a light on the world’s first wholly feminized state. Women, she writes in The European Conservative, run everything in Iceland: “the presidency, the prime minister’s office…[the] national state church…schools, municipalities, police…newsrooms and [the] ever-expanding public bureaucracy.” As for the men, Erlingsdóttir observes, they describe themselves ruefully as (bad-taste alert) “pussy-whipped.”


