the AfD Party’s Last Laugh

On Tuesday, Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, lost the first vote for the Bundestag’s next chancellorship, marking the first time a presumptive chancellor was rejected on an initial ballot. Merz eventually cobbled together the necessary votes, but his initial rejection highlights the weakness of his coalition—and the ascent of the country’s most popular party, Alternative for Germany (AfD).

As Heather Mac Donald reports, AfD has been targeted by Germany’s intelligence agency and smeared as a neo-Nazi party simply for reflecting the will of German voters on immigration. “If Germany’s leaders continue to tell a quarter of the German population—decent, law-abiding individuals—that they are at best Hitler-adjacent and at worst Hitler-worshippers for wanting Germany’s cultural identity preserved,” Mac Donald argues, “there will be a massive upset in the halls of power and the people will be liberated, or the mechanisms of repression will grow more sweeping.”

Read the rest here.

Last week, Governor Greg Abbott signed the Texas Education Freedom Act, creating a $1 billion program that will give families more than $10,000 per child to spend on private school tuition, tutoring, transportation, and more. With this law, Texas becomes the 16th state to enact universal eligibility for private-school choice.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Stelle Garnett reflects on how far the movement has come and why Texas’s victory is a watershed moment: over half of American children will soon be eligible for some form of public support for private education. “These victories,” she writes, “mark a tipping point in the battle for educational freedom.”

The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) has near-total control over ports up and down the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. That’s why the union’s strike last fall, despite only lasting three days, sent a tremor across several industries.

At issue? Technology. Key global trade spots have embraced artificial intelligence and automation, but the ILA continues to resist over concerns about job security.

“As it has done in the past, the waterfront serves as a vivid staging ground for the conflict between traditional blue-collar work and technological change,” Jordan McGillis writes in the spring issue. “Now it also highlights tensions within the president’s political coalition.” Read his deep dive here.

Why are elite campuses melting down? It’s not just ideology—it’s idleness. Frederick M. Hess and Greg Fournier—authors of the new Manhattan Institute issue brief “What Do College Students Do All Day? The Answer Isn’t Studying”— argue that today’s campus chaos stems in part from the sheer aimlessness of modern college life. “We’ve normalized a college culture in which full-time students imagine that 20 hours of classes and studying constitutes a full week’s work,” they write.

The data are striking: the average student today studies ten hours or less per week, down from 24 in 1961, and more than half of college seniors report not writing a single paper over ten pages in their final year. To restore order and rigor, Hess and Fournier call on universities to enforce federal credit-hour rules and reset cultural expectations around what a full-time college education should actually require.

Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has made fighting anti-Semitism central to his campaign in the city’s mayoral race. But only time will tell whether it’s a winning issue—or if voters’ antipathy toward President Trump outweighs everything else and pushes them to support state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

Read David Christopher Kaufman’s take on the race and candidates here.

Charles Fain Lehman, Rafael Mangual, Renu Mukherjee, and Tal Fortgang discuss live in studio the latest Columbia University student protest, the Trump administration’s fight with Harvard, and highlights from the Manhattan Institute’s annual Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama is at it again.

During her appearance on The Diary of a CEO podcast last week, she lamented that while her husband, Barack Obama, was president, she and her family had to pay for their own food.

“You’re paying for every bit of food you eat. You’re not paying for housing and the staff in it but everything, even travel,” she said.

You mean First Ladies can’t rely on the American taxpayer to subsidize their meals or vacations? The horror!

News flash: All Americans pay for their own food (and flights and hotels and mortgages and everything else). And it’s increasingly difficult for many of them to do so—69% of U.S. adults said in a recent survey that sticker shock is making it challenging to eat nutritious meals.

Never mind that the Obamas are now reportedly worth $70 million—and had more than $1 million when they first entered the White House.

So excuse us if we struggle to sympathize with Michelle for having to pay for some things out of her own pocket.

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