In my predictions for the year 2016, I predicted that because of the controversy caused by Angela Merkel’s “open door” policy towards refugees, an attempt would be made to topple her from power this year.

A recent opinion poll published in Germany reports that a staggering 64% of Germans sampled do not want Angela Merkel to run as chancellor next year. The majority of German public opinion has turned against her decision to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees in 2015. Whether hard-line conservative factions within the ruling party will attempt to remove Angela Merkel from office this year remains to be seen, but it is clear that the German Chancellor has lost her Teflon touch with the German public.

Evidence that ISIS have used the migration crisis to infiltrate terrorists into the heart of Europe continues to grow, with German police currently investigating 40 potential terrorist cases. As many of the migrants who arrived in Germany last year did not have identification papers, it is impossible to know for certain how many terrorists ISIS have managed to infiltrate into those countries in Europe that accepted refugees.

The European intelligence services are in a race against time to prevent a terrorist attack against innocent civilians and I certainly hope that my grim prediction of a multi-state jihadi terror attack this year does not come to pass. The horrifying Brussels attacks show the capability of these jihadi terror networks and it is unfortunately a strong possibility that more attacks will come later this year.

 

The Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump crushed his remaining rivals in the Indiana primary elections on 3 May 2016 winning 53% of the vote. The landslide result forced his chief rival Senator Ted Cruz to suspend his campaign, effectively ensuring that Donald Trump will be the GOP presidential nominee in the 2016 presidential election.

For those who have been reading my blog I predicted that the Donald would have wrapped up the Republican nomination by early May in my article ‘Donald Trump – Cruising towards victory’, dated 23 February 2016. What the Donald has achieved is affectively a hostile takeover of the Republican Party by the populist-nationalist wing of the Republican coalition.

By wresting control away from the traditional elite party grandees and the superrich donor class, Trump now has the opportunity to remake the party as the champion of the American working and middle classes. The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump is unelectable and will be slaughtered by the centrist establishment figure Hilary Clinton. On the contrary, I argue that as long as Trump moves firmly into the “populist centre” of American politics and reassures independent voters that he is ready to take on the responsibilities of the office of the presidency, he is in a very good position to defeat Clinton in November.

The world is transfixed by the US presidential election and watch with growing horror, disbelief and amazement as the Trump juggernaut gets ever closer to the White House. What would a Trump presidency mean for the United States and the world? I intend to try and answer these questions in a future post soon. The only thing for certain, should Trump win the presidency in November, is that it will be a world-historical event with global implications which will reverberate for decades to come.