A Facebook friend shared this wonderful article with me. This friend and I spoke last week about the current time and that we saw a very dangerous time coming. We both wondered that so few people see this.

Too many people have indeed become destructive. Destructive in terms of human norms, the EU, solidarity with the weak. National and individual selfishness is ruling much more than in the eighties and nineties of the last century and selfishness always does its destructive work, always !

So yes, I fear for the worst. In a post an the Facebook page of Guy Verhofstadt concerning the official nomination of Hillary Clinton and the possible election of Donald Trump I wrote:

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… for us Europeans it could probably even get worst than we saw in the last 8 years. If no strong moderate candidate shows up in the French elections, I predict that Marine Le Pen will become the next French president. I just returned from France. A staggering amount of people I spoke to is completely fed up with both the socialists and the conservatives. And with Sarkozy and Hollande there is no credible candidate in the moderate camp. Marine Le Pen will win an election between the three and then there will be a Frexit referendum in France, she already announced that. I think she will fulfil this promise. With her as president and given the polls and the resistance among many French against austerity I predict France will step out of the EU. Without the German-French axis the EU will be dead.

And with Trump as US president NATO could be seriously weakened as well although if Putin says just one wrong word about Trump you’ll never know, Trump’s skin is thin.

With stabilisers like the EU and NATO weakened or gone and with instabilisers like Putin, rising national selfishness and IS terrorism strengthened, the future of our continent looks very bleak ! The ridiculous number of European crises of the last years will be nothing compared to what could happen in case my predictions are right.

I hope I am wrong in everything I predicted here but thus far rightwing and leftwing populism have too often been winning formulas. Furthermore I see only very few counter powers to prevent all this. Merkel’s credibility has been seriously undermined, the EU commissions has too little power to stabilise our continent and many people simply don’t believe politicians, business leaders and scientists anymore who collectively warn them against EU disintegration, Brexit proved that. So I am really really worried !

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Again I hope in hindsight I have made myself completely ridiculous with the above predictions and all went fine but I really fear the coming years !