Sixty-five years on from when the wall went up, Germany’s eastern regions are trapped in a depopulation spiral. Nearly a quarter of former East Germans have moved west or abroad since German reunification. Most are young, well-educated and female. That’s left behind a region that is now Germany’s oldest, with its birth rate among the lowest, and with many of its communities watching schools, playgrounds, clubs and traditions slowly disappear.

While recognizing the scale of the demographic collapse, Germany’s established parties have tended to treat it as an economic issue, all while suggesting mass immigration as the answer: if you don’t have enough people, just import some. But Eastern voters don’t view demographic decline as a shortage of workers; they see the world they know disappearing, and they respond with pessimism. Mainstream politicians have ignored and even belittled this anxiety at their peril. Now, Right-wing populists are stepping into that void with spectacular success. The German East isn’t the only example of such dynamics, but it is a particularly stark one.

One thing that hit the East particularly hard was the speed of the change. When I was born in East Germany, in 1985, the birthrate was beginning to decline but was still above 1.7 children per woman. My family was pretty typical in having two children. In West Germany, the birthrate was already 1.3 — almost exactly what it is today across the reunified country. In what was formerly East Germany, though, it’s now just 1.2. In the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where, in 1990, nearly 32,000 children were born, there were fewer than 12,000 new babies last year — the lowest number on record.

On 6 September, Saxony-Anhalt goes to the polls to elect a new state parliament, and the way the parties are addressing the demographic crisis couldn’t be more different. The state government is currently run by the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), as it has been for most of the time since 1990. Their campaign focuses on the usual issues: jobs, crime, education, welfare, migration, healthcare. “Demographic change” is mentioned in the manifesto, but as a fact, something to be managed rather than addressed — let alone reversed. Voters seem unconvinced. Polls have the CDU at around 23% at the moment, down from 37% at the last election.

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By contrast, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), whose Saxony-Anhalt branch has been classified by domestic intelligence as “Right-wing extremist”, is currently at 43%, very close to achieving an absolute majority of seats in the state parliament. They have come out hard on the issue of declining birthrates. Indeed, it’s the first item on their manifesto. “Germany suffers from massive depopulation,” they write in the first sentence of the first chapter. “What in political debate is referred to as ‘demographic change’ is nothing less than the aging and extinction of the German people.” The text goes on to claim that the “ruling parties” have known the extent of the problem for decades but are lacking “the political will or the courage to enact the measures that would be necessary to reverse the trend”.

The AfD’s language may be stark, but the party is not wrong to suggest that the established parties are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of discussing explicitly pro-natal politics. As with many other topics, debates around demography are fraught with uniquely German anxieties. The country where Nazis once pinned medals on the chests of particularly fertile mothers doesn’t want to be seen to be doing anything like it ever again. 

Indeed, there was public outrage when the popular German news anchor Eva Herman started talking about it in 2007. Arguing in books and TV appearances that the German people was on the brink of extinction because feminism was eroding traditional family models and causing low birth rates, she referenced Nazi family policy. Hitler’s Germany, Herman claimed in a press conference, “was a cruel time”, one which ultimately led the country to its downfall. But, Herman added , “then we also abolished what was good, and that was values, children, mothers, families, solidarity”. Facing massive public criticism, and despite trying to back-track, Herman was fired from her job as a newsreader.

It was a lesson in what isn’t sayable in Germany around declining birth rates. All the same, today’s politicians and commentators would do well to take a closer look at Nazi pro-natalism: not to emulate it, but to see where ignoring the issue can lead if it’s left to extremists.

In the Twenties, too, many Germans were beset by demographic anxiety. Birth rates had plummeted from above four children per woman at the end of the 19th century to below replacement levels. The First World War had claimed the lives of around two million German men on the front lines, as well as hundreds of thousands of civilians. A smaller and continually shrinking population now worried over “empty cradles”, an issue never explicitly addressed by a deeply fractured political class whose political bandwidth was eaten up by infighting and economic turmoil. 

For the Nazis, though, pro-natalism was a central strand of their ideology. Their program attempted to increase the number of children through a mixture of propaganda, financial incentives and outright coercion. The most famous policy was the “Mother’s Cross”, a state decoration introduced in 1939 to honor German mothers with at least four children. Other policies aimed to drive women out of employment and into domesticity. In 1936, a Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion was established to discourage acts that obstructed reproduction.

Over time, Nazi policies became more and more extreme. While forced sterilization programs and the outright murder of disabled people and ethnic minority groups aimed to limit the number of children the Nazi regime deemed undesirable, marriage loans and education for girls, that prepared them explicitly for future roles as mothers and housewives, were supposed to encourage the birth of more children for the German “People’s Community”. 

Meanwhile, the SS created the so-called Lebensborn program, originally established to support unmarried, pregnant “Aryan” women to have their children rather than seeking illegal abortions. During the war, the program radicalized and became involved in a number of increasingly bizarre and cruel practices, including the abduction of thousands of foreign children who happened to either be ethnically German or at least looked like they might be. Lebensborn claimed to “repatriate” these children by placing them in German families.

While the Nazis pursued demographic policies that involved state-orchestrated murder, the East German regime kept its existing population in the country at gunpoint. Given this historical backdrop, it’s hardly surprising that few German politicians today wish to discuss depopulation as something other than an unalterable fact. It’s much safer to think of people as workers or commodities, a view that allows the “topping up” of missing young people through immigration. 

Indeed, that’s exactly how the refugee crisis of 2015, when Germany took in more than one million people, was framed. As the German Economic Institute wrote in 2016, “the immigration of refugees rejuvenates the German population”. You still hear similar noises from regional governments a decade on. 

And, certainly, most people I meet when I return to the former East Germany haven’t got a problem with controlled labor immigration — so long as the migrants integrate culturally and learn to speak German. But they don’t see it as an answer to depopulation. On the contrary: they see their children leaving and birthrates plummeting, even as the population of foreign nationals in Saxony-Anhalt has doubled since 2015. On average, the newcomers are 18 years younger than the local population, while a quarter of children born in Saxony-Anhalt in 2025 had a mother without German citizenship. This tends to fuel rather than alleviate anxieties of social and cultural change, whatever the established parties might claim. 

The AfD, as a new party, only founded in 2013 and well used to being labeled as Nazi, has no qualms about suggesting pro-natal policies. Among other things, it wants to introduce a “Welcome” payment of €2,000 for the first two children of a family, and then €4,000 for each additional child if at least one parent is German. Abortion is to be discouraged and an ultrasound would be compulsory before an abortion is permitted. 

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The AfD manifesto blames what it calls a “perverted Left-wing, radical feminist and individualist” spirit in German institutions, including schools, for the demographic collapse. “Rising abortion rates and declining birthrates,” the party claims, “are also connected to the fact that sexual deviances and non-reproductive lifestyles are now enjoying more acceptance and are more aggressively advocated than the normal family consisting of a man and a woman from which children are born.” 

The primary aim of these policies is not to ensure a sufficient workforce for economic stability and growth: but sustaining the German population as an ethnic and cultural entity. Or, to quote analysis in Die Zeit, population decline is something “most parties view as a danger to the labor market and to pensions — the AfD senses a threat to the nation.” Most Germans, too, want less migration, especially of the unselective kind. Last year, a poll found that 68% of Germans want asylum numbers to go down, the highest such figure in a decade. 

By emphasizing immigration while leaving Germany’s demographic anxiety entirely to the AfD, the mainstream parties are losing a lot of ground. And not just here: from Hungary to Poland, pro-natalism is largely a Right-wing populist concern. For the most part, of course, pro-natalism, doesn’t appear to work; the AfD may well prove to be unsuccessful with its efforts in Saxony-Anhalt, should it come to power there. Even the Nazis’ aggressive policies only increased the birth rate a little bit in peace time, before it plummeted again after 1939. 

What to actually do about population decline amid changing lifestyles and gender roles remains a complex and ongoing question. But it is possible to acknowledge concerns and discuss the problem without slipping into the racialized or coercive politics of the past. If mainstream politicians refuse to find answers to that knotty demographic question, then the political margins will do it without them. 

Hitler was complying with a public speaking ban issued by Walter Felix Mueller, Weimar’s mayor. Everyone knew the Nazi leader was dangerous. He had tried to overthrow the government in the so-called Munich Putsch just three years earlier. Now, here he was in Weimar, once home to Goethe, and where the German Republic had been founded in 1919, stamping the town’s name on its fragile democratic experiment. Mueller was determined that the cradle of the new democracy would not become its grave. So he silenced Hitler by law — for one weekend in July 1926 anyway. History would soon prove this a futile gesture, one that neither slowed the death of the Weimar Republic nor Hitler’s rise to power.

I’ve spent the last few years studying the German interwar years for my new book, which focuses on the town of Weimar between 1918 and 1939. A century on, we seem to look to this period for guidance more than ever, but one conclusion is rarely drawn: there is little evidence to suggest that the Nazi Party could have been legislated out of history.

This was clear enough that summer day in 1926. Although Mueller’s speaking ban stopped Hitler from addressing his followers in Weimar’s market square, it didn’t stop people from wanting to listen to him. And since the mayor had no power over private gatherings, the Nazis simply held indoor invitation-only meetings instead. Indeed, the very same day that Hitler stood silent on the market square, the Hitler Youth received its name at the nearby Crossbow Society, while in other meetings, central Nazi rituals and symbols were decided. All party publications, for instance, were to be marked with a standardized emblem: an eagle holding an oak wreath with a swastika in the middle. This would later become the official emblem of the Nazi state. Hitler himself also spoke — entirely playing by the rules — behind closed doors at the German National Theater in Weimar: the very birthplace of the republic. In short, Mueller’s ban had done absolutely nothing to stop Hitler, not even for a single weekend.

Despite such evidence to the contrary, many Germans today seem to believe that the lesson from Weimar is that growing public discontent is best tackled by legislating against the parties that channel it. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, whose rapid rise is causing a fair amount of angst in Germany. Haunted by their Nazi past, Germans long believed that there would never again be a significant political party to the Right of conservatism. Now, the AfD is not only occupying that space but is even leading the opinion polls. How should Germany respond? “Learn from history and ban the AfD!” says the far-Left Die Linke party.

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They are not alone. At their party conference last year, pretty much the only thing the deeply divided center-left Social Democrats (SPD) could wholeheartedly agree on was initiating legal proceedings towards an AfD ban because, as one senior party figure put it, “we all have a responsibility to learn from our history.” Even the German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose role is meant to put him above party politics, asked in a speech last year: “Is it actually possible that we haven’t learnt from history?”, warning that “a party that walks the path of aggressive anti-constitutionalism always had to reckon with the possibility of a ban.”

At the local level, meanwhile, some politicians are trying to tackle the AfD the same way Mueller tried to hem in Hitler. Earlier this year, two Bavarian municipalities issued speaking bans against Björn Höcke, an AfD politician who had planned to appear at campaign rallies. In the end, a court declared this gambit illegal. When Höcke finally spoke, it turned out that his audience now contained people who’d just come to see what the hype was about.

Höcke is a point in case for the argument that legal action does little to diminish the appeal of radical politics. Intense, radical and ambitious, he is infamous in Germany for leading the most extreme faction of the AfD, and has been convicted twice for using Nazi slogans at campaign rallies. Yet Höcke leads one of the most successful AfD branches in the country, with his Thuringian party coming first in regional elections in 2024 and now polling at 38% of the vote share. As a former history teacher, Höcke is conscious of the same history his enemies hope to use to defeat him.

There are indeed many striking parallels between past and present. Thuringia, that central German state where Höcke today has his power base, was pivotal to the rise of the Nazis, as indeed was Weimar, the state’s capital after the First World War. Hitler himself visited Weimar over 40 times, because he found ideal political conditions there despite temporary speaking bans. In many ways, Thuringia became a safe haven for the nascent Nazi movement. Some German states had instituted regional bans of the party from 1922, followed by a nationwide ban after Hitler’s botched 1923 coup. Yet Nazi politicians and fellow-travelers simply stood for election as independents, or in newly formed ersatz parties. In this way, seven far-Right men made it into the Thuringian state parliament in 1924, three of whom were card-carrying National Socialists.

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Due to the parliamentary arithmetic, these Thuringian Nazi MPs were needed to form a  Right-wing majority in the state, and they duly agreed to back the ruling coalition in exchange for a re-legalization of the local Nazi Party. They got what they asked for, forcing a local lifting of the ban as early as March 1924 and granting Hitler’s party a political sanctuary from which to rebuild his movement until the national ban fell in 1925. It’s no coincidence that the first formal Nazi rally, that one with Hitler silent on the stage, happened not in Nuremberg — but in Weimar. The town would, in time, become the seat of the first state government to appoint a Nazi minister, a full three years before Hitler became German chancellor.

Höcke knows all of this — and so do many of his party colleagues. Take the time and location of this year’s national AfD conference. It is being held in Erfurt, which is today the capital of Thuringia. The date for the meet-up is 4 July 2026, exactly 100 years after the crucial Weimar rally of 1926. Make of that what you will, but the AfD certainly doesn’t go out of its way to reject the political legacy of Hitlerism. In fact, it often outright flirts with the phrases, symbols and gestures of the Thirties. The latest example is the federal AfD MP Matthias Moosdorf, who has recently been charged with greeting a party colleague with the Nazi salute in the Berlin parliament.

To be clear, the AfD is not the reincarnation of the Nazi Party. For one thing, it doesn’t have or seek to acquire a private army. By contrast, Hitler’s stormtroopers eventually counted over four million members. Even at the rally in 1926, when he wanted to be seen to stick to the rules, Hitler’s men caused a veritable blood bath in Weimar, provoking brutal street battles. One policeman was shot and wounded on the street, right in front of the train station. So far, there is no sign that the AfD has a comparable appetite for brutal illegality.

That’s another good reason for mainstream politicians to keep their heads — and focus not on the AfD itself but on the causes that have helped it grow. Again, there are parallels to the past. For all its campaigning and consolidating, and for all of Hitler’s personal charisma, the Nazi Party only got 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 elections. Then came the Wall Street Crash, causing such rage and despair that no party ban could have stopped it.

What ordinary Germans wanted most after 1929 wasn’t extremism or ideology: but tangible, drastic and effective reforms to address the misery they found themselves in. That it was possible to absorb such despair — and turn it into optimism by democratic means — is shown by the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President of the United States. FDR came to power in 1933, the same year Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Of course, the comparison isn’t perfect: unlike Germany, the US boasted a long tradition of democratic politics. All the same, both Roosevelt and Hitler ultimately dealt with the same economic crisis. We will never know if a charismatic, capable and democratic-minded politician could have pulled Germany from the brink. But there is nothing inevitable about the way German history turned in the interwar period.

That is doubly true today: the causes for the rise of the AfD are far less severe than those that brought the Nazis to power. Between 1929 and 1933, the Great Depression caused mass unemployment at a time when many German families had only just begun to rebuild from the traumas of the First World War and the turmoil that followed in its wake. Today, the AfD is growing not because of external economic collapse, but because people are frustrated with political choices made by recent governments, primarily on immigration, but also on energy policy, economic reforms and cultural issues. All of these are eminently fixable with reforms centrist politicians could themselves enact. Surveys show, for instance, that the stricter stance on controlling immigration that the current German government has taken has led to this issue being seen as less of a concern by voters.

Instead of burying their heads in the sands of time, German politicians should focus on the here and now, tackling the reasons that cause people to turn to radical politics. Suffocating the fires of discontent is never as effective as depriving them of fuel. The Weimar Republic may be the most terrifying example of a fallen democracy in Western history, but fear shouldn’t tempt its successors into trying to legislate against a repeat. The lessons from Weimar are complex and nuanced — yet it’s clear they don’t boil down to party and speaking bans as guarantors for a better future.

Almost exactly 10 years have passed since 24 August 2015. On that day, the German government, headed by Merkel, suspended the so-called Dublin Protocol, which stipulates that asylum seekers must be processed in the EU country they first enter. It was a response to the waves of refugees coming into Europe, fueled by the Syrian civil war, and which were overwhelming bureaucratic systems across the bloc. Especially in light of her country’s Nazi past, Merkel felt she had no choice but to act on what she called a “humanitarian imperative”. Germany’s decision effectively made it legal for anyone to enter Germany, so long as they said they were claiming asylum.

According to the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, nearly 1.1 million people applied for asylum in Germany in 2015 alone. For context: that number was 25 times higher than in 2011. Syrians made up the single largest proportion that fateful year, at 40% of the total, but they were not the majority. Other people from the Middle East, mostly Iraqis and Afghans, but also from the Balkans and North Africa, comprised the remainder. Nearly 70% were male.

A year later, the center-left newspaper Die Zeit looked back on the night of 4 and 5 September, when Merkel decided to fully open the borders and bring asylum seekers in on trains, as “the night Germany lost control”. For one thing, the liberal journalists lamented, “the government admits that not a single refugee who arrived on that weekend or in the days that followed was screened by security officials.” Germany had no idea whether it was admitting snotty-nosed children from war-torn Aleppo — or terrorists and sex offenders. Over the next decade, Germans swiftly discovered that they had opened their gates to all of these and more.

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The first shock came on New Year’s Eve 2015, when 1,200 women were sexually assaulted in Cologne. “A throng of about a thousand young men was forming,” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle explained. “Most of them were from the North African-Arabic region.” In scenes Merkel would later describe as “abominable”, the report continued, “packs of men were hunting down women, cornering many of them. There were sexual assaults, rapes.”

The police response was somewhere between clueless and callous. One young woman told the German media later how she was trapped in the crowds and then suddenly “someone had his hands between my legs.” When she tried to report this at a police station where “there were lots of girls, all crying uncontrollably”, she was told to go elsewhere. A public police statement said the celebrations in Cologne had been “relaxed”.

In the end, it was probably this staggering denial that riled people the most. In her memoirs, Merkel dedicates just one paragraph to the incident in Cologne. There is no compassion for the victims, just a cool assessment that the delayed response “gave rise to the impression that the authorities were trying to cover something up.” Merkel’s main concern, then as now, was political. As the leader of a nominally center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she faced plenty of internal pressure for her generous refugee policy. But the public mood also tipped. The “Welcoming Culture” that dominated the news dissipated quickly. Asked in one representative poll in January 2016, 73% of respondents felt dealing with “asylum” and “refugees” was the most urgent government priority.

The same poll, from January 2025, showed that 68% of people wanted Germany to take in fewer asylum seekers. The problem was that while Merkel was chancellor, all the way up to 2021, there was no effective way for this majority to express their skepticism at the ballot box. The architect of the refugee policy hogged the center-right slot on the political spectrum. The other parties sat further to the Left. Even Christian Lindner, the leader of the small libertarian FDP, called Merkel’s decision “right and justifiable”.

Merkel understood this dynamic. In 2015, she tried to frame the influx as a temporary crisis that the country had to overcome together. “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do this!”), she famously told her compatriots. By December, however, she admitted at a party conference that “even a strong country like Germany would in the long run be unable to cope with such a large number of refugees.” In March 2016, the EU duly struck a deal with Turkey to return migrants and show domestic voters something was changing. Yet with the German political establishment reluctant to change, the intake continued. Today, there are at least 3.3 million asylum seekers in Germany: some 4% of the population.

The majority that worried about the numbers was never going to stay silent forever. With Merkel defending what was essentially a Left-wing migration policy while leading the major center-right party, a powerful vacuum emerged for a more radical alternative. It was filled by a political newcomer: the Alternative für Deutschland or AfD.

In December 2015, Alexander Gauland, a leading figure in the AfD then as now, called the migration crisis a “gift” and “very helpful” to his then two-year-old outfit. He was right: the AfD, which started on a libertarian platform but is now focused on immigration, first entered the German parliament in the election of 2017 with 13% of the vote. Today, it is the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. Recently, it has even topped some polls, with around a quarter of the electorate supporting it.

The meteoric rise of the AfD is a direct response to German immigration policy since 2015, with many here feeling their country has changed irrevocably — and without their consent. Take crime. Official police statistics say 42% of suspects are foreign nationals. Even if you discount being in the country illegally, that still leaves 35%.

Such statistics have come in for criticism. One study, released earlier this year, found that “migration and asylum have no systematic impact on criminality.” But many people feel and see unwelcome change in their immediate environment. This summer, sexual harassment and assault of women and girls in German lidos have triggered a heated debate. In June, one case made the headlines when girls aged 11-16 reported to have been groped by four Syrian men. According to figures from the Federal Criminal Police Office, there were 423 sexual crimes reported in public swimming locations last year; nearly two thirds of suspects were non-Germans.

One can attack the veracity of those statistics: but what’s certain is that Germans feel less safe. In a survey taken last year, only a little more than half of people said they felt safe in public spaces. Two years earlier, it had still been 75%. This is likely also connected to a number of high-profile, violent crimes and acts of terrorism committed by men who came to Germany as asylum seekers. This began with the Christmas market attack in Berlin in 2016 in which 12 people were killed by an unsuccessful asylum seeker from Tunisia who had entered Germany during the refugee crisis in 2015. From there, the grim reports have continued, from a mass stabbing at Solingen, in August 2024, to the shocking story, in Aschaffenburg, of an Afghan asylum seeker who stabbed a toddler to death earlier this year.

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No doubt, radicalization and psychiatric issues played a role in all these cases. But that won’t make people feel any safer. The fundamental problem remains that asylum seekers weren’t checked, with the government’s focus being on their safety and not that of the German public.

Beyond the questions of safety, meanwhile, Merkel’s experiment has transformed German life in other ways. Politicians have constantly stressed that the vast majority of asylum seekers are law-abiding and hard-working. Nonetheless, the sheer numbers admitted since 2015 make integration difficult both for them and the rest of the country. Nearly half of benefits claimants in Germany are non-nationals. Often this is due to bureaucratic hurdles as well as language and culture barriers. Regardless of the reasons, seven-in-10 Germans think the state is “overwhelmed”.

People see this in their everyday lives. On average, 30% of school children now have what Germany calls a “migration background”; in some places, notably in certain parts of larger cities, it’s 80% or more. Apart from language issues in overstretched classrooms, this has a bearing on culture too. Some schools have switched to Halal-only food in canteens. In Berlin, a gay teacher was abused by children for years. At his primary school, where 95% of students come from migrant families, he was told he would “go to hell” and that “he was a disgrace to Islam”. Some kids boycotted his lessons. His complaints to school and city authorities remained ignored until he took them to the media.

This cultural shift is visible right across Germany. After the October 7th attacks, Hamas supporters celebrated on the streets of Berlin, handing out sweets to passers by. For obvious historical reasons, the connection between antisemitism and immigration in Germany is a highly sensitive and contested field, but existing figures suggest that there is a link. In 2020, a study found that 40% percent of Muslims in Germany held antisemitic views; the same was true for just 5% of Protestants.

To quote Merkel herself, then, “there was a before and an after.” Germany has changed forever and there is no turning back the clock. But that still leaves the future. The current German government under Friedrich Merz — a long-term inner-party rival and critic of Merkel — is attempting a two-step approach to move forward. On the one hand, it is implementing stricter immigration policies. National border controls have been reinstated, and family reunification rules have been suspended for certain asylum seekers. Though there are a number of reasons behind this trend, Germany has seen a 50% decline in asylum applications in the first half of 2025. 

The second, and much more difficult, step will be the integration of recent arrivals who are likely to stay in Germany. The case of a school in Ludwigshafen in western Germany has triggered a debate on how the children of immigrants can be better supported to learn the skills needed to integrate into German society. There, nearly all students are from non-German backgrounds while a quarter of them lack the required basic skills to advance to the next grade. Education Minister Karin Prien has put the idea of an imposed “migration quota” for schools on the table to distribute children with poor language skills and those lacking other required skills, such as holding a pen, or have difficulty sitting in a chair for extended periods. But she received immense criticism for this, and the debate over integration rages on.

Policies like these are important for voters to feel that a line has been drawn under Germany’s unlimited approach to asylum. Had Merkel followed her initial instincts, when she argued that opening the gates was the only way out of a once-in-a-generation crisis, many Germans would likely have forgiven her. After all, they came out in droves to feed, house and support genuine refugees. The problem came with the abdication of control. The borders remained open, and the lines between asylum policy and general migration were blurred. Arguments around labor shortages, demographic imbalance, and cultural diversity were all introduced, as though Germany only had two choices: no immigration or uncontrolled immigration.

What is clear, anyway, is that the current German government will have a hard time tackling the problems Merkel unleashed. Yet, as the AfD rises and cultural divisions widen, the tenth anniversary of her decision may be the last chance for the German establishment to look back, take stock, and finally change course.

That’s not to say politicians, historians, journalists and teachers aren’t making an effort to mark it. In the former West German capital of Bonn, 11 public figures will issue “love declarations to the Basic Law”, while Berlin is hosting a three-day “Festival for Democracy” with workshops and music. But for all the attempts at fanfare, the anniversary of the Basic Law is no German Independence Day. Buildings won’t be bedecked in the national colours; street parties will be a rarity. As political expert Ursula Münch told the German press, “significant parts of the German people don’t give a monkey’s about this anniversary”.

A tempting explanation for the lack of public displays of affection for Germany’s legal framework is the country’s ultra-conscious relationship with history. But guilt alone doesn’t explain the absence of the “constitutional patriotism” that West German thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas had hoped for. Germans have long found other outlets for post-war national pride, football being the most obvious example.

When West Germany won its first World Cup in 1954, fans bellowed a part of the German anthem that is now no longer sung — the bit that starts with “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” (“Germany, Germany above all”). Instead, they were supposed to sing the third stanza, the one about “Unity and Justice and Freedom”. Whether they did it out of habit or deliberately is hard to tell, but historians such as Joachim Fest have called that moment of national euphoria the true day when modern Germany was born. Similarly, the 2006 World Cup, which was held in Germany, transformed the country into a sea of black, red and gold. While critical voices remained, most Germans celebrated the summer of patriotic jubilation as a “fairytale” moment.

So, Germans can celebrate themselves under the right circumstances. But pinning a sense of national togetherness on a legal document isn’t as easy as it is on sporting success. It doesn’t help that republican democracy is not a form of government that lends itself to pomp and pageantry. With their interchangeable office holders, rules-based order and attendant bureaucracy, such systems are intended to be fair and sensible, not awe-inspiring and glamorous. How do you celebrate something that doesn’t like fanfare?

German politicians had already struggled to drum up passion for rational republicanism after the First World War, when they tried to set up the country’s first fully fledged democracy but found it difficult to compete with the ceremonial flair of the dethroned monarchy. When the new constitution was passed in 1919, “there was no jubilation, no address, no tribute, nothing”, a conservative newspaper grumbled. “The state’s constitution shuffled out into the country like an indifferent guest.” Harry Graf Kessler, a pro-democracy aristocrat, wrote in his diary, “the republic should avoid ceremonies; this form of government doesn’t lend itself to them. It’s as if a governess is dancing ballet”.

Such generalisations go too far. France and the US make a valiant effort each year to celebrate their republics, but both have rousing origin stories to draw on. When the French mark Bastille Day, they don’t remember the signing of a piece of paper but the day in 1789 when revolutionaries attempted to storm a hated political prison. It was a rebellious act that symbolises the defeat of dynastic rule by people power. Similarly, Americans see the Fourth of July as a celebration of the moment they gained national freedom. Both are dramatic stories of a victorious struggle for democracy.

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Modern Germany’s story, by contrast, begins in defeat and shame. Nazism had bankrupted the nation politically, economically and morally. The country lay in ruins and its people were dejected and hungry when the Western Allies decided that they needed their zones to become a bulwark against communism in the emerging Cold War.

To remedy this, in 1948, a Parliamentary Council was summoned under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer who would soon become West Germany’s first chancellor. They discussed, drafted and redrafted the articles under the watchful eye of the Allies, and agreed them on 8 May 1949. There was no pathos. In lieu of the anthem they didn’t yet have, the delegates sang the 19th-century song “Ich hab mich ergeben” — “I have surrendered myself”. Over the next few days, the Allies signed off on the document and so did all regional governments (with the exception of Bavaria, which didn’t agree to it but acknowledged it as lawful). On 23 May, the West German constitution became law and created a new German democracy.

The origin story of the Basic Law isn’t the stuff of national legends. Many West Germans have much stronger feelings about post-war chancellors like Konrad Adenauer or Willy Brandt, the first Social Democrat to take office in 1969. There is an intense collective memory of the so-called “economic miracle” of the Fifties in which Adolf Hitler’s people’s car, the Volkswagen Beetle, somehow became one of the most iconic vehicles in automotive history. While the Basic Law enabled the economic, political and social stability that emerged, it remained a largely unsung hero.

Another problem with using the birthday of the German constitution as a national rallying point is that it didn’t unite the country, but rather cemented its post-war division. It only applied to West Germany and was deliberately designed to be provisional until reunification with the Soviet Zone of Occupation could be achieved. Its last article, Number 146, said the Basic Law would stay in place until a permanent constitution was “freely adopted by the German people”. At the time this meant that a West German state was founded with its own currency and legal system. The formation of East Germany was a response to that and followed on 7 October 1949.

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During the country’s reunification in 1990, heated discussions ensued over whether the merger of two states necessitated a new constitution with input from Easterners. But Wolfgang Schäuble, the West German Minister of the Interior who led the reunification negotiations, made the situation very clear: “This is not the unification of two equal states,” he declared. “There is a constitution, and there is a Federal Republic of Germany. Let us start with the assumption that you have been excluded from both for 40 years. Now you are entitled to take part.” There wouldn’t be a new constitution. East Germany would join the West German system.

This has contributed to the resentment many East Germans continue to feel about the way their former country was dissolved without much input from them. Such resentment is difficult to overcome and even more difficult to turn into enthusiasm for a document over which they had no say. In the first free elections in 1990, the majority of Easterners had voted for parties that offered quick unification, but this is not the same as having explicit input into the country’s constitution.

East Germans, as a result, are expected to celebrate an origin story in which they feel they had no part while few former West Germans would consider the history of East Germany their own. The East remains the anomaly to Western normality. As the historian Frank Trentmann put it, drawing a straight line from the West German constitution to today risks making East Germany “little more than an inconvenient detour that, with reunification, rejoins the main road to the liberal democratic West”.

Meanwhile, a number of German commentators are also doubtful about the self-assured celebrations of German democracy because of the rise of the Right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which polls as the second largest party in many surveys. The political magazine Der Spiegel is running a stark cover this week featuring a swastika covered by Germany’s red-black-and-gold tricolour and the heading “Haven’t we learnt anything?”, which seems to imply that voting for the AfD is akin to abolishing democracy in the way Hitler did in the Thirties.

Of course, few would deny that Germany is today a deeply divided country with many voters looking for ways to express their discontent outside of the established political boundaries. But the same is true for many other Western democracies who don’t, by and large, mistake a mismatch of political offerings and voters’ concerns as a sign that people are fed up with democracy itself. This equation doesn’t work out for Germany either. In a recent survey, 85% of Germans considered democracy a good form of government. If people are losing faith in parties, politicians and institutions, they still believe in the values of the Basic Law.

Where does this leave today’s anniversary? While bombastic celebrations of the Basic Law may not be appropriate for a number of reasons, few would disagree that Germany is right to take a moment to reflect on the long and winding road that took it back into the fold of the liberal democracies of the West. It is a country that takes its lessons from the past more seriously than most and has bound them into the very fabric of its political system. Passionate “constitutional patriotism” may never have materialised in Germany, but a strong commitment to democracy has. And that is well worth celebrating.

But today should also be a day for Germany to reflect on how to grow democracy out of its West German infancy. When the Basic Law was enacted 75 years ago, it introduced people-power to a deeply Nazified population that had never experienced a functioning democracy and looked to self-assured men like Adenauer to lead the way. Those days are gone. Today, a vocal, confident and well-educated population wants to be able to voice concerns and criticism without being chided by politicians for doing democracy wrong. Article 20 of the Basic Law says: “All state authority is derived from the people.” Some 75 years after those words were enshrined in law, they provide a pertinent reminder of what democracy is all about.

After two world wars, an aversion to military conflict has long hampered Berlin’s ability to act decisively and shoulder its fair share of responsibility as part of the Western alliance. In the past decade, Germany’s defence budget barely made it across the 1% mark of GDP, never mind the 2% required by Nato. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the fallacies of Germany’s unconditional pacifism, it plunged Berlin into an identity crisis. A national rethink was in order and Chancellor Olaf Scholz dramatically declared in February 2022 that a Zeitenwende, a watershed moment, was underway: “the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.” While German aid to Ukraine was initially sluggish and always badly communicated, it is now among its biggest financial and military supporters. Only yesterday, 18 German Leopard 2s arrived in Ukraine.

There are many Germans who can’t and won’t kiss old certainties goodbye. But the two world wars at the root of modern German angst were all-encompassing catastrophes that plunged the entire country into a moral abyss. This trauma is a national one and, since Russia’s invasion, has triggered a lively public debate, leading to a degree of change. Alongside a vastly increased military budget for the German army, Berlin has also just announced that it wants to raise military aid for Ukraine from currently €3 billion to more than €15 billion in the next few years — a clear sign that it is beginning to come around to the idea of contributing to European security on a much greater scale despite its historical inhibitions.

The same cannot be said about another legacy of Germany’s tumultuous 20th century: the fact that it spent much of the latter half as two separate countries. Between 1949 and 1990 two Germanies existed: the Federal Republic in the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East. Each found very different ways to move on from the horrors of war and genocide. And unification in 1990 was not enough to foster agreement on Germany’s response to armed conflict, particularly not one that involves Russia.

When East Germany vanished overnight, 16 million people who had been born there became citizens of a country that was in many ways alien to them. Their fellow Germans on the other side of the Berlin Wall may have shared their language and cultural roots, but they had an entirely different understanding of modern Germany’s place in the world.

From West Germany’s very foundation in 1949, its first chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s transatlantic outlook and focus on reconciliation with France laid the groundwork for a thoroughly Western political identity. His American partners supported this process, seeing in West Germany the easternmost outpost of the democratic world, one they wanted to fortify against Soviet influence. As a result of its ringside seat on the fault lines of the Cold War, West Germany became a fully fledged member of Nato in 1955, a mere decade after the end of the most devastating war the world had ever seen. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower declared in 1951 that he did “not believe that the German soldier as such has lost his honour” in the Second World War. Adenauer was trusted to rebuild a German army, the Bundeswehr, in the early Fifties.

Adenauer saw no conflict in the fact that he was binding German soldiers to their former Western enemies. He declared in 1955 that Nato’s objectives were “in full harmony with the natural interest of the German nation”. While many Germans, particularly his opponents on the Left, disagreed with him, he pressed ahead, spending over 4% of GDP on defence in almost every year of his tenure, from 1949 to 1963. Bundeswehr pilots learned how to drop American nuclear bombs which were stationed on their soil alongside American nuclear-capable missiles. With male conscription reintroduced in 1956, West German men learnt to fight for and with Nato. Even as defence spending was gradually reduced and a powerful peace movement evolved in West Germany with anti-American strains, the bulk of society remained firmly Western in outlook. Nato was a partner, not the enemy.

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It was this outlook that East Germans were expected to share when they joined the Federal Republic in 1990. After all, they had gleefully watched Western television in secret and obsessed over branded American jeans. They had eventually joined mass demonstrations to bring down their socialist system and then voted for parties that had advocated a swift and one-sided unification process. It seemed reasonable to assume that they had shared the pro-Western outlook of their counterparts on the other side of the Iron Curtain all along.

Yet East Germans were not asked to return to something they were once part of, but to blend into a state that had evolved without them. They had served in the National People’s Army, formed in 1956, and were integrated into the Warsaw Pact. Unlike the trust Adenauer had enjoyed from his American Allies, the East German leadership had a rather different relationship with Moscow. During the Prague Spring in 1968, when the Soviets suppressed political reform in Czechoslovakia, East German troops only formed supply lines and were kept directly under Soviet command. It was a decision made in Moscow, not in Berlin, that they weren’t deployed in open combat. The East German authorities didn’t even know how many Soviet troops were stationed on their own soil (still around 350,000 in the Eighties). They relied on guesswork based on water use in Soviet military installations to gain a vague picture. This peculiar mixture of being tied to Moscow without enjoying its confidence defined the East German experience for 41 years.

Military affiliation is just one facet of the worlds that collided in 1990. East Germans had learned Russian at school, they read Russian literature, watched Russian films, and had Russian partner schools and organisations. Meanwhile, West Germans learnt English and watched Hollywood movies.

Unsurprisingly, these differences still echo today. According to one survey carried out last month, only a quarter of Germans living in the former East think of the US as a “reliable ally”, as opposed to the majority of West Germans. Fewer easterners also deem Russia a threat to peace, (though the figure is still high at 73%). Meanwhile, East German politicians such as Michael Kretschmer, the Minister President of Saxony, or Sahra Wagenknecht, a vocal member of the far-Left party Die Linke, have been among the most ardent supporters of a swift peace in Ukraine — even if this means severe concessions towards the Russian aggressor.

On Russia and Ukraine, many Germans in the eastern states keenly feel the economic legacy of division. It is here that oil and gas connections, such as Druzhba, one of the world’s longest oil pipelines, once delivered Russian energy. Many German locals were involved in its construction in the Sixties. Today, however, sanctions and escalating tensions have seen the pipes dry up, leaving entire regions uncertain about their economic future.

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Yet all these ongoing rifts have largely been ignored. East Germans are a minority: there are more than five times as many West Germans. In terms of actual representation, the picture is even more slanted. In his new book, Dirk Oschmann, an academic who was born in the GDR, points out that only 1.7% of the senior positions in media, research, the justice system and the civil service are currently occupied by East Germans. It has been a bestseller for weeks in Germany, obviously voicing concerns that many feel have been ignored for too long.

Will King Charles, caught up in the circus of his first foreign trip as monarch, also ignore them? It seems unlikely, given his special affinity with Germany. He has visited the country more than 40 times since his first trip at the age of 13, and has dazzled audiences with speeches delivered in fluent German. He will also make a point of visiting places in the former East, such as the rural village of Brodowin, 50 miles north-east of Berlin. The respect he will show small East German businesses — such as by visiting an Ökodorf, an eco-farm, where he will make his own cheese — makes the important point that a state visit to Germany should include its eastern regions. At a time when almost 60% of East Germans say they feel second-class citizens in their own country, Berlin’s political class would do well to take note.

For while Germany rethinks its position in the world and in Europe following Ukraine, it needs to rethink its society too. When the East German state disappeared in 1990, the life experiences of its former citizens did not. To airbrush 41 years of political, social and economic history out of the national story as a failed experiment, an anomaly or the side show to the continuity narrative is as ahistorical as it is unhelpful. Reunification was a step towards bringing the nation back together, not the happy ending of that path. A Zeitenwende in German foreign policy might be underway, but a domestic watershed is needed too.

Having grown up in a country which has already undergone the same painful process, I can say that the transition to capitalism will not come pain or risk-free. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there was immense pressure to transition the state-owned East German economy to a capitalist model and to do it quickly. But the price was extremely heavy, and many former GDR citizens paid with their jobs, their livelihoods and sense of identity; what should have been entirely joyous moments of liberation and reunification left a sour taste that for many lingers still.

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Similar to the peaceful revolution that occurred in my homeland before the Communist regime fell, Cuba too has seen widespread protests. The latest wave began on 11 July in San Antonio de los Baños, south-west of Havana, and have since spread across dozens of cities. Cuban exile communities and their campaign groups have claimed that these gatherings were anti-communist in nature and called for an overthrow of the regime, but this only shows one side of a complex picture.

There can be no doubt that Cubans are angry and frustrated. Economically, their country is suffering from an existential crisis to which there is no obvious solution, exacerbated by the pandemic which caused its tourism industry to grind to a near-halt. Around 75% fewer international arrivals were registered last year, and recovery in 2021 has been sluggish.

Unlike other countries, Cuba has not been able to borrow money or receive any form of international aid to deal with the pandemic. Pressure from successive US governments has ensured that the island is still excluded from organisations such as the IMF, which has agreed to help the neighbouring Dominican Republic with an aid package of US$650 Million. Unaided and isolated, the Cuban authorities watched on helplessly as the national economy contracted by a painful 11% last year.

People who work in the private sector were particularly affected by the Covid-induced downturn. Since reforms in 2011 allowed an expansion of the non-state economy, around one million Cubans left state employment, some 15% of the workforce. As self-employed workers in jobs that were often tied to the tourism industry, they suffered a disproportionate hit and fell through the cracks of government support systems, a problem witnessed in many other countries too. The salaries of those employed in the majority state-owned sectors were also reduced but they are safe and include at least rudimentary health and social care packages.

It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the July protests were driven and fuelled by those Cubans who had moved into the private sector and would like to see it expand, and in particular open up to the US (including American tourists).

But this protest movement is not necessarily representative of the Cuban population as a whole. There were also widespread counter-demonstrations, which ranged from outright pro-government marches to processions celebrating the old symbols of the Cuban revolution, including images of Che Guevara or the flag of Fidel Castro’s “26th of July Movement”.

It is part of a struggle for the soul of the nation that has been ongoing for decades, a question that can be as important as mere economic questions. Castro and his revolutionaries received widespread popular support during and after the revolution of the 1950s largely because they successfully portrayed their actions as a struggle for independence, not socialism. Cuba Libre is more than a drink to the nation – the famous toast to national independence predates the Castros and socialism by over 50 years and it will likely outlast them too.

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However, even if Fidel Castro painted an image of the revolution as a struggle for independence, he could not fulfil this ambition once he was in power. A US trade embargo was introduced in 1960 and continues to this day, making it the longest lasting in modern history. The embargo bans all American enterprises and even foreign ones active in the US from trading with Cuba, isolating the island from commercial interaction with the West. While the aim may have been to isolate Cuba, it drove the state into the arms of communist allies, particularly the Soviet Union, which in turn demanded political loyalty.

The island nation cannot produce everything it needs by itself and so became reliant on communist support for anything from paper to bicycles — and when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba suddenly found itself entirely cut off. Its exports dropped by 61% and imports fell by 72% — staggering figures given that this included basic supplies such as medicines and food. The Cuban economy lost around $28.6 billion between 1989 and 1992, marking the beginning of the so-called “Special Period”, a term for the crisis used by the government to suggest transience.

When I travelled to the island in 2005, toilet paper was still rationed to three sheets at a time in public places. The family I stayed with in Havana had none at all, and resorted to installing a bidet instead. There were long queues in front of shops whenever deliveries of staple goods such as eggs or cooking oil arrived. The situation is so bad that, year on year, the UN passes a resolution to stop the blockade due to its humanitarian consequences. Year on year it is vetoed by the US.

Yet while life is undoubtedly dire, it does not mean that all Cubans want an unbridled opening to the West, as the exiles would have it. On my own travels, I was amazed to find the streets deserted when Fidel Castro broadcast a speech. When I tried to ask my own hosts why they were glued to the TV for hours when the aging revolutionary made an appearance, I was unceremoniously shushed. They later explained that it was a family tradition. I must have raised a questioning eyebrow, which was met with a shrug and the explanation that they “had always done it”.

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I visited Cuba in the first place because I was born in a socialist country myself, and having seen its transition to capitalism in a haphazard and abrupt manner, which brought as much unemployment and economic devastation as it brought freedom and private enterprise, I was curious to see a state that was taking its time. Back then, some parts of the economy were being privatised; now constitutional reforms are taking speed under the first non-Castro head of state, Miguel Díaz-Canel.

If the East German model of selling a nationalised economy into the private sector is anything to go by, Cubans ought to be cautious. The GDR, too, began the process in a structured manner by setting up an agency, the Treuhandanstalt, whose task it was to transition around 8,500 state-owned companies into the private sector. Hopelessly out of its depth with the mission to de-nationalise the economy, the Treuhand let the step-by-step privatisation deteriorate into a bargain-basement sell-out, which cost 2.5 million employees their jobs — over half of the workforce of the companies it was responsible for.

The result was that in Germany the former East was already off to a very bad start in 1990. Having lost not only their living, but also part of their identity and sense of self-worth, millions of former GDR citizens did not look forward to reunification, democratisation and freedom but became resentful and disaffected. To this day, East Germans are far more likely to vote for the fringe parties of Alternative fur Deutschland on the Right and Die Linke on the Left than their West German counterparts.

More damning still, this trend towards political extremism is most prominent among younger voters who were only born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the former East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, one in five young people voted for the AfD in local elections earlier in the year, the highest rate of all age groups. This is not a problem of political culture but has deep roots in the botched process of transitioning the East German economy.

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For Cuba, this process is far more risky. The East German economy had not only been the most stable among the Eastern Bloc nations but could also bank on the financial support of the powerful West German economy, which it was joining. As an isolated island nation with a feeble economy, Cuba has not got such options. If it wants financial aid, it will have to pay for it with its independence and adapt fully to the American system.

I doubt that Cuba’s soul-searching can go on for much longer. It is unlikely that the US embargo will be lifted for anything less than a complete opening up of the island’s economy to capitalism. The Cuban government will come under increasing external pressure to speed up economic reforms, as well as from a disgruntled population who long to have goods on shelves.

Miguel Díaz-Canel is the first Cuban leader to have been born after the revolution, and he is not ideologically wed to its ideals in the way that the Castro brothers were. Whether under him or one of his successors, the temptations and pressure to break the country’s isolation and wed it to the Western economy will prevail in the end. But Cuban leaders would do well to look to the missed chances and often disastrous outcomes in East Germany, Russia and elsewhere — because their country may be next.

But Germans need not be nervous. This is a chance for Europe’s largest democracy to finally grow out of the nervous political infancy of its post-war decades and embrace a more confident future.

Fortunately, when Germans go to the polls in September, “more of the same” will not on the ballot paper. Even Armin Laschet, the newly elected leader of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) who is touted as a continuity candidate, has insisted that if his party gets re-elected, it will not stand for the “sixteen years of the past”. But there is a palpable nervousness in the air. Merkel is currently facing a barrage of difficulties which she can afford to kick into the long grass until her departure.

One such issue is the increasing scepticism among Germans about their country’s role within the EU. Like Helmut Kohl before her, Merkel has continued a policy of unconditional support for the European project. Indeed, it is rather fitting that the current president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will by far have been her longest-serving cabinet minister, with roles that spanned from 2005 to 2019.

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However, a Spiegel survey published last week laid bare that her adoration for the EU is not universally shared: nearly two-thirds of Germans said that their opinion of the bloc had worsened due to its botched vaccine procurement plans. Half of all participants also said their view of von der Leyen had become “decidedly worse”. Merkel, on the other hand, defended the EU’s decisions as “fundamentally right”.

But while Merkel’s unchallenged position in Germany has allowed her to ignore the public mood, her successor will not have this luxury. For it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is an appetite for change, even among conservative voters who are likely to continue to support the chancellor’s party.

That is partly why Markus Söder, the leader of the CDU’s sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) who has publicly criticised the EU’s sluggish vaccine procurement, is already emerging as the most popular candidate to succeed her. A recent survey showed that 55% of Germans thought he was the best candidate for the CDU/CSU to put forward in the elections; only 27% favoured Laschet.

This election goes right to the heart of Germany and Europe’s relationship — and it is triggering a familiar type of political angst, one with deep roots in Germany’s unique historical past. For too long Germans have voted with a risk aversion that has given their chancellors an unhealthy sense of authority and invincibility. It speaks volumes that, at the end of four terms in power, Angela Merkel is still leading the polls as the most popular German politician. In fact, had she not stepped down herself, there is every chance that she would have been re-elected once again in September.

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But while this may seem a sign of enviable consensus — so rare a commodity in an increasingly partisan Western world — the reality is far more complicated and disconcerting. Indeed, beneath the surface of outward stability stews an increasing sense of anger and disenfranchisement, which Merkel’s unchallenged position has allowed her to ignore.

The last federal elections of 2017 laid bare how thin the veneer of political consensus really is. The conservative Union of CDU/CSU came out with a loss of 8.6% while the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) gained almost the same amount. Having ruled out working with the latter, Merkel once again turned to a grand coalition with the social democrats (SPD), who had also made staggering losses.

But the 12.6% of the electorate who voted for the AfD are not the only Germans frustrated at the country’s political stagnation. For years, small-c conservatives in Germany have looked on with concern as Merkel pulled their political home, the CDU, further and further towards the centre — most notably with her decision to allow 1.1 million refugees into the country in 2015.

In her typically stoic style, Merkel tried to plaster over the deepening cracks within her party with her slogan, “Wir schaffen das!” — “we can do this!”. There was no need to have a national debate; it was as if her course for the country was an act of God.

This self-image of German chancellors as the ultimate moral and political authority is, of course, an unhealthy and increasingly dangerous relic of the past. Among Western democracies, Germany stands out in the way that its traumatic history has caused its people to value stability over charisma, continuity over change, dependability over showmanship.

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Nobody embodies this more than Merkel, whose image as the austere and pragmatic mother of the nation has allowed her to rule without needing to fear the political consequences in a way that a British Prime minister would. A survey last year showed that 71% of CDU/CSU voters were against Merkel’s pro-refugee policies, yet her approval ratings remain paradoxically high.

Why are these German voters so generous? I suspect the answer lies in the fact that, from the beginning, West German democracy constantly felt under threat from extremism. In fact, in the first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, voters found an ideal candidate for the challenges the country faced. Unashamedly authoritarian, Der Alte (the old man), as he was affectionately known, led his CDU — under the slogan “No Experiments” — to victory in the 1957 election with the only absolute majority ever achieved in German parliamentary history.

But while a single-minded and reliable leader was arguably a necessary infringement on democracy in the wake of two world wars and the traumatic experience of fascism, Adenauer’s tenure also established an unhealthy detachment of the chancellor from his people. Chancellors can no longer afford to sit on a political pedestal, claiming moral exclusivity and dressing this up as steady leadership.

Yes, at the moment, a large part of the electorate is still willing to give an incumbent chancellor the benefit of the doubt. But this better-the-devil-you-know approach can only go so far. Forgotten and left-behind, increasing proportions of the population will turn to radical alternatives — the 2017 elections were proof that this process is well underway.

Whoever inherits the baton of German chancellorship this autumn needs to take this chance of a new beginning and build a more democratic, more transparent and more approachable office which works with the other elements in the constitution rather than above them. Chancellor democracy had its time and its place, but in 2021 it is an anachronistic relic of a bygone age — and anyone who seeks to hold onto it might pay a dear political price. It is time for Germany’s democracy to trust in itself without a father (or indeed a “Mutti”) figure to cling on to, for better or worse. It is time for German democracy to grow up.