The big initial winner in Sunday's German election has to be Britain's Theresa May.  German voters gave a huge majority to the parties on the right, all of whom largely despise the E.U. and the shabby way their bureaucrats have treated Brexit.  Look for a much easier process now for the Brits.

The big losers were the socialist SDP party, with traditional European leftist parties becoming all but irrelevant in 21st-century politics, and individually, Frau Dummkopf, as I call her – Angela Merkel.  The big vote for the new conservative party, the Alternative for Deutschland, is almost completely a result of former Christian Democrats leaving their party for AfD in protest of her disastrous immigration and environmental policies.  Before Merkel came along, Germany's Christian Democrats were the one European party most like Ronald Reagan's Republicans – unashamedly pro-market, pro-defense, and pro-life.  But Merkel has repeatedly turned her party toward idiotic leftist policy ideas, and a lot of traditional conservatives have left.

Merkel's bizarre rise from East German apparatchik to CDU/CSU leader has never made any sense, and comparisons to The Manchurian Candidate are common.  It's as if a duller but even more cynical Al Gore somehow got the GOP nomination for the presidency.

Diminished by the election results or not, and with the socialist SDP ruling out a coalition government, Merkel is supposed to be forming a new government with the Free Democrats and the Greens – the AfD supposedly being too controversial to be asked to participate.

But here's the kicker: the leader of the most moderate faction of AfD, Frauke Petry, just announced she would be joining the Bundestag as an independent.  By my count, if only about 30 of the 94 AfD deputies follow her into independence in the new Bundestag, there should be no stigma about them joining CDU/CSU and the FDP in forming an all-right government and ditching the Greens.

This is no doubt being discussed behind closed doors in Berlin.  If such a deal is made, it will be yet another humiliation for Frau Dummkopf and she may just retire.  Certainly, a lot of party leaders have already had to lay down the law to Merkel.  In 2016, CSU chief Horst Seehofer had to threaten to end the Christian coalition and run CSU candidates outside Bavaria in order to stop Merkel's open-borders policies.  Seeing the 2017 results, that German voters overwhelmingly don't want any more Muslim immigrants or E.U. bureaucrats, even the most stubborn party bosses now may be ready to ease Merkel out.

And there are plenty of attractive young conservative leaders to choose from – Horst Seehofer would be good, and Julia Kloeckner would be even better, but then again, just about any Christian Democrat would be preferable to Merkel.  Given the state of the world these days, it sure would be nice to have Germany back in the Western alliance on a full-time basis, something that has not been the case for two decades under the last German chancellors – the paid Russian agent Gerhard Schroeder and the lamentable Frau Dummkopf.

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.