State elections will be held there on 6 September, and the AfD is set for a sweeping victory. The party is currently polling at 43%, on track to secure an absolute majority of seats — though that outcome largely hinges on whether the parties currently polling close to the 5% threshold, primarily the Greens, make it in or not. A handful of votes could tip the outcome in the opposite direction, allowing the establishment parties to keep the AfD out of power once again, as they did in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg after 2024 — if not through a full everyone-minus-the-AfD coalition, which might prove arithmetically difficult, then through a minority government.

In short, the result sits on a knife edge; little wonder that the German political establishment is in a state of panic. For the AfD to win an absolute majority would be a historic triumph and mark the definitive collapse of the “firewall” erected around the party in recent years. Not only would it be the first time the party takes power in a state, but it wouldn’t have to share that power with anyone else — a feat hitherto achieved only by the two main establishment parties, the CDU/CSU and the SPD. Meanwhile, the AfD continues to rise practically everywhere — including in Berlin, where it has doubled its support (in the polls) since 2023 and now runs level with the CDU, behind the frontrunner, the Left-progressive Linke. Berlin votes a fortnight later, as does the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the AfD leads the polling. This makes Saxony-Anhalt all the more important, since a victory there could propel the party forward in the other two contests as well.

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Crucially, because of the way Germany’s federal structure is set up, if the AfD were to take control of a state it would inevitably have to be reckoned with at the national level too — precisely what the anti-AfD firewall was designed to prevent at all costs. As state premier, one of the first responsibilities of the AfD’s candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, would be to assume the annually rotating chairmanship of the regular meetings of Germany’s 16 state premiers. The position typically entails a visit to Berlin and a joint press appearance with the chancellor.

To get an idea of the panic gripping the German political establishment, and especially its metropolitan, social-liberal wing, one need look no further than its house journal, the magazine Der Spiegel, which recently featured on its cover a mugshot-like photograph of Siegmund — a former perfume trader — with the caption “Germany’s most dangerous man”. It’s such an outlandishly exaggerated claim that the cover drew criticism even from mainstream corners. Ulf Poschardt, the former editor-in-chief of Die Welt, pointed out that such brazen and caricatural ad hominem attacks simply play into the AfD’s narrative: that they are fighting an out-of-touch political-media elite that views everyone outside their narrow political-ideological spectrum as a “threat to democracy” — including the party that is polling first across the country, well ahead of Chancellor Merz’s CDU/CSU.

Indeed, it is precisely because the establishment has lost control of the narrative — and Germany is hardly an exception in this regard — that, as Politico recently reported, it is now studying an arsenal of extraordinary measures designed, in effect, to prevent a possible AfD state government from exercising its mandate. The first scenario involves excluding Saxony-Anhalt’s representatives from meetings on sensitive matters. In addition to the gathering of state premiers that Siegmund would be expected to chair for a year, Germany’s states regularly coordinate through a network of ministerial “conferences”. Among the most important is the conference of interior ministers, where some of the country’s most pressing security and intelligence matters are discussed. Thus, as several ministers confirmed to Politico, one possibility would be to keep holding the regular meetings of the interior ministers, but also organize separate gatherings for particularly sensitive issues from which the representative from Saxony-Anhalt would be excluded. According to an emeritus professor of constitutional law, the idea is “perfectly conceivable”, though he conceded that it might be challenged by the federal courts.

A second scenario would involve raising a “wall” within shared information systems. The argument is that the AfD, given its alleged “closeness” to Russia, cannot be trusted with sensitive dossiers. The notion that the AfD would act as a pipeline of classified information to Moscow is rather ludicrous — if only because that would amount to political suicide. “We talk to everyone, whether West or East,” said a spokesperson for the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to hand over files. Anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. If and when we get access to such information, we understand our responsibility as a party of government.” Nonetheless, a Social Democrat politician told the magazine that the AfD should be kept away from all intelligence on Right-wing extremism and espionage. In other words, an elected government would be deliberately kept in the dark about dossiers crucial to national security, rendering it effectively incapable of governing. Once again, it is claimed that this would be “legally possible”.

A third scenario, the most striking so far, would involve financially starving the AfD-led state. Saxony-Anhalt receives almost €3 billion a year from federal fiscal equalization, equal to a fifth of its budget. The threat is to reduce or suspend those funds in order to “make life harder” for a potential AfD government, “or to coerce the party to behave in ways the political establishment finds acceptable”. The finance minister of Baden-Württemberg points out that the system is anchored in the constitution, as though a single constitutional provision could disguise the political motive behind financially strangling a rebellious region.

A final scenario being contemplated is the so-called “nuclear option”: the Bundeszwang, or federal coercion. Under Article 37 of Germany’s Basic Law, the federal government, with the consent of the Bundesrat, the chamber representing the states, may take “necessary measures” to compel a state to fulfill its legal obligations. In other words, Berlin could force a state government to obey federal law, a measure that has never been applied in the history of the Federal Republic, not once since 1949.

The picture that emerges is unmistakable: the same German establishment that is constantly lecturing other countries about democracy and the rule of law is demonstrating that democracy is tolerated only so long as it produces results deemed acceptable. When democratic processes produce an unwelcome government, or risk doing so, ways are sought to circumvent it, to hollow it out or to render it harmless — all in the name of “defending democracy”, of course.

Indeed, it has become increasingly common in recent years in Germany for mainstream parties and media outlets to use the term “Unsere Demokratie” — our democracy. The meaning is clear: only those who hold the “right” positions sit within the perimeter of democracy; those outside it are not opponents within the system but threats to it. In this way, ordinary political disagreement about migration, energy, EU policy or the war in Ukraine can be reclassified as an attack on the constitutional order itself, and the ordinary remedies — debates, elections — can give way to exceptional ones.

In this regard, the German establishment has a formidable ally: the constitution itself. Germany’s postwar order is built on the doctrine of “militant democracy”: the idea, drawn directly from Weimar’s collapse, that a democracy may legitimately refuse to tolerate those who would use democratic means to abolish it. There is a basic logic to the concept, but it is clearly now being stretched to the extreme. One may agree or not with the party’s most radical policy stance, that on remigration — which the AfD itself defines as lawful measures to return foreigners already under removal orders — but that is a policy position, not a program for abolishing democracy or the constitutional order. Even critics of the party have said as much: writing on Verfassungsblog, one German constitutional scholar noted that the case against the AfD largely rests on its portrayal of German democracy as dysfunctional, and that fundamental criticism of the system is the very thing that distinguishes democracy from dictatorship. Yet the doctrine of militant democracy is no longer merely being invoked against the AfD; it is being used to justify waging war on the party by all means necessary, including extra-legal ones.

In May 2025, the domestic intelligence service formally classified the AfD — by then already the country’s largest opposition party, polling first or second nationally — as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization, on the strength of a 1,100-page report the public was not permitted to see, announced by the outgoing interior minister days before leaving office. The designation — which would have unlocked expanded surveillance powers and fueled mounting calls for a formal ban procedure — did not survive judicial scrutiny: in February 2026 the Cologne Administrative Court barred the agency from applying or publicizing it, finding its conditions unmet.

But the episode’s lesson cuts deeper than its outcome: it took a court to halt the state security apparatus’s attempt to brand the principal opposition party an enemy of the constitution. Nor did the judicial setback end the campaign: by summer 2026, a 1,500-page NGO legal opinion had concluded a ban application would probably succeed, and more than 1,000 lawyers, judges and prosecutors had signed an open letter urging ban proceedings. That the prohibition of the largest opposition party in Germany could be seriously entertained, to the routine applause of Brussels-aligned commentary, tells its own story.

The current geopolitical tensions provide another tool in the hands of the political establishment, in Germany and elsewhere: so long as Russia can be framed as an invisible but ever-present threat, anyone who opposes the status quo can easily be delegitimized as a “Kremlin-aligned internal enemy” — an outright national security threat. It has now become commonplace across Europe to blame virtually every unwelcome electoral outcome — including the recent Icelandic EU referendum — on Russian interference, even in the absence of any evidence. Indeed, a number of journalists and analysts, several of them German, have already been sanctioned for “spreading pro-Russian propaganda”.

No wonder the German establishment seems so intent on escalating tension with Russia. This doesn’t just serve EU-Nato geopolitical interests in Ukraine — where Germany is now leading the charge — but also serves the establishment’s domestic aim of cracking down on the opposition. As mentioned already, the AfD is regularly accused of being a tool of Russian interests, though this largely rests on the party’s programmatic positions: opposition to sanctions, to arms for Ukraine, calls to reopen Nord Stream, and dialog with Moscow — all things that one might argue would serve first and foremost in Germany’s interests. In this light, the German government’s claims that Russia is behind the failed drone attack at Leipzig/Halle airport — for which it has so far failed to provide any concrete evidence — might also be seen as aimed at putting even more pressure on the AfD. The timing of the announcement is noteworthy: four weeks after the alleged attack, but only a few days away from the election in Saxony-Anhalt. Leipzig/Halle airport, incidentally, sits directly on the Saxony-Saxony-Anhalt border, and Halle is Saxony-Anhalt’s largest city.

Finally, the German establishment can count on another formidable ally: Brussels itself. In recent years, the EU has gradually developed a playbook of electoral influence: a dense ecosystem of regulatory, financial, legal and informational instruments capable of shaping electoral conditions and outcomes, which have now been institutionalized through tools like the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Democracy Shield, aimed at the permanent monitoring of electoral processes across all member states — continuous supranational oversight of national elections, without any basis in the Treaties. These are tools that can be — and are — regularly deployed in support of establishment-aligned parties, be they incumbent or in opposition. Though these tools are less useful in the case of state elections, one can be sure that they will be amply deployed in next year’s federal election.

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Ultimately, one thing is clear: Germany’s elites are scrambling to shore up their power in the face of collapsing legitimacy and popular consensus. Support for Chancellor Friedrich Merz has plummeted to historic lows, with his personal approval rating now down to 14% — the worst figure ever recorded for any sitting chancellor. This is hardly surprising: his cabinet is presiding over the deepest industrial contraction in the Federal Republic’s history, one that falls hardest on states like Saxony-Anhalt, whose chemical and automotive employers are being squeezed by high energy prices. At the same time, Merz’s cabinet is rolling back the welfare state (such as scrapping early retirement at 63 for long-serving workers) and promoting a highly dangerous — and highly unpopular, especially in eastern Germany — escalation towards Russia, all while suppressing free speech through surveillance, intimidation and even criminal prosecution. This is ultimately what is fueling support for the AfD: not a renewed taste for “fascism”, but deep-seated hostility towards the establishment. This is particularly true in eastern Germany, or the former GDR, where a long-standing east-west economic and cultural divide has consolidated into a sharp political polarization, with the AfD capitalizing on growing “anti-western” sentiment — “western” here meaning the former West Germany as much as the West at large.

What is at stake in Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, then, is not really the government of a small eastern state of two million people. It is whether the German establishment still believes it can beat its opponents at the ballot box or whether it has quietly concluded that it cannot, and must therefore win by other means. Every measure now being war-gamed in Berlin is an admission of that second possibility. And each of them, if deployed, would hand the AfD precisely the argument it has been making for a decade: that Germany is governed by a caste which regards the electorate as a problem to be managed, and which is prepared to trample on the most elementary principle of “their” much-vaunted liberal democracy — that whoever wins an election must be able to govern — rather than lose control. The firewall may be crumbling, but the establishment appears intent on laying the foundations for something far more impregnable.

The real question, however, is how they failed to see this coming. The uncritical acceptance of Trump by Europe’s populist Right reveals a poor understanding of US foreign policy, and a near-total absence of geopolitical vision. Regardless of who sits in the White House, the logic behind America’s foreign policy remains the same: advancing US economic and geopolitical interests at the expense of everyone else.

Since the early Nineties, every single American president has ended up bombing some faraway country, despite all of them — including George W. Bush! — campaigning against foreign entanglements. Trump 2.0 is merely the latest, and most brazen, iteration of this pattern. Having vowed to “stop all wars” as recently as in his inauguration speech, he has since pursued the most aggressive and militarist foreign policy since Bush Jr., culminating in the attack on Iran — something none of his predecessors had dared to do, despite four decades of Israeli pressure to that end, precisely because they understood the catastrophic consequences. For Europe’s self-described patriots, America’s addiction to military intervention — much of it, over the past quarter century, on or near Europe’s doorstep — should have prompted some caution. That would have been far safer than automatically aligning with “America First” or taking Trump’s promise of peace at face value.

This imperial logic applies to its allies just as much as to its adversaries. Since the Second World War, Washington has consistently treated Europe as a key extension of its global empire, a region to be controlled politically, economically and militarily, and kept firmly aligned with US interests. Nato has been central to this project. As summarised by its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, its function was that of “keeping the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. In other words, the original purpose of the Alliance was not to defend Europe, but to prevent the emergence of an autonomous bloc, ensure its strategic subordination to the United States and foreclose rapprochement with Russia.

Earlier European sovereigntists understood this. Charles de Gaulle deeply resented what he saw as American domination of Western Europe under the guise of the Atlantic alliance, arguing that it reduced European nations to the status of protectorates rather than genuine sovereign states. In 1966 he acted on this conviction, withdrawing France from Nato’s military structure and expelling US forces from French soil.

In the six decades since, US policy towards Europe has remained essentially unchanged. In the Eighties, when European nations, led by France and West Germany, sought to pursue a détente with the Soviet Union, Washington pushed back, insisting that European security policy be subordinated to American Cold War strategy. And even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the US made clear that that European security would remain anchored to American leadership through Nato.

Far from providing security to the continent, the Alliance’s eastward expansion was a key factor in triggering the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which the US then exploited not only to “bleed” Russia — but also to drive a wedge between Europe and Russia, and force the EU to decouple from Russian gas and turn to American gas instead, both of which were longstanding US strategic imperatives. This was made possible by a European political class in submission to the transatlantic dogma. Just look at their silence in the face of the Nord Stream bombing, an act of sabotage carried out with at least US foreknowledge, if not direct US involvement.

European populists have long attributed this subservience to ideology — an unholy alliance between liberal-globalists on both sides of the Atlantic. But Trump himself explodes this thesis. Despite being as ideologically remote from Europe’s liberal-transatlanticist class as it is possible to imagine, he has extracted from them essentially the same compliance: on trade, defense, Nato spending and even Greenland. The master-servant relationship, it turns out, has nothing to do with ideology; it is structural. One might expect this from a “globalist” political establishment quite clearly beholden to foreign and vested interests. Yet the same transatlantic streak seems to run through virtually all European Right-populist parties, which means the continent’s sovereigntists are either comfortable with Europe’s subordination to Washington or genuinely blind to its structural nature, believing that Trump would somehow be different.

In fact, things have only got worse. Since returning to the White House, Trump has launched an aggressive trade war against Europe, threatened to annex part of its territory, weaponized the continent’s dependence on American gas to extract political concessions and demanded Europeans spend hundreds of billions on US weapons. Europe’s globalist establishment has dutifully complied with all of it. But Europe’s sovereigntist parties have not put up much of a fight either. Whatever the short-term political calculations, the optics of self-described European patriots saying little while their transatlantic ally economically waterboards the continent are not good.

The war on Iran may prove to be the turning point. Europe is already feeling the economic ripples: oil and gas prices have surged dramatically, heaping further hardship on households and businesses already battered by the switch from Russian to American energy. Indeed, according to the EU Commission President, the war has already cost European taxpayers an additional €3 billion in fossil fuels imports. A prolonged conflict — or even a stabilization of prices at current levels — would be economically devastating for the continent. And if Europe loses access to Qatari LNG, its dependence on American gas will become absolute.

That alone would be alarming if it were simply an unintended consequence of war. What if rising energy prices were, however, factored in from the outset? As the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, and Europe’s principal energy supplier, the United States stands to gain substantially from the price surge. This raises the possible scenario: if the proxy war in Ukraine was designed to decouple Europe from Russian gas, the Iran war may be aimed at decoupling it from Mediterranean resources altogether. As noted earlier, US imperial strategy spans decades and administrations, and the ideological color of the president is largely irrelevant to its execution.

Nor does this account for the war’s other potential consequences: mass refugee flows towards Europe, as previous US Middle Eastern wars have generated, and growing pressure on European governments to become more directly involved militarily. Europe now faces two devastating wars on its doorsteps — one to the east, stoked by Washington, and one to the south, actively waged by it. The first pushed Europe into economic and geopolitical vassalage, but the second may be the shock that finally breaks it, plunging it into economic and social collapse.

In light of all this, it’s little wonder that rifts are starting to emerge between MAGA and the European populist camp, and most visibly in Germany, the country most economically affected by these wars.

The AfD is probably the party that has received the most explicit US backing, including Elon Musk’s notorious declaration that “only the AfD can save Germany”. But the Trump administration’s increasingly reckless and aggressive foreign policy is now causing serious strains within the party.

The AfD has always been broadly split into two camps. One — stronger in western Germany, associated with party leader Alice Weidel and foreign policy spokesman Markus Frohnmaier — is pro-MAGA, transatlantic, pro-Israel and neoliberally oriented. The other — dominant in the east, represented by party co-chairman Tino Chrupalla and Thuringian leader Björn Höcke — is more openly nationalist and Eurocentric, more sympathetic to Moscow, hostile to US interventionism, and critical of Germany’s unconditional support for Israel.

Höcke has been characteristically blunt. In 2022, he stated: “It was and is US strategy, as a foreign power on our continent, to drive wedges between peoples and nations that could actually work very well together.” He argues that Germany must cease to be a “vassal state” of the United States, and that Washington, as a non-European power, “should withdraw from Europe”, since “the natural partner for our way of working and living would be Russia”.

When Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, the divide became impossible to paper over. Chrupalla wrote on X: “A fuse has been set on the powder keg of the Middle East.” More recently he said: “Donald Trump started as a president of peace. In the end, Donald Trump will end as a president of war.” Meanwhile, within the other wing, Frohnmaier declared that Israel had “every right” to ensure that “its existence is not threatened”.

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The party leadership has tried to manage these tensions, largely aligning with Trump on most issues. But the outbreak of the war in Iran has caused these pressures to bubble to the fore. In a notable break with other European Right-populist parties, most of which either endorsed or stayed silent about the US-Israeli strikes, the AfD issued an official statement, claiming that “the renewed destabilization of the Middle East is not in the German interest and must be brought to an end”. It is a modest step, but a telling one. And as the war grinds on and its costs for Germany mount, the Eurocentric wing of the party is likely to grow stronger.

Similar fault lines will inevitably open in other Right-populist parties across the continent and beyond — and indeed they already are. A vivid example comes from the UK, where Nigel Farage’s Reform has found itself tied in knots over the Iran war. Within the space of days, Farage criticized Starmer for not backing the US operation more forcefully, while simultaneously attacking the rising fuel prices that the same war has caused. Meanwhile, Reform’s own ranks were split: deputy leader Richard Tice called for full UK support for the US offensive, while the party’s new Treasury spokesperson Robert Jenrick, who recently defected from the Conservatives, told the BBC: “If you’re asking me the question, do I think that it is in the interests of the British people… for us to be deploying British airmen in bombing raids over Iran right now, when our allies have not asked us to do that, then, no, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

Labour wasted no time pointing out these contradictions, accusing Reform of “saying they would bomb Iran” one week and “backtracking as petrol prices rise” the next. It illustrates the impossible position in which Trump’s war has placed his European populist allies: they cannot support it without owning its economic consequences, and they cannot oppose it without betraying their transatlantic loyalties. But more crucially, it points to the total lack of geopolitical vision among most Right-populist parties.

They better get their act together fast. Any national-populist party that wants to seriously challenge the European liberal-globalist status quo — and wishes to retain credibility with its voters — can’t limit itself to anti-immigration, anti-“woke” and anti-establishment domestic politics. It needs to articulate a coherent foreign-policy framework in line with Europe’s core economic and geopolitical interests. As de Gaulle understood 60 years ago, this necessarily means breaking with Washington and its forever wars.

As such problems accumulated, so too did discontent with public policy and democratic politics. As a result, there has been a growing fragmentation of the postwar political party system, a decline of the established parties on both the center-right and the center-left, along with a Right-wing “populist” challenge to the political system inherited from the postwar era, in the form of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

Relatively little attention has been paid, though, to whether and how declining trust in political institutions extends to local government, which has traditionally been less politicized, with local families and networks allegedly making for a less ideological, less confrontational, and more socially embedded politics of pragmatic consensus and cooperation. It is from this perspective, then, that the recent local elections in the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW) may be of more than just local interest.

With 18 million inhabitants, 14 million of whom are eligible to vote, NRW is by far the largest state of the Federal Republic. With elections held every five years, voters elect local parliaments for cities and counties as well as county administrators (Landrat) and mayors (Bürgermeister, Oberbürgermeister) for the cities. If no candidate for county administrator or mayor wins more than 50% of the vote, a French-style run-off is held.

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The NRW local elections of 14 and 28 September were the last major elections of the year in Germany, and have been intensively studied by election strategists. Looking at the first round, one finds a considerable increase in turnout, from 51.9% to 56.8%, as is always the case when new “populist” challengers mobilize both friends and foes. More surprising was a remarkable regional stability in both CDU and SPD support, which at 33.3% and 22.1% respectively, lost no more than 1.0 and 2.2 percentage points — both ending up far above their Bundestag results of February 2025 and a national poll (by Forschungsgruppe Wahlen) taken around election day (see Table). The Greens fared far worse than the SPD, falling 6.5 percentage points to 13.5%, despite being in a governing coalition with the CDU at the state level. Finally, there were two winners compared with 2020, the populist Left Linkspartei (5.6% up from 3.8%) and, above all, AfD, which almost tripled its result, from 5.1% to a striking 14.5%.

 Credit: Polling data: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen. Table: Wolfgang Streeck.

North Rhine-Westphalia, which contains the populous cities of Cologne, Dortmund, Essen and Düsseldorf, has always been socially and politically on the more conservative side. This may well explain why the CDU and SPD, Germany’s legacy parties, held up relatively well — regardless of the looming social spending reductions at federal level under the no-longer-so-grand CDU/SPD coalition. But it does make the result of the AfD all the more impressive — especially given the fact that, at the time of the election, there were hardly any AfD members yet in political offices in local communities, where local ties tend to be at least as important as party programs, and the fact the AfD suffers in NRW from fierce public infighting. Moreover, as the AfD had been unable or unwilling to put up candidates in around 40% of constituencies, the official election result, computed on the basis of all constituencies, inevitably underestimates the AfD’s real support, probably by some margin. Where the AfD did not join the race this may have been because potential candidates were afraid of the social ostracism they might suffer after identifying themselves as AfD members. Or the party deliberately avoided constituencies where it could not expect to win a minimum of votes. In any case, both factors may have changed by the next election, which may explain the satisfaction of the party leadership after the first round.

Nonetheless, in spite of its gains, the AfD still did not manage to capture even one of the key trophies: the 52 regional positions of Landrat and Oberbürgermeister. But it did manage to disrupt traditional voting patterns. As a result of the AfD advance, 36 of the 52 races, many more than last time, had to go to a runoff. The AfD, however, was among the final two in only three of those races. There all the other parties united against the AfD candidate, leaving them with no chance of winning. The Brandmauer (firewall) remained intact. This, too, may no longer be the case five years from now, with the AfD currently present in all major local assemblies and in a position to build alliances with other parties and groups of voters.

If the AfD was the winner, the Greens were the losers — with the exception of Münster, where the Green candidate for mayor narrowly defeated the CDU candidate in the run-off. Münster is a beautiful and prosperous university town that has long been governed, and governed well, by Christian Democrats of the Merkel sort, in an informal coalition with the Greens — an alliance between a well-to-do liberal-Catholic bourgeoisie and a large international student community. In Cologne, the fourth-largest city in Germany, with one million inhabitants, and easily the worst-governed, the Greens lost, after having been in a formal coalition with the CDU for a decade. In the run-off, their candidate, of Turkish descent, vice chair of the state legislature, lost to a Social Democrat supported by the CDU, whose candidate had come in only third in the first round. Generally, the party paid the price for the last federal government’s climate-change policy, which tried to legally force homeowners to install new heating systems that could easily cost more than their houses; buy overpriced electric cars; and make local communities accommodate an open-ended number of refugees and asylum seekers assigned to them by Länder governments.

Of the two traditional majority parties, the CDU and SPD, the former did better than the latter, notwithstanding the record low national support for the CDU and its Chancellor, Friedrich Merz (see the table above), after barely six months in office. This may be due in part to the Minister-President of NRW, Hendrik Wüst, also CDU, who is Merz’s main internal rival. Governing with the Greens, who do not have much to say under him, he radiates a friendly competence and calmness that Merz all too obviously lacks. More importantly, the CDU can cohabit more easily with the AfD than can the SPD, not necessarily for programmatic reasons but because its social milieu, lower-class and middle-class Catholic communities, common in the Rhineland and Westphalia, continues to be more resistant to AfD rhetoric than the SPD’s working-class milieu. This may explain why in Dortmund, an old industrial center that the SPD had governed for the past 80 years, the AfD inflicted such heavy losses on the SPD that the CDU candidate won in the runoff. That so few SPD voters turned to the Linkspartei instead of the AfD may be due to the traditionally low presence of the Linke in local politics, and to SPD voters having grown too old to be attracted by the radicals’ youthful image.

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All in all, the NRW election result will only add momentum to efforts to have the AfD banned by the Constitutional Court, by those in the SPD parliamentary party who consider Kampf gegen rechts (Battle against the Right) to be their party’s foremost political mission. Under the German constitution, a party can be found unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court if it is found be hostile to “the liberal-democratic basic order”. There is a long legal literature on what this could mean. In the past, two parties were declared unconstitutional: the Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands in 1952, a self-declared successor organization to the NSDAP, and the Kommunistische Partei (Communist Party) in 1956. Once found unconstitutional, a party is formally dissolved by the government, its funds confiscated, and attempts to continue it or establish a substitute organization become punishable under criminal law, with imprisonment from six months to five years, or from one to ten years “where the offender acts as a ringleader or instigator… Attempt shall also be punishable” (Section 84 of the Criminal Code).

There are good political reasons for the SPD to wish the AfD banned as soon as possible. After all, if the SPD’s decades-long decline continues, it may end up under 10% in the next federal election in early 2029, with the AfD the strongest party by far. As the Court will need time to investigate and deliberate, those in the SPD that want to see the AfD banned will have to ensure that the case is brought to the Court very soon, given that the Court may be hesitant to render a decision in the midst of the next federal election campaign, which will begin roughly in the spring of 2028. While two new judges, recently appointed on the SPD ticket, might support a ban in time, other judges under the influence of the CDU might not. Of course, if the Court were to decide only after the election, the fact alone that the AfD could then be found unconstitutional might damage its electoral prospects; expect the court proceedings to be professionally orchestrated by the government’s public relations machinery and dutifully dramatized by the public and private media. Potential AfD candidates might be scared away, and potential party members might not join for fear of being disqualified from jobs in the public sector after a party ban. Not least, Kampf gegen rechts before the Constitutional Court might also help hide the inability of the new federal government’s U-turn to fiscal profligacy to solve the local problems accumulated over decades of austerity, and it might divert attention from the cuts in social spending that will be necessary to finance the war in Ukraine.

Even if the Constitutional Court were to decide in favor of the established parties — and it could hardly decide otherwise in the midst of a highly politicized election campaign — the huge political and legal problems of banning and enforcing a party representing at least a third of the electorate would not disappear. While the Court can outlaw a political party, it cannot remove its members of parliament from their seats, at any level, federal, Länder, or local. In fact, if the AfD were banned, one third if not even more of all seats might be occupied by MPs elected on the AfD ticket after the next election, and all would be legally safe for the rest of the legislative term unless found to have engaged in something that government prosecutors considered “continuation” or “substitution” of the AfD. Accusations to this effect by political competitors could be expected en masse. (According to Section 46 of the Constitutional Court Act, details of how a party ban is to be executed are determined by the federal government by statutory order, without need for legislation.)

With a verdict after the next election, this would make a new, early election inevitable. In it, former AfD MPs could run as individual candidates or on lists of new Right-wing parties, unless excluded from running by the Länder electoral boards or, of course, in prison for continuation or substitution. There would be litigation galore. During an election campaign in the wake of a party ban, the Office of the Federal Prosecutor (Bundesanwaltschaft) would be busy day and night, observing suspicious candidates’ every move to determine whether they were in violation of the AfD ban, which would be a statutory offense. If they were found to be, they would have to be immediately disqualified from running and taken to the courts where they would face imprisonment. What a spectacle that would be.

Merz joined the party decades ago as a student. But today, he is effectively running on a “Make Germany Great Again” platform — a calculated attempt to win votes from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) by shifting his party to the Right on issues such as immigration. His cynicism here shouldn’t be underestimated: like Donald Trump in America, the millionaire Merz is a corporate king in conservative clothing.

Merz, let’s not forget, has long represented the interests of some of the world’s most powerful corporate and financial elites, most notably as a key representative of BlackRock in Germany between 2016 and 2020. Indeed, if Merz is elected, Germany will become the first country to be ruled by a former BlackRock official. But his ties to elite institutions go back much further: for over two decades, even before joining BlackRock, he embodied the revolving door between politics, business and finance.

After the 2002 federal election, Angela Merkel, the then-leader of the CDU, secured the chairmanship of the parliamentary group, while Merz was appointed as her deputy. Their relationship, however, was far from breezy, and Merz resigned just two years later, gradually withdrawing from politics until he left parliament in 2009. Yet he struck gold even before his departure. In 2004, he was hired as senior counsel by the international law and lobbying firm Mayer Brown, a heavyweight in the industry with an annual turnover of billions.

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Here, Merz discovered a far more fruitful relationship. As Werner Rügemer, author of BlackRock Germany, explains, at Mayer Brown Merz helped facilitate deals that promoted the interests of US capital in Germany, encouraging American investors to buy companies in the Federal Republic. The result was the sale and restructuring of thousands of German firms, which involved slashing jobs and freezing wages — an approach openly praised by Merz in his book Dare to Be More Capitalist. No doubt keen to embody his book’s thesis, during this period Merz also sat on the supervisory and administrative boards of several major corporations. And then BlackRock, arguably one of the most powerful companies to ever exist, came knocking. How could Merz say no? Pharmaceuticals, entertainment, media and, of course, war — there is virtually no sector that BlackRock won’t try and profit from.

The attraction of hiring Merz isn’t hard to glean. He facilitated meetings between BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and German politicians, helping to shape the policies that would benefit the company and its vast portfolio of investments. Under Merz’s influence, for instance, BlackRock became one of the largest non-German shareholders in many of the country’s most important companies — from Deutsche Bank to Volkswagen, BMW to Siemens. Yet his work wasn’t just about increasing profits for shareholders; it was also about shaping a political environment where corporate interests were aligned with government policy. By happy coincidence, it also created a climate in which someone like Merz could easily flit between big business and the Bundestag.

And so it came to pass in 2021, when Merz, armed with a bulging bank balance and two private jets, returned to politics as the leader of the CDU. Unsurprisingly, his political philosophy is firmly rooted in neoliberalism. He is a vocal proponent of privatization and deregulation. This is often couched in promises to reduce bureaucracy and attract foreign investors. But, in reality, this corporate doublespeak is designed to mask his emphasis on private-sector solutions to public problems. Merz is a strong supporter of the privatization of social welfare systems — to the benefit of companies such as BlackRock, a leader in private pension schemes. He has also traditionally been a staunch opponent of the minimum wage and of laws against unfair dismissal. Under his watch, German workers are very likely to see their wages continue to stagnate, or worse.

But then it’s hard to truly believe that ordinary Germans are Merz’s concern. Once a Davos Man, always a Davos Man — and his long history of representing powerful industries, including the chemical, financial and metallurgic sectors, suggests he will have other priorities. As chancellor, for instance, Merz could be called upon to regulate sectors with which he has long been associated — and which Mayer Brown, his former employer, still represents.

Recall, too, that under Merz’s leadership the CDU has received millions of euros in campaign donations from the very business interests he represented in the past — more than any other party. For both German and global corporate lobbyists, then, having Merz — a former colleague — as chancellor would be a dream come true. Or, as Rügemer puts it: “This is putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.”

Nor is this simply a matter of economics: Merz’s corporate connections shape his foreign policy as well. At heart, he’s a staunch Atlanticist, and a firm believer in America’s role as the guarantor of the global order. This ideological stance has led Merz to align with the US on issues such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, calling for the project’s cancellation long before the escalation of the Ukraine crisis. His hawkish position on foreign policy, particularly around his muscular support for Ukraine, further illustrated his alignment with America’s erstwhile geopolitical priorities — even at the expense of his own country’s core interests. After all, one of the main reasons for Germany’s contracting economy and ongoing industrialization is its decision to decouple from Russian gas under strong US pressure.

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Now, of course, Washington has a very different Ukraine policy. So will Merz be forced to abandon his Atlanticist beliefs? Not necessarily. Though his strong anti-Russian stance and militaristic tendencies seem at odds with Trump’s efforts to de-escalate the conflict, the reality is that their visions are more aligned than might initially seem to be the case. What, in the end, does Trump demand from Europe? Higher defense spending and a significant role in shouldering both the financial and strategic responsibilities for post-war security in Ukraine, something which could even involve the deployment of a European “peacekeeping” force.

These policies align neatly with Merz’s own vision. He has long advocated boosting Germany’s defense budget, a stance welcomed by his corporate allies in the German military-industrial complex. Now, in fact, he has joined the chorus calling for Europe to “take its security into its own hands”. Trump couldn’t ask for more. This strategic convergence, coupled with Merz’s conservative leanings, deep ties to the US financial and corporate sectors, and ingrained Atlanticism, all make him well-placed to become America’s European “vassal-in-chief” in our post-liberal era. This would place Germany back at the helm of a European Union that is both economically weaker and militarily emboldened — even as it remains strategically adrift.

This arrangement will be accompanied by much rhetoric about German and European “autonomy” — and possibly even heated public disagreements between Berlin and Washington. In reality, though, it would largely be a façade, for the new dynamic would merely serve European and American elites. The former would continue to stoke the fear of Russia as a means to justify more defense spending, directing funds away from social programs and legitimizing their continued crackdown on democracy. As for the latter, they would continue benefiting from Europe’s economic dependence on the US. All the while, people like Merz would be well placed to aid the further cannibalization of Europe at the hands of US capital.

Not that we should be surprised. Over the past two decades, Merz, just like Trump, has proved himself a businessman first and a politician second. Yet unlike Trump, who at least has some populist credentials, Merz’s victory will be celebrated in the boardrooms of BlackRock and other major corporations, which can expect to see their bank balances start ticking steadily upwards. As so often, though, ordinary voters should not expect this bounty to flow their way.

The shocking attack has reignited the debate about immigration only weeks before the German federal elections on February 23, and exposed the weakness of its political elites. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU opposition and front-runner in the race to be chancellor, will propose legislation this week to permanently end free movement across all of Germany’s borders. Radical enough in itself, such a change would signal the end of the political firewall, or Brandmauer, his party had erected against the far-Right Alternative for Germany. The firewall is a pledge among the mainstream parties that there would be no cooperation with the AfD under any circumstances — no coalition, no confidence and supply agreement, and no joint legislation at federal level.

Previously, the CDU had rejected an offer from AfD co-leader Alice Weidel to vote together for a change in asylum policy, committing to pull its support for any law that would only pass with the votes of the AfD. Now things have changed. As Merz put it: “I am no longer willing to refrain from putting the right thing to the vote in the German Bundestag just because the wrong people might agree to it.”

Merz then went even further, doubling down with another pledge. He said, echoing Donald Trump, that if elected chancellor, he would pass an executive order on his first day in office to reintroduce border controls. German chancellors, however, are not as powerful as US presidents. Proportional representation means they have to co-opt other parties into coalitions. And there is no way that his potential centrist partners would accept such an executive order — the coalition would fracture on day one. And so the CDU leader has, effectively, erected a new firewall — this time against the other parties. There are only two scenarios whereby he could enact what he promises: either, he wins an absolute majority, which not a single German poll predicts. Or, he cooperates with the AfD.

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This seemingly local debate about immigration has important ramifications for the EU project as a whole. For if Merz were to reintroduce border controls, this would permanently end the EU’s Schengen passport-free travel system — one of the significant achievements of integration, along with the euro and the single market. If Germany were to resurrect passport controls to keep out refugees, all its immediate neighbors, and their neighbors, would have to do the same, because nobody wants to be stranded with its rejected refugees. Schengen — which includes 29 European countries — would collapse within hours. To solve the problem of illegal immigrants would require a fully functioning European immigration policy. There is no chance of that happening either. And so, for the EU, this would be worse than Brexit; it would mark the first step towards the disintegration of the entire EU project.

Friedrich Merz is an impulsive politician with lots of good ideas. He was enjoying a secure lead in the polls, strong on national security and on the economy. He is the only senior German politician who understands at a deep level that his country’s economic model is broken. A critic of Germany’s digital protectionism, he has a better grasp of 21st-century technologies than any of his peers. But nobody is talking about his ideas for economic transformation and innovation now because everybody is now talking about immigration and firewalls.

Voters know that given Germany’s system of proportional representation, parties can promise whatever they want but it is the coalitions that decide. They also know that Merz will almost surely go into a coalition with a centrist party, like the Social Democrats or the Greens, neither of which support permanent border controls. If current polls are right, the CDU will have to govern with at least one of them, possibly both. The more parties, the harder the coalition talks will be, and the less of his agenda Merz will be able to implement.

There are moments in politics when politicians have to take big risks. But this was not one of them: it would have been enough for him to promise a review of immigration policies. When you make up policies on the hoof like this, people are bound to question your sincerity. After all, it was only a little over a week ago when he told a campaign rally to loud applause that “one 1933 is enough for Germany”. This was a reference to the year when Hitler came to power. He was essentially comparing the AfD to the Nazis. Until Wednesday, his firewall was a firmament of German politics. Today, people are no longer sure whether it still stands.

Austria just showed us how fast a firewall can crumble. The center-right Austrian People’s Party had one in place against the far-Right Freedom Party, the winner in last year’s election. Karl Nehammer, the former Austrian chancellor and leader of the People’s Party, wanted to negotiate a “losers’ coalition” with the Social Democrats and a small liberal party. But the negotiations failed because Nehammer, like Merz, insisted on immigration policies that were tougher than the centrists could stomach. After the talks collapsed at the beginning of this month, Nehammer resigned both as chancellor and party chairman. His party has now agreed to collapse the firewall and form a coalition with the Freedom Party. Its leader, Herbert Kickl, will become the next chancellor.

What happened in Austria is that two competing red lines clashed. If Merz ended up in a position where he would need both the SPD and the Greens to form a coalition, there is no way he could implement his immigration policies. If as in Austria, the German negotiations also ended with no deal, then the only viable coalition option would be for the CDU to form a coalition with the AfD, or a minority government with the support of the AfD.

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Most probably, Merz’s high-risk gamble will end up with him having to eat his words and cobble together another centrist coalition with the same old parties and same old policies that failed in the past. In this scenario, the AfD would become the main opposition party, with a strong chance of winning the 2029 elections. Weidel would stand a good chance of becoming the next chancellor. In both scenarios the AfD wins.

But this iteration of the AfD is a far cry from the party which started out 12 years ago as a conservative-libertarian group, founded by economics professors who wanted Germany to leave the euro. Today, the professors are long gone, displaced by nationalists, including some who are close to the neo-Nazi movement. Weidel herself is not in that camp. But nor is she a Javier Milei or an Elon Musk. Weidel’s party, though popular with the younger generation — and with Musk, who appeared at an AfD rally at the weekend to decry multiculturalism — supports a return to Russian gas and heavy industry. The AfD may claim to understand new technology, but it is not a party of innovation.

My message to all libertarian conservatives, then, is to be careful what you wish for. The AfD is a party that would not have you as a member. But the increasingly desperate attempt to keep them away from power is what sits at the heart of Germany’s dysfunction and prevents it from addressing its economic paralysis.

Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have no firewalls. These countries are governed by coalitions of the center-right and the far-Right. Austria will soon join them. It was a choice the voters in those countries have made. They will make other choices in the future. A firewall would have deprived them of the choice.

If as a German voter, you wanted change in economic policy, there is currently no path for such a preference to be implemented. No matter how you vote, you always end up with the same homogenized centrist policies. Ending the firewall is the only way to prise open the failing political cartel which has Germany — and the EU — in its suffocating grasp.

The direct parallel between the AfD and the Nazis, who 90 years ago branded the Bauhaus “degenerate” and closed the school down, has prompted widespread continental commentary — along with, understandably, much defending of the Bauhaus as an exciting and progressive movement. This is presumably why the story has received any attention; otherwise architecture generally receives short shrift. But such simplistic politicisation of architecture obfuscates the issue and leaves the real thorn in its heart unplucked — that defending the Bauhaus is not as progressive as it seems.

Bauhaus is everywhere; the building you are in right now was almost certainly influenced by the movement’s ideas. Just about everything constructed on this planet since the Second World War — when the Bauhaus style became the world’s default — directly descends from those radical buildings of the Twenties. Look at the Bauhaus headquarters in Dessau, opened in 1926, or the ADGB Trade Union School, opened four years later, and you will understand. Each looks remarkably ordinary, but this ordinariness is very proof of the Bauhaus’ colossal success in shaping the architecture of the modern world.

Undecorated, box-shaped buildings with large windows and flat roofs might seem like the obvious standard now, but once upon a time they were revolutionary. That’s because the world was a very different place in the Twenties. Nobody really knew how to build with novel materials such as concrete, plate glass, and steel, and so the Bauhaus sought to create a new style, to find an aesthetic suited to industrial mass production and prefabrication, whether for houses or chairs or alarm clocks. And they succeeded. When the ravaged world of the Forties needed rebuilding, and a booming global population needed housing, the Bauhaus was waiting in the wings with an architectural style specifically prepared for rapid, cheap construction.

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The AfD have therefore very obviously overlooked the essential factor in the rise of the Bauhaus, and the reason for which it really does deserve praise. During the first half of the last century, millions of people were living in not wholly un-medieval conditions — even in the world’s richest countries. Such a state of mass-misery is surely a far greater aberration than the minimalism of the Bauhaus. Better an ugly roof than no roof at all. So this was their real and quite extraordinary triumph.

And, we must remember, in an age of florid Victoriana, the clean geometry coming out of Dessau was fabulously exciting. When you see those smooth white walls and curtains of glittering glass in photographs from the Twenties and Thirties, and compare them to the terracotta finickities that otherwise filled the streets of Europe, it is hard not to get goosebumps. Here was something genuinely new.

Such context, however, must not lead us to shy away from what have become the painfully clear aesthetic failures of the Bauhaus. It was exciting once, but it has since become boring by virtue of its success. A handful of plain concrete surfaces is one thing, and most often an architectural delight; a world of plain boxes is more or less anti-human.

Thus we reach the Gordian Knot of this story — that, on the whole, people of all political alignments and social backgrounds are not much fond of the Bauhaus. Look where tourists take photos: always with older buildings that seem to embody something about the country they are visiting, never with the generic modern buildings. Studies have also proven what we instinctively know to be true: our tendency of late to build cities filled with identical architecture has made the world an anxiety-inducing place, one too frequently hostile to human nature and our most basic psychological needs.

But this fact — that people generally like older architectural styles — cannot really be tussled with. Politics stands gurgling in the way, and this current furore will only bolster its obstruction, further deluding us into thinking that modernist architectural is fundamentally Left-wing and traditional architecture is fundamentally Right-wing.

The media, unsurprisingly, have drawn comparisons between the AfD’s motion and Donald Trump and Viktor Orban’s mandates regarding neoclassical architecture in recent years. Hence the Left feels obliged to defend the Bauhaus, not on aesthetic but on ideological grounds — and thus concedes to the Right a monopoly on humanity’s pre-modernist architectural heritage.

This is a sorrowful mistake, partly because terms such as traditionalist and modernist are pathetically vague, but primarily because we all stand to lose by letting architecture, which is really the question of how we choose to design our world, be warped by blind ideological loyalties.

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The Left may have grown suspicious of traditional architecture, but this is misguided. The 19th-century Gothic Revival, for example, was really a socialist endeavour, promoted by the likes of John Ruskin and William Morris precisely because of its progressive qualities. And, if the Left are wrongly suspicious, the Right are yet more misdirected. It has become a received conservative opinion that all modern — by which they mean “ugly” — architecture is a consequence of socialism. But it is only a careless consumerism, a heartless commercialism, that favours generic architecture. For who would want every corner of our rich and varied Earth to look the same? Only somebody whose exclusive goal was making money, and for whom human wellbeing an irrelevance. Capitalism, not socialism, is the real driving force behind the enduring success of the Bauhaus. A strange truth to reconcile, but obvious to anybody who will think on it.

So you see the mess. And it is so lamentable because what we might loosely call traditional architecture should be a rare place of unity. A form of architecture that celebrates local history, promotes human wellbeing over hard profit, builds community, and is much more environmentally conscious — that is the real value of traditional architecture. Such fruits would surely be welcomed by conservatives and progressives alike. For, again, who would not want to preserve and expand the majestic diversity of mankind’s global architectural heritage?

So long as we politicise architecture — whether by the misdirected hooting of the Right or the reluctant-yet-implacable defences of the Left — it shall not be possible. We may simultaneously acknowledge that the Bauhaus has lifted millions out of material squalor, and also that its philosophy has turned out to be an aesthetic failure when applied so broadly. A pitiable state of affairs when we cannot seem to say this; and, yet more pitiably, act on it.

Soon enough, though, the backlash against the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance began. Quite aside from the usual suspects — the Social Democrats and the Greens to name but two — Wagenknecht’s venture quickly attracted the ire of other recent insurgents: the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Alice Weidel, the AfD’s leader, has described her populist counterparts on the Left as mere “footstools of the establishment.” And to be sure, while the BSW has been quick to grab the anti-establishment mantle, it’s already in discussions to join three state governments in eastern Germany, partnering with the Social Democrats (SPD) in Brandenburg and the Christian Democrats (CDU) in Thuringia and Saxony. 

In a country where the conservative CDU has held the chancellorship for 52 of the Federal Republic’s 75 years, and the SPD the remaining 23, you can’t get more establishment than that. Weidel, indeed, has argued that the BSW “allows the CDU to look for governing majorities on the far-Left as a way of excluding the AfD from participation in government.” After all, Wagenknecht was once a Communist, unsurprisingly anathema to the centre-right Christian Democrats until recently. In a sense, though, this populist bickering is irrelevant. Even if they don’t work together, after all, both the BSW and AfD are nonetheless transforming Germany — not least by pressuring more mainstream parties to do their bidding. 

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When the BSW first exploded onto the political scene, some in Germany wondered whether they might partner with the AfD to revolutionise German politics. From Ukraine to migration, after all, both parties agree on much — even as their leaders seemed to get on personally. That was clear enough when Wagenknecht and Weidel met in a much-discussed TV debate, finding themselves speaking as one on the origins of the Ukraine war and jointly rebutting the moderator’s lazy assertions that they were mirroring “Putin narratives.”

Since the BSW threw its lot in with the CDU, however, things have changed. Quite aside from her infamous “footstool” comment, Weidel has speculated that the BSW will fail to achieve its core demands. But things aren’t quite that simple. Recent developments, after all, show that Wagenknecht is trying to drive a hard bargain on an issue that is also on the top of the AfD’s agenda: settling the war in Ukraine. It would certainly be a political masterstroke if Wagenknecht could press the CDU closer to her own position here. Next to the Greens, no other German party is as hawkish. But Wagenknecht insists on a “peace provision” in any formalised coalition agreement. She’s also demanded that the CDU reject the stationing of US medium-range missiles on German soil.

For a while, this strategy appeared to bear fruit. In early October, a trio of politicians from the CDU and SPD published an op-ed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine where they called for a “ceasefire and negotiations” in Ukraine. All three authors want to lead eastern German states where elections were lately held. Equally relevant, all three need the BSW to get into office. Steffen Quasebarth, the BSW’s newly minted deputy speaker of the Thuringian state parliament, says the op-ed was lacking in parts, especially since the authors noticeably avoided an outright rejection of stationing the American missiles. Even so, he calls the article a “step in the right direction.” And as Wagenknecht herself pointed out in her debate with her AfD rival, you’re hardly a “footstool” if you push the establishment closer to your own politics.

Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU and the party’s candidate for chancellor, was quick to rebut such ideas. Pushing back against the op-ed, he demanded that German-made Taurus be sent to the embattled Kyiv government. Soon enough, Wagenknecht herself piled on the pressure too, suggesting in an interview with Der Spiegel that local CDU parties in Germany’s east should distance themselves from Merz’s sabre-rattling. In essence, Wagenknecht was asking them to disobey their party leader in exchange for her seal of approval, something they’re hardly willing to do. 

Wagenknecht may be her party’s namesake, but not every member seems willing to take things quite so far. Some Thuringian BSW leaders seemed fine with the op-ed, both as a sign of accommodation and because they pushed negotiations with the CDU along. Any peace provision would be probably symbolic anyway: German state governments don’t make foreign policy. Interestingly, those BSW politicians who appear more willing to appease the CDU include its Thuringian state chair Katja Wolf, like Wagenknecht formerly of Die Linke.

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Nowhere was Wolf’s eagerness to cooperate with the CDU clearer than last month, when the newly elected Thuringian state parliament convened in Erfurt. The AfD politician Jürgen Treutler was supposed to preside as the eldest member. The most important order of business was to elect the parliamentary speaker and his deputies, and as the largest party, the AfD had the privilege to nominate one of their own. It was clear that the AfD’s nominee would never have been elected. But rather than being allowed to follow proper procedure, Treutler was repeatedly heckled by other parties, including BSW members, in a clearly staged disruption. One CDU politician shouted that Treutler was leading a Machtergreifung (“seizure of power”), an obvious reference to Hitler’s rise.

The meeting descended into chaos and a subsequent legal dispute over the proper order had to sort things out. The state constitutional court, which is stacked with CDU and Left appointed judges, quickly ruled against the AfD, who were ultimately barred from the deputy speakership and important committee chairs. A party with nearly 33% of the vote was left without influence over parliamentary rule-making while the SPD, which had won only 6%, was given one of the deputy speakerships.

Why the casual dismissal of a third of the voters’ will? What about democracy? Steffen Quasebarth insists that the AfD in Thuringia falls far outside the realm of acceptable democratic politics, noting the presence of its notorious state chair Björn Höcke. Quasebarth and others attack as a far-Right extremist, pointing especially to his probable past in the German neo-Nazi scene. For his part, Quasebarth concedes that the AfD was within the law when it ran the constituting session, but thought the protest was nonetheless necessary. “Excluding the AfD from the parliamentary speakership,” he says, “was not a decision against the voters, but a decision for democracy.”

Not everyone in the BSW agreed with the party’s apparent coordination with the CDU. Friedrich Pürner, one of the first BSW members in the EU Parliament, wrote a long post claiming that actions of the anti-AfD bloc looked worryingly like the “ominous behaviour of politicians” during lockdown years. That was a time when “power-hungry politicians wanted to achieve full control over the population and massively restricted fundamental rights to do so.” The scenes in Erfurt were no different. Instead, Pürner told Die Welt that the BSW should have held talks with the AfD, as well, given that it is a “democratically legitimated party”. Yet the Thuringian BSW swiftly dismissed Pürner’s protests, suggesting he should stick to politics in Brussels.

Nonetheless, Pürner’s outcry shows that there are indeed some in the BSW who oppose a strategy of simply demonising the AfD. Another example is Robert Crumbach, a union activist and former SPD member who today leads Wagenknecht’s party in Brandenburg. Before the election, Crumbach said that the BSW should treat AfD bills like those of any other party, considering them on their merits. But then a Syrian Islamist stabbed three people to death at a diversity festival in the town of Solingen. The AfD reacted by demanding a blanket ban on asylum seekers, refugees and certain other foreigners from public events. This went too far in Crumbach’s eyes, who said the idea reminded of the Nuremberg Law. All the same, he can see a future in which the BSW and AfD would join forces, he says today. “But that depends entirely on the AfD and its further development.”

AfD leaders disagree that the ball is in their court. Nationally, after all, the BSW polls at just 8%. Compare that to the AfD’s 18%. “If the AfD will one day closely work with the BSW, the BSW should remember that it will do so as the junior partner,” says René Springer, another Brandenburgian and an AfD member of the Bundestag. Springer is one of those outspoken easterners who occasionally gives the national party leaders massive headaches. When, in January, the state-aligned “fact-checking” website Correctiv led a sting operation claiming to have exposed a “secret plot” by AfD members and Right-wing activists to mass expel non-ethnic German citizens, the party leadership distanced itself from any such plans. Springer, however, Tweeted that “we want to lead back foreigners into their home country. By the millions. That’s not a secret plot but a promise.” It’s a promise Springer ultimately thinks the BSW — for all its criticisms of mass migration — wouldn’t make and certainly never keep. During her debate with Weidel, in fact, Wagenknecht categorically rejected mass-deportation schemes, instead committing to focus on criminal aliens.

At least Springer seems to have the zeitgeist on his side. A majority of young voters regularly report that the AfD is their favourite party, in keeping with Gen Z’s move Right generally. The Right-wing populists do equally among working-class voters, nominally Wagenknecht’s pro-welfare base. That’s possibly because they see the AfD as more credible on the number one issue in German politics: immigration. In fact, the BSW seems to be treading water for the moment. For a party founded in January, it’s certainly impressed, winning seats in state parliaments right off the bat. But its results so far have ultimately proved underwhelming, especially when compared to Wagenknecht’s fame and all the media attention she’s enjoyed.  

And whether that represents BSW’s electoral ceiling may be tested sooner than expected. The next major elections in Germany would normally occur next September, when polls for the Bundestag take place. But if the coalition negotiations in the eastern German states fall apart — due partly to Wagenknecht’s insistence on further concessions from the mainstream — snap elections would be necessary. It’s possible that those eastern Germans who felt betrayed by the BSW’s behaviour during the antics in Erfurt might gain new respect for Wagenknecht’s hard line on the Ukraine war. But there’s one thing Wagenknecht doesn’t seem willing to budge on: during her debate with Weidel, Wagenknecht insisted that there could be no common cause with a party that offered a political home to the likes of Björn Höcke. The AfD can’t purge the Höcke wing, of course, lest it loses populist appeal with voters. Whatever else you might want to say about it, anti-immigration policies sell.

In a sense, though, any future partnership between the AfD and BSW matters less than their embrace by the mainstream. While Wagenknecht’s outfit can only go so far on issues like immigration, both populists parties have put the establishment under such pressure that they’re now shifting Germany’s Overton Window. Merz’s protestations aside, the CDU’s rhetoric on Ukraine has become softer. The mainstream parties are showing a new toughness elsewhere too. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has demanded “deportations on a large scale” while Merz, too, has recently called for tougher border enforcement. Whether the AfD and BSW will or won’t, in short, is beside the point. The real question is how far the old establishment is willing to go to win over the hearts of the ever-growing share of voters who flirt with populism.

Granted, in Thuringia at least, forming a stable governing majority in the state parliament might now be tricky and require some unusual alliances, such as between the centrist Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Left-wing Die Linke, which the CDU for decades has denounced as the irredeemable successor to the old GDR’s Stalinist ruling party and thus beyond the pale. The new left-conservative BSW party of Sahra Wagenknecht, who has ruled out collaborating with the AfD, has also signalled its openness to entering into a coalition with the CDU if certain conditions are fulfilled. In Saxony, meanwhile, the current ruling majority of CDU, Social Democrats (SPD), and the Greens will remain in power, even though the SPD and Greens barely passed the 5% threshold needed to win seats.

The outcome of Sunday’s elections, then, is that the AfD will remain an opposition party, Germany’s largest, but still one without any real power. Some privileges come with the AfD’s strong showing in Thuringia: because it now holds more than a third of seats in the state parliament, it can block a number of measures for which two-thirds of votes are needed, such as changes to the state constitution or the election of state judges. An inconvenience, perhaps, but hardly a revolution.

And this seems unlikely to change. Since the AfD was founded in 2013, Thuringia and Saxony have been its strongholds, which means that for now the party seems to have reached a preliminary ceiling. Except for the AfD’s few office holders at the municipal and district level, the Brandmauer (firewall) erected by all other major German parties against the right-populists remains rock solid. There is simply no clear path to power for the AfD short of an absolute majority of votes, which it is extremely unlikely to secure anywhere. The centre and the policies that it represents will hold — until, at least, a major war or devastating economic crisis further destabilises the crumbling European order.

The more interesting question, then, is not what the Right-wing firebrands will do with their newly won seats, but rather how Germany’s leadership class will react to their increased prominence. And if past is present, this is likely to take two forms. First, they could threaten the German Right with legal challenges and bans; and second, they could carefully adopt some of its positions to take the wind out of its sails.

Let’s start with the idea of outright AfD ban, a theoretical possibility which is being discussed openly in the German mainstream media. Such proposals normally start by acknowledging that the Federal Republic of Germany is the legal successor to the Third Reich. To distinguish itself from its predecessor state, the framers of the Federal Republic’s constitutional order wanted to make the nation a wehrhafte Demokratie, which loosely translates to “resilient democracy” or “well-fortified democracy”. As a result, the Federal Republic was given the legal tools to defend itself against challenges from within, including its domestic intelligence apparatus, the Bundesverfassungsschutz, which can monitor political activists and parties even if they haven’t committed a crime. If a party is deemed “extremist” and in opposition to the German constitutional order, it can be banned and its assets seized. The idea is to stop a new Hitler in his tracks before he can even give his first beer-hall speech. A denazification before the fact, in other words.

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Since its inception in 1949, the German state has already made use of this power in numerous cases, most notably against the Communist Party in 1952. Most recently, in July, the German Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser used it to unilaterally ban the publication of the AfD-adjacent magazine Compact for its “extremist” views. While the move appeared like a major assault on the freedom of the press, the ban won widespread support from the German mainstream, with even the public news broadcaster Tagesschau denouncing the magazine’s agitation against a “vaccine dictatorship”. Since then, however, the Federal Administrative Court has suspended the ban and Compact is temporarily back in print, although the litigation continues and could still result in an eventual ban.

By contrast, the decision to outlaw an entire political party that nationally polls at just below 20%, and is the most popular in some eastern German states, could be deeply destabilising. Most obviously, it would expose the centre’s democratic pretensions as little more than a façade. This would also risk isolating AfD voters further from the political system, merely confirming them in their belief that the powers that be are out to get them.

So, if banning the AfD isn’t a viable option, can the centre adopt some of its policies? Certainly, the AfD’s most distinct policy position — hostility to immigration — has increasingly become normalised. Only last month, after a Syrian migrant carried out a mass stabbing attack in Solingen, CDU leader Friedrich Merz called for a Trump-style block on all immigration from Syria and Afghanistan, though he has since walked back on his proposal after denouncements in the mainstream press.

More likely, it seems, is the introduction of a patchwork of bureaucratic measures designed to streamline the deportations of some migrants with criminal records. Shortly before the state elections in Thuringia, Chancellor Olaf Scholz boasted that his government had deported 28 Afghan criminals — simply to show that they are actually doing something. But the small number, as well as the fact that each of the migrants was given €1,000 as an allowance (technically mandated by law), led to widespread ridicule. To the AfD supporters, the deportation of 28 offenders is a drop in the ocean. Many AfD supporters want that figure to be in the millions, making it unlikely that the ruling parties will ever credibly co-opt the party’s anti-immigration views.

To a lesser extent, the same can be said for Wagenknecht’s BSW. She has already stated that one condition for the party’s entrance into a coalition with the CDU is an opposition to further military aid to Ukraine and the stationing of US long-range missiles in Germany, which had already been jointly announced by the Biden and Scholz administrations. It is doubtful that the hawkish CDU will submit to these demands, nor do state parliaments make foreign policy, so it will be interesting to observe who will cave first. If the BSW does and helps the CDU into power to spite the AfD, its carefully maintained maverick image will crumble barely a year since the party’s inception.

But perhaps that would be to the AfD’s benefit. In such a scenario, the party would be left once again as the most credible source of opposition in many voters’ eyes — and its thwarted revolution simply deferred.

***

For more analysis of the German results, watch the below:

In the recent European elections, as amply expected, the Right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party overtook the centre-left SPD for the first time, becoming the country’s second-largest party after the centre-right CDU/CSU alliance. Meanwhile, the two major parties between them gained less than 45% of the votes — down from 70% just 20 years ago. It was the biggest collapse of the German political mainstream since reunification.

The real surprise, however, was the impressive performance of a new Left-populist party launched a few months prior by the icon of the German radical Left: the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Overall, the party won 6.2% of the vote; but, just like the AfD in previous elections, it performed much better in the country’s east, scoring double figures in all those states, but only 5% in the west. More than anything, the elections revealed that post-reunification Germany remains neatly divided along its former border: while western Germans are also signalling growing dissatisfaction with the current SPD-Greens-FDP coalition, but remaining within the bounds of mainstream politics, eastern Germans are revolting against the political establishment itself.

Thus, with state elections taking place in three eastern states over the next month — in Saxony and Thuringia this weekend, and in Brandenburg on September 22 — it’s no wonder the German centre is bracing itself for collapse. But while it’s a foregone conclusion that the AfD will make massive gains, with the party leading the polls in two of the three states, the real surprise may prove to be, once again, Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party, which is currently polling between 11% and 19%.

For now, Wagenknecht has ruled out forming regional coalition governments with the AfD, as well as with any party that supports arms deliveries to Ukraine (which means most mainstream parties). But her mere presence on the ballot will further erode support for the ruling coalition — and make it very hard, if not impossible, for the latter to form centrist coalition governments at the state level.

The Wagenknecht phenomenon is fascinating — and unique — for several reasons. Not only has she managed to establish the BSW as one of the country’s major political forces in a matter of months, but she’s also running on a platform that is unique in the Western political panorama, at least among electorally relevant parties. Though Wagenknecht tends to avoid framing her party in tired Left-Right terms, its platform can best be described as left-conservative.

In short, this means it mixes demands that would once have been associated with the socialist-labour Left — interventionist and redistributive government policies to regulate capitalist market forces, higher pensions and minimum wages, generous welfare and social security policies, taxes on wealth — with positions that today would be characterised as culturally conservative: first and foremost, a recognition of the importance of preserving and fostering traditions, stability, security and a sense of community.

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This inevitably entails more restrictive immigration policies and a rejection of the multiculturalist dogma, in which minorities refuse to recognise the superiority of common rules, threatening social cohesion. As the party’s founding text reads: “Immigration and the coexistence of different cultures can be enriching. However, this only applies as long as the influx remains limited to a level that does not overburden our country and its infrastructure, and as long as integration is actively promoted and successful.” What this looks like in practice became clear in 2015, when Wagenknecht strongly criticised then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow in hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, invoking the mantra “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do it!”). A year later, after a series of terror attacks perpetrated by migrants, Wagenknecht released a statement that read: “The reception and integration of a large number of refugees and immigrants is associated with considerable problems and is more difficult than Merkel’s frivolous ‘We can do it!’.”

More recently, following a fatal knife attack in Mannheim, Wagenknecht again lashed out at the government’s immigration policies: “We basically financed [the migrant attacker’s] radicalisation as well. He lived off us, off the money of the citizens.” Her focus on benefits here is crucial. For Wagenknecht, the promotion of social cohesion, including by restricting immigration flows, shouldn’t just be seen as a positive end in and of itself, such as for reasons of public safety, but also as a precondition for the pursuit of economically redistributive policies, and even of democracy itself. Only a political community defined by a collective identity — a demos — is capable of committing itself to a democratic discourse and to a related decision-making process, and of generating the affective ties and bonds of solidarity that are needed to legitimise and sustain redistributive policies between classes and/or regions. Simply put, if there is no demos, there can be no effective democracy, let alone a social democracy.

The inverse, of course, is true as well: the social cohesion necessary to sustain the demos can only flourish in a context where the state intervenes to restrain the socially destructive effects of unfettered capitalism (including the push towards the free flow of labour). There is, in other words, no contradiction between being economically Left-wing and culturally conservative, says Wagenknecht; rather, the two things go hand in hand. Neither is the concept particularly new, she adds: this was basically the (winning) platform of most old-school European socialist and social-democratic parties.

This is also why Wagenknecht places a strong emphasis on the importance of national sovereignty, and is highly critical of the European Union: not only because the EU is fundamentally anti-democratic and prone to oligarchic capture, but because it cannot be otherwise, given that today the nation-state remains the main source of people’s collective identity and sense of belonging, and therefore the only territorial institution (or at least the largest) through which it is possible to organise democracy and achieve social balance. As she has said: “The call for ‘an end to the nation-state’ is ultimately a call for ‘an end to democracy and the welfare state’”.

In short, Sahra Wagenknecht is anything but your typical Western Leftist. Now, this is partly to do with the fact that she was born on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in former East Germany in 1969. She became interested in philosophy and Marxist economics as a teenager, but the end of the socialist GDR, in 1989, was, according to her biographer Christian Schneider, “the moment in time when the politician Wagenknecht was born”. She experienced it as a “unique horror”: like many East Germans, she believed in a reformed socialism, not in embracing West Germany’s capitalist path.

That same year she joined the East German communist party, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then, following reunification, became one of the leading figures of the party’s successor, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). Even back then, she stood out as being both more radical and more conservative than her communist peers. “There was now this young woman who desperately wanted to go back to the old days” of the GDR, as one former leader of the PDS put it.

When, in 2007, the PDS merged with a splinter of the SPD to give birth to Die Linke (The Left), Wagenknecht quickly emerged as one of the party’s leading voices — and the face of the German radical Left. Die Linke’s support rocketed to 12% of the vote in 2009’s elections to the Bundestag, and remained close to there for nearly a decade. Wagenknecht also became a key figure in the German parliament, serving as parliamentary co-chairwoman of her party from 2015 to 2019 and as leader of the opposition (against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition) until 2017. It was there that she earned a reputation for her powerful rhetoric and ability to challenge mainstream political narratives.

Her relationship with Die Linke, however, grew increasingly strained over the years: while the party became captured by the kind of “progressive neoliberalism” that has infected, to one degree or another, all Western Left-wing parties, Wagenknecht remained true to her old-school socialist roots. Her views on immigration and other issues — which would once have been completely non-controversial in socialist circles — were quickly becoming anathema on the Left. Eventually, in November 2019, Wagenknecht announced her resignation as parliamentary leader, citing burnout. Two years later, in the federal elections, Die Linke garnered less than 5% of ballots and lost nearly half its seats — its worst result ever. For Wagenknecht, this was not a surprise.

In a widely discussed book published that same year, Die Selbstgerechten (“The Self-Righteous”), Wagenknecht explained the reasons for her growing estrangement with the mainstream Left. “Left”, she argues, used to be synonymous with improving the lives of ordinary people forced to support themselves through their (often backbreaking) labour; however, today’s progressive movement has come to be dominated by what Wagenknecht calls the “lifestyle Left”, whose members “no longer place social and political-economic problems at the centre of Left-wing politics. In the place of such concerns, they promote questions regarding lifestyle, consumption habits, and moral attitudes.” She further notes that, far from being liberal, today’s Leftists tend to be viciously authoritarian.

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For Wagenknecht, this new movement’s authoritarian shade became clear during the pandemic. Unlike virtually all her colleagues — and most of the German Left — Wagenknecht became a sharp critic of the government’s “endless lockdowns” and coercive mass vaccination programme (she refused to take the vaccine herself). Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Wagenknecht has also emerged as the most vocal critic of Germany’s military support for Ukraine and the sanctions regime. This escalated her rift with Die Linke, which voted in favour of economic sanctions against Russia.

At that point, their break-up became inevitable — and finally, late last year, Wagenknecht announced the launch of her new party. The choice led to the unravelling of Die Linke, which was forced to dissolve its parliamentary faction, and has now virtually disappeared from the political map, receiving only 2.7% of the votes in June’s European elections.

Since the launch of BSW, Wagenknecht has put the question of détente with Russia at the centre of her party’s platform. On several occasions, she has highlighted how Germany’s subordination to the US-Nato proxy war strategy in Ukraine, and refusal to engage in diplomatic talks with Russia, is self-defeating from an economic as well as a geopolitical standpoint. Not only is the oil and gas embargo against Russia the main reason for Germany’s collapsing economy, but the government is, she told the Bundestag, “negligently playing with the security and in the worst case the lives of millions of people in Germany”. More recently, she has strongly condemned the government’s plan to deploy US long-range missiles on German territory and, perhaps most dramatically, challenged the omerta surrounding the Nord Stream attack. Indeed, following recent revelations about the German government’s possible cover-up of Ukrainian involvement, she called for a public inquiry, saying that, “should German authorities have known in advance about the attack plan on Nord Stream 1 and 2, then we would have the scandal of the century in German politics”.

It’s important to note that Wagenknecht views opposition to the proxy war against Russia as part of a much deeper rethinking of Germany’s geopolitical strategy. Its aim, as Wolfgang Streeck has written, is to “free it from the geostrategic grip of the United States, guided by German national survival interests instead of Nibelungentreue, or loyalty, to America’s claim to global political domination”. This necessarily entails re-establishing long-term political and economic relations with Russia, which could potentially lay the groundwork for a new Eurasian security architecture, and even a Eurasian community of states and economies.

Elsewhere, Wagenknecht has criticised the government’s “green” and gender-affirming policies, arguing that “Germany’s energy supply cannot currently be ensured by renewable energies alone”, and voting against a bill passed by the German parliament earlier this year to make it easier to change one’s legal gender. “Your law turns parents and children into guinea pigs for an ideology that only benefits the pharmaceutical lobby,” she said.

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If that seems blunt, that’s because it is. But taken together, Wagenknecht’s old-school leftist economics, pro-peace and anti-Nato foreign policy, and conservative cultural outlook is resonating with voters. And as a result, she now finds herself in the crosshairs of both the establishment and her populist competitors. Indeed, on the Right in particular, the common criticism levelled at her is that, by drawing voters away from the AfD, she is weakening and dividing Germany’s populist front.

Yet the evidence for this is somewhat shaky. Rather, opinion polls show that the emergence of the BSW does not seem to have overly affected the AfD, which continues to maintain a 30% vote share in several eastern German states and 20% nationally. In fact, according to a recent study by the Hans Böckler Foundation, the BSW is actually drawing voters mostly from the centre and the Left — Die Linke and the SPD — rather than the AfD. The BSW’s staunchly Left-wing economic agenda, which puts it at odds with the neoliberal economic policy of the AfD, would appear to be key here: the study shows that the BSW draws support mainly from socially marginalised and low-income groups — traditionally, the classic target group of social-democratic parties. It also explains why she enjoys much stronger support in eastern Germany, which has significantly lower GDP per capita and wages, and higher unemployment and poverty rates than western Germany.

This suggests that Wagenknecht’s left-conservative agenda is filling a political space that was previously vacant, hoovering up German voters who are disillusioned with mainstream politics, and even very critical of immigration, but nonetheless feel uncomfortable voting for a party that has undeniably xenophobic or racist traits. The BSW, by contrast, represents a much more palatable “non-extremist” option for these would-be populist voters. This is further confirmed by the fact that, despite its tough stance on immigration, the BSW appears to be winning over an above-average number of voters from migrant backgrounds, a demographic that has traditionally voted for centre-left parties. In short, the evidence suggests that Wagenknecht is actually broadening the populist front rather than simply crowding out the existing populist pool.

It is this, along with the fact that Wagenknecht is among the top three most popular politicians in Germany, that explains why the establishment has decided to go on the attack. In recent weeks, the media there has launched a relentless campaign against Wagenknecht and the BSW, predictably focused on claims that she is a “Russian propagandist” — or “Vladimir Putinova”, as one article called her. Even more desperately, some have attempted to paint Wagenknecht, a literal communist, as a “far-Right extremist”. Only this week, Politico, which is owned by German media titan Axel Springer, unironically asked: “Is Germany’s rising superstar so far-Left she’s far-Right?”

The answer, of course, is a boring nein. And no doubt a far more interesting question will be thrown up by this weekend’s results: with a general election scheduled for next year, has Germany finally found a politician capable of breaking through its ideological wall?

Last Friday, at about 11:30am, a 25-year-old Afghan went on a knife spree at a rally in Mannheim. He stabbed Michael Stürzenberger, the convener of the rally, along with a policeman and four others, before a second policeman shot him. Two days later, the officer succumbed to his wounds.

We still don’t know everything about the incident. What we do know, though, is that it is a deeply sad — and obvious — metaphor for the way Western countries function. People protest Islamic violence. The press smears them. Islamists attack. The state tries to subdue the protestors. The Islamists continue attacking. Rinse and repeat.

It isn’t even the first time Stürzenberger’s protests have been attacked. He has been assaulted twice before by Islamists, in 2013 and in 2022. Why? Well, according to the mainstream media, he is a far-Right extremist. As Euronews puts it: he has been “previously linked to Pegida, a xenophobic extreme-Right group with a strong neo-Nazi following, prompting an investigation by the German federal state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution”.

And what did this investigation uncover? Little more than the fact that he’s a relatively normal man who condemns Islamic violence — and who, like many such people, including some of my friends, has now ended up being stabbed. Yet Stürzenberger’s normalcy hasn’t stopped the German legal system from persecuting him. One of his convictions was for sharing a photo on Facebook of a Nazi shaking hands with an Islamic cleric, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Not a doctored photo. Just a photo. After all, photos reveal facts — but in Germany, even sharing the government’s own statistics can get you a criminal record.

Last week’s attack prompted the standard response from the German political establishment. The Chancellor condemned it. He expressed sadness. His government promises to investigate, to defend “against Islamist terrorism with determination”. But did anyone buy it? Though there are exceptions like Hungary, these attacks seem to happen regardless of national borders, and regardless of whether the country in question has a Left-wing or a Right-wing government.

The more cynical among us are inclined to claim that they keep happening because no one really cares. But that is lazy thinking. Not all of these politicians are feckless monsters, however temporarily gratifying it may feel to say so.

So why do they seem to do nothing? Part of the answer — a significant part of the answer — lies with the cluster of policies and assumptions that all mainstream European countries have written into their rules regarding immigration.

The first concerns treaties. These governments are signatories to international treaties that inadvertently leave them with no option but to leave their borders unprotected and to allow unwanted migrants to stay put. The Geneva Convention on Refugees. The European Court of Human Rights. As long as these are in place, national governments can do little to stop Islamists from entering — even if they wanted to.

The second concerns constitutions. Western nations abide by constitutional laws that leave them with no alternative but to allow the Islamists to recruit operatives and establish networks, mosques, schools and charities devoted to the spread of political Islam. Again, there is nothing they are able to do, because Islam is not singled out in their constitution as a singular cause for concern. If it were, the lawyers for these institutions would sue, saying that it is illegal to treat Islam differently. And, infuriatingly, under the current system, they would be right.

The third concerns perceptions. Our governments assume that anyone — citizen or organisation; journalist, politician or academic — critical of the government’s way of handling Islamism is a dangerous bigot who must be shamed into silence. Maybe such attitudes were forgivable half a century ago, but it is pretty obvious now that there is nothing bigoted about fearing Islamism. Islamists make that clear with increasing regularity. Nonetheless, it is not as if any human is immune to the effects of the echo chamber. The elites swim in a pool where everyone believes that racism underlies opposition to open borders. This is particularly true of Germany’s elites, who are still so focused on stopping the re-emergence of Nazism that they see it everywhere, and are blind to any other threat.

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What this means is that, without a seismic shift, there is actually very little that can easily be done about the first two problems. Even if he wanted to, the Chancellor of Germany does not have the authority to change Germany’s basic law, let alone an electoral mandate. And while the Bundestag could just about get Germany out of some of its international treaties, because those treaties underwrite Germany’s international relations, they underwrite the trade her economy needs for survival.

The constitutional problem is broadly similar. All constitutions lack perfect foresight. Of course, it’s true that, when these documents were written, states had no business treating religions differently. But that was before Islamism arrived. Once Islamic migration really began in earnest, the days of procedural neutrality should have ended. And while none of this is to say that peaceful, patriotic Muslims should be targeted, Islamism — as I well know — is plainly different.

We do not yet know whether Mannheim’s second attacker, who stabbed an AfD politician on Tuesday night, was an asylum-seeker. He may have just been an ordinary immigrant, or even a German-born citizen. But if I were a betting woman, I would bet he came in on one of the many schemes designed to help threatened people, in very small numbers, in a previous era. Most conventions around refugees were drawn up just after the Second World War or the Cold War, with those conflicts’ problems in mind. Things are different now, and the change is killing our nations.

What is the cure? It certainly doesn’t involve electing a centre-right government. As the past 14 years in the UK have shown, centre-right governments do nothing. Instead, what is needed is a shift in international and constitutional law, or events like those in Germany will just keep happening until the nations of Europe collapse.

No doubt I’ll write this article again in a year. And the year after that. But if we think big, and enough of us wake up, then one day, I’ll be able to stop. Until then.

Who is to blame? The liberal-centrist consensus is that the country is facing an unprecedented threat from nefarious populist and far-Right forces — most notably the AfD, which aims, according to the country’s vice-chancellor, to “turn Germany into an authoritarian state”. But one may very well argue that Germany is already displaying worrying signs of authoritarianism, at the hands of those very same liberal-centrist forces that claim to be defending democracy from the barbarians at the gate.

Earlier this month, a court rejected a complaint by the AfD against its classification from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) as a suspected Right-wing extremist case. This means that the BfV, the domestic intelligence service, can continue to monitor the AfD’s activities and communications. The German government hailed it as a victory. “Today’s ruling shows that we are a democracy that can be defended,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser.

Meanwhile, in another ruling, a Thuringian AfD leader was fined for allegedly using a slogan from the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. Following the rulings, various politicians, most notably from the centre-Right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Green Party, stepped up calls for the party to be banned. One Christian Democrat even announced that he would initiate a motion in the German Bundestag to that end, arguing that that the party could no longer be kept at bay by political means, especially in Eastern Germany.

It goes without saying that attempting to outlaw the country’s second most popular party wouldn’t just be appalling from a democratic perspective, but would also have unexpected and far-reaching consequences — potentially pushing the country from a fraught political situation towards a state of civic unrest. But the establishment’s war on the AfD is just one part of a much wider crackdown on dissent — not only on the Right, but on the Left as well. In many parts of the country, pro-Palestinian protests have been restricted, and schools have been granted the power to place bans on Palestinian flags, pro-Palestinian speech and keffiyeh scarves. Across Germany, using the pro-Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea” is now a criminal offence.

These moves are part of a broader process of institutional engineering aimed at dramatically narrowing the scope of democratic action in the name of protecting democracy. This includes the passing or proposal of an array of illiberal new laws. One such example is the recently approved “Law to speed up the removal of extremists from civil service”, aimed at making it easier to target so-called “extremist” civil servants — or “enemies of the constitution” — who may be removed from their posts and even denied their pension payments. If found guilty of sedition, the civil servant faces a prison sentence of six months or more. The law’s logic was spelled out by the Interior Minister: “Anyone who rejects the state cannot serve it.” But what does it mean to “reject the state”? Or to be an “extremist” for that matter? These concepts are so vague — and deliberately so — that they can easily be weaponised against anyone who happens to disagree with government policy on any given issue.

In a similar vein, the Democracy Promotion Act, currently still under discussion, is aimed at distributing hundreds of millions of euros of state funds to NGOs to promote “diversity, tolerance and democracy” and “prevent extremism” — which, it’s safe to assume, means promoting the repression of those who don’t conform to the establishment’s world view. The law would expand on an already existing programme launched by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, which supports campaigns “against conspiracy theories” and “Right-wing extremism”. Elsewhere last week, 30 of the country’s major corporations joined forces to encourage support, at least among their 1.7 million employees, for pro-European parties and warn of the dangers of populist groups such as the AfD.

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Many of these initiatives were born amid the hysteria that gripped Germany following the revelation, in 2022, of an alleged coup d’état that was being planned by a “far-Right terrorist group”. When it emerged that most of the members of the Reichsbürger group were pensioners, and that one of their leaders was an eccentric 70-year-old self-styled “prince” with a penchant for astrology, people started taking to social media to denounce its farcical nature. But this didn’t stop the government and media from inflating the group’s actual threat, claiming that a fascist military government was around the corner — and emphasising the fact that the conspirators were AfD supporters.

The trial began this week, a year and a half after the alleged conspirators’ arrest, and no doubt we’ll see a slew of hyperbolic headlines in its wake. But even so, it’s hard not to view the government’s measures as having very little to do with protecting democracy, but rather being about protecting a failing and increasingly delegitimised establishment from democracy — and from the surging “populist” challenge, both on the Right and the Left. This has, after all, been taking shape for years, and well before the Reichsbürger plot.

As elsewhere, the pandemic represented a turning point in this increasingly authoritarian drift in German politics, as the government used the “public health emergency” to sweep aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarise societies, and crack down on civil liberties. Germany implemented one of the world’s most draconian lockdown and mass vaccination regimes, including the use of vaccine passports and segregated lockdowns for the unvaccinated. Meanwhile, the definition of the term “unconstitutional” became increasingly vague: teachers were accused of being “unconstitutional” if they opposed school closures, and an entire new category was even invented for public dissent: that of “anti-constitutional delegitimisation of the state”. Not even esteemed public intellectuals were spared from this brutalisation of the public debate.

It would be comforting to see all this as a betrayal of German post-war democracy and of its institutional bedrock, the constitution of 1949, or Basic Law — not least because it would imply that this is an awkward deviation from the norm, which may be potentially corrected by appealing to the strong democratic safeguards offered by that very constitution. Indeed, this quasi-religious faith in the constitution is deeply engrained in the German post-war collective consciousness, not just among intellectual elites — Habermas and others developed the concept of “constitutional patriotism” — but among dissidents as well: during the pandemic, it was common for protesters to hold up a booklet of the constitution as a symbolic shield against state repression.

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But what if the current authoritarian turn in Germany is not a failure of the constitution but rather a case of it doing exactly what it was designed to do? The German constitution has long been seen as the country’s main democratic bulwark against the kind of anti-democratic aberrations of the Nazi era. However, for its creators, this meant, paradoxically, that it also had to act as a bulwark against democracy itself — or better, its potential “excesses”. After all, as liberal commentators never tire of reminding us, Hitler rose to power through democratic means. As the weekly newspaper Die Zeit recently observed, the Basic Law is “deeply laden with scepticism” and mindful of “the abuse of power and the obstruction of the democratic system”. Its creators didn’t trust the people, and were actually quite fearful of the concept of mass democracy.

They thus took it upon themselves to create a constitution that, while guaranteeing equal individual rights for all citizens, would also contain various safeguards and provisions to ensure that the “will of the people” would not get out of hand. The document’s authors envisaged the creation of only three “people’s parties” — the CDU, SPD and FDP, reflecting a narrowly defined spectrum of acceptable opinion. This allowed for the ban of anti-constitutional parties — and even for the temporary stripping of the basic rights of individuals who oppose the “democratic order” too vehemently. Importantly, the text’s “safeguards” were excluded from any future change, even via a parliamentary majority.

Of course, many of these limits were also a consequence of the geopolitical context of the time — namely, Germany’s semi-sovereign status and its subordinate role within the US-centric imperial system. In many ways, under the American umbrella, the Federal Republic of Germany was established as a bulwark against socialism, which meant tightly bounding the new state into the US-led order through Nato and then the EEC. Seen in this light, the various safeguards embedded within the constitution were just as much aimed at avoiding the rise of a new Hitler as they were at keeping Germany firmly within the boundaries of the role assigned to it in the post-war geopolitical divide. This goes a long way to explaining the German establishment’s evolution into US “vassal-in-chief”, especially since the start of the Ukraine war, and its aggressive stance against those who dare to question its destructive consequences.

Once one understands the ideological premises of the German constitution — that the state must do whatever it takes to protect the status quo from any threats arising from the masses — the nation’s authoritarian turn starts to make sense. Far from being an aberration, this is exactly what the German post-war system was designed to do all along.

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.

Admittedly, Wagenknecht hasn’t gone out of her way to make friends. In her 2021 book Die Selbstgerechten (The Self-Righteous), she condemned the rise of a so-called “lifestyle Left” that was made up of “the academic middle class, software programmers, and marketing experts” whose obsessions with political correctness, climate change, and unregulated immigration threatened to alienate Die Linke’s supporters in the working class and among the unemployed. The attack was taken badly by her comrades, who saw the book as a declaration of “literal war against her own party” and “the marginalised”.

But perhaps Wagenknecht doesn’t need their support. For months now, rumours have been circulating in the German press that she is planning to found her own party before the end of the year. The tabloid Bild claims to have confirmed that the launch of the new party is imminent, while one Wagenknecht ally, the political scientist Ulrike Guérot, told the news magazine Cicero in August that she had been offered to run on the new party’s ticket for next year’s elections to the EU parliament. If Wagenknecht goes ahead with her plan, the German political landscape might realign in unprecedented ways, both condemning Die Linke to oblivion and possibly slowing the rapid rise of the AfD.

Born in 1969 to a German mother and an Iranian immigrant father in the former GDR, 54-year-old Wagenknecht was associated with the Stalinist party faction “Kommunistische Plattform” until 2010 when she left the group. Since then, she has noticeably moderated her image, dressing in conservative pantsuits, wearing her hair tightly pinned up — and approvingly quoting Roger Scruton’s “philosophy of belonging”, which she pits against the “individualism and cosmopolitanism” of the “lifestyle Left”.

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Still, she continues to appeal to popular anti-capitalist sentiments. Her worldview, which she first set out in her 2011 book Freiheit statt Kapitalismus (Freedom over Capitalism), sees the sovereign nation-state as the essential bulwark against what she calls a “rule-less, globalised capitalism”. National welfare systems exist, she writes in Die Selbstgerechten, “to protect domestic workers and domestic consumers” (the italics are hers). German Leftists, still deeply scarred by the country’s national socialist past, see such protectionist appeals to national interests as little more than far-Right dog whistles.

Yet to many, she is a bold tribune of the people. In her YouTube show, she presents herself, somewhat awkwardly, as a news anchor commenting on the latest news in simple German. She regularly advocates views that are commonly associated with the German Right, whether it be attacks on Covid vaccine mandates or the Biden administration, which she accuses of having sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines last year. A fierce critic of Germany’s membership of Nato, which she blames for having provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she demanded that the German federal government publicly reveal everything it knows about who blew up Nord Stream. But the Scholz administration responded enigmatically that “in the interest of the welfare of the state” the findings needed to be kept secret.

Predictably enough, Wagenknecht has been condemned as “Vladimir Putin’s voice in Germany”, especially after she helped initiate the Manifest für Frieden (Manifesto for Peace) petition in February that demanded an end to German weapons deliveries to Ukraine and a diplomatic settlement of the war. This ultimately triggered a falling out with her party: after she refused to condemn the support of the manifesto by Right-wing activists, Die Linke leadership denied its endorsement of the peace initiative.

Yet her actions drew praise from surprising corners. Björn Höcke, an influential voice of the AfD and an advocate for Russo-German rapprochement, suggested that Wagenknecht should join his party. His proposal, however, was clearly tongue-in-cheek — the AfD leadership is aware of the dangers that a Wagenknecht party would pose to its unprecedented rise in national polls. While the AfD would be the second strongest party in the Bundestag if elections were held today, a new Wagenknecht party might slice off as much as a third of its support. “We’ll need to regard a Wagenknecht party not as an ally but as a competitor,” Höcke said recently, adding that a Wagenknecht party would more likely provide “opposition within the ruling cartel than opposition to the cartel”.

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Neither side is keen on an alliance. Wagenknecht has regularly condemned the AfD as beyond the pale of acceptability and excluded any collaboration with it, despite overlapping on crucial issues such as immigration, Nato membership, and the reopening of the Nord Stream pipelines. “To me, any cooperation with the AfD is absolutely unacceptable”, said Amira Mohamed Ali, co-chair of Die Linke faction in the Bundestag and one of Wagenknecht’s closest allies who would most likely follow her into a new party. “The AfD is a party which in parts holds extreme Right-wing views… Many politicians in the AfD do not clearly distance themselves from the National Socialist era and its rhetoric.”

Such a view is common in German political discourse. The oppositional Christian Democrats (CDU), who were in power for most of the history of the post-war Federal Republic, most recently under the 16-year chancellorship of Angela Merkel, have self-imposed a so-called “Brandmauer” (firewall) that mandates a total prohibition on any collaboration with the AfD. The CDU party chair Friedrich Merz recently had to reaffirm his commitment to the firewall after causing an uproar when he told the public broadcaster ZDF that the party would have to be “pragmatic” at the local level if CDU council members were confronted with resolutions put forth by AfD politicians. His point was that if AfD members of a small-town council suggested repaving a road, the CDU faction shouldn’t reflexively oppose the measure.

Elsewhere, this firewall rhetoric has boxed the CDU into a corner. Recently, the party proposed a bill in the state parliament of Thuringia to cut taxes. But after the AfD faction voted in support of the bill, embarrassed handwringing ensued. Did the CDU inadvertently violate its own firewall by taking a position with which the AfD agrees? Should it withdraw proposals if it becomes clear that the AfD might endorse them? Some prominent CDU members indeed seem to believe so.

In this, the CDU has found an unlikely sympathiser in Amira Mohamed Ali. “What should they have done?” she told German media. “Refuse to propose a motion or withdraw it after the wrong ones voted for it? I find that rather absurd.”

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Might this present an opportunity for a future party led by Wagenknecht? While the AfD and a potential Wagenknecht party would likely denounce each other in public and promise no formal collaboration, on key issues of the day — such as the Ukraine war or energy policy — they could vote in line. And even though the AfD might earn smaller vote shares with Wagenknecht as a competitor, the two parties together may still earn a larger combined vote share than the AfD does by itself. This would allow them to form subtle coalitions on specific issues.

The status quo, by contrast, limits Wagenknecht’s reach because in national polls Die Linke is stagnating around the 5% mark that parties need to cross in order to gain seats in the Bundestag. In Sunday’s elections for the state parliaments of Hesse and Bavaria, the party incurred heavy losses and failed to win seats in either parliament — in Hesse, Die Linke earned only half as many votes as in the last elections five years ago. Prominent Linke politicians blame it all on Wagenknecht. “It is the stated goal of Wagenknecht and her associates to destroy Die Linke,” tweeted the Bundestag member Caren Lay.

But Wagenknecht could still lose her nerve. After all, this would not be her first time trying to launch a novel political organisation. In 2018, she helped to form an extra-parliamentary movement named Aufstehen (“Rise Up”), which she modelled after the British Momentum campaign of Jeremy Corbyn supporters, to provide grassroots support for her Left-wing goals. Yet the project quickly fizzled out after Wagenknecht complained that she felt “burned out” and withdrew from leadership.

If she proceeds, Wagenknecht will have the crucial support of Klaus Ernst. The former union executive helped to lead a sizable chunk of members out of the Social Democratic Party in 2005 to protest the party’s cuts to social welfare during the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder. He then helped to form the Left-wing social-democratic party WASG, which in 2007 merged with the Party of Democratic Socialism to become today’s Linke. Ernst, who is discontented with Die Linke’s support for “genderism” and apocalyptic climate activism, recently told Cicero that if Wagenknecht were to launch such a party, “it would really be a realistic option for me to participate”.

The combined vote share of Germany’s Nato-supporting mainstream parties is ever-shrinking as more and more Germans, especially in the East, feel alienated from Berlin and seek to punish their leaders by voting for disruptive populist forces. So far, the AfD has fought a lonely fight in total rejection of the status quo. If Wagenknecht starts to address many of the AfD’s complaints against Germany’s energy or foreign policy as well, the Right-wing populists may not be lonely for long.

Today, that political settlement has dissolved. Germany’s reliance on Russian gas has devastated its industrial economy, while the surface tranquillity of the Merkel era is a distant memory. Alternative für Deutschland, a far-Right populist party, has been the beneficiary of this chaos, surging in the polls to become the second-most popular party in Germany.

To understand this reversal of fortunes and what it means for Europe and the world, Freddie Sayers spoke to Wolfgang Munchau, former co-editor of FT Deutschland, and founder and co-director of Eurointelligence. Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Does the rise of the AfD represent a return to Germany’s far-Right past?

Wolfgang Munchau: If you look at the European far-Right parties, the AfD is quite special. Most of the far-Right parties are led by strong leaders: Le Pen, Meloni, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. They’re shaped in the image of their leaders. That’s not the case with the AfD. So if you wanted to draw some historical parallels with the Nazis in particular, they are very different in that respect. I often forget the names of the leaders — they have joint party chiefs — and they keep changing. There are lots of internal rebellions against them. This is a party that’s been very insurrectionary against its own leaders.

But they are on the far-Right: they have goals that I would consider incompatible with constitutional law. For example, one of the goals they recently pronounced was not only Germany’s exit from the EU (which is legal), but the disbandment of the EU, which is obviously not something that a country can do. Some members of the party have been outwardly antisemitic. I wouldn’t call the party officially antisemitic; it’s not like this is an antisemitic platform. But it has neo-Nazis in it.

FS: Fringe parties always attract fringe figures. Is it fair to judge a whole party — or in the case of the AfD, 20% of the general population who say they might support them — by just those few characters?

WM: No, I don’t think you can. It’s not helpful to characterise any party with a word or adjective. They are on the far-Right, that is clear. They’re not a conservative party. Would I call them fascist? No, and I don’t call Meloni a fascist either. She obviously has roots in the far-Right, in the fascist movement in Italy. But she has moved away and from what we see she governs from the centre-right. The AfD is different in the respect that its policies are very different from someone like Meloni, if you take Meloni as the other far-Right party, the one that actually succeeded to get into government. They want Germany to leave Nato, they want Germany to leave the EU — and the euro, of course.

FS: The original energy for the AfD came out of the immigration issue, particularly in 2015 when Angela Merkel accepted over a million refugees. How has the party’s support developed since then?

WM: 2015 was the moment when its support first grew. But by the 2021 election that had already ebbed away and the party was mostly occupied with internal strife and power struggles among party members. It only ended up at 10% at the 2021 election, which is only two years ago. What happened between 2021 and today is that the party doubled its vote, not much in West Germany, but dramatically in East Germany. To go from 10% to 20% in all of Germany means it had to do extremely well in East Germany, and in some parts of East Germany it is now the largest party. It has won its first mayoral election. It has won its first regional election. Previously, with a system of proportional representation, when you are 20% and nobody wants to form coalitions with you, you can have a lot of MPs and councillors sitting around, but you’re never in power. That is now starting to change — they now have their first people in office.

FS: You’ve previously written that East Germany is the German parallel to flyover country, the industrial heartlands that have been suffering over recent decades in places like the US and in Britain and other countries. That suggests that economics is a big part of the AfD’s appeal.

WM: This is the reason why the AfD is now gaining support. Germany’s economic performance is weak at the moment, for reasons that have to do with Germany’s economic model. The general storyline is that Germany did really well until recently and now it’s doing really badly. But the roots of that date back a long time ago. Germany made itself dependent on Russian gas and, as a result, it also made itself dependent on industry, because that was its strongest sector. It had huge export surpluses — Germany had a current account surplus for many years of 8% of GDP, which for a large industrial country is just mind-bogglingly large.

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FS: That was made possible, is it fair to say, by the European Union?

WM: That’s right. We have an internal market, and the currency also helps Germany, because what Germany always does when it is in a monetary union with others is it tries to obtain a competitive advantage by reducing wages, so that costs relative to others are lower, and they can’t adjust because the exchange rate is fixed. For Germany, the fixed exchange rates have always worked like a charm. Another huge factor was that this was the heyday of the fuel-driven car, of the diesel car, the heyday of oil heaters, and all the things that Germany did well. And it was also the time of massive globalisation, when countries like China and other developing countries needed equipment, machinery, and machine tools. And they bought them from Germany. Now that they’re in a much more mature phase of their economic development, they need them less. China has now for the first time flipped the trade balance in its favour.

FS: You mentioned energy. Obviously, Germany has been used to Russian gas and meanwhile, it’s been completely winding down its nuclear power. How much are these energy policies driving the AfD and the political instability?

WM: It is certainly one factor. The Greens insisted on the phasing out of nuclear power, and the other parties accepted that this was not something they wanted to fight because in Germany, you tend to lose these kinds of fights. Both Merkel and the SPD favoured the phasing out of nuclear power and it happened this year. The last power station was switched off in April. And it makes no sense. Because now all the Russian gas has gone and nuclear power is switched off and Germany has increased the share of electricity coming from coal — especially from brown coal, which is an incredibly dirty version — and CO² emissions are going up again.

FS: So by that account, voters can be legitimately angry — it feels like an own goal?

WM: It got worse earlier this year when the Government introduced the domestic heating bill. You’re going to have the same coming in the UK: the switch over from traditional gas heating and heating systems to heat pumps. And heat pumps work very differently from gas heaters. They’re more like air conditioning systems in terms of technology and the way they’re made. And the Government introduced an initial law that would force every homeowner to install a heat pump starting from January next year. I think there was a deadline for 2030 for existing homes, next year’s deadline was only for new homes. They’ve since watered it down a little bit, but still — how much does it cost to change your house’s heating system? Depending on the house, between £20,000 and £50,000, paid for by the homeowner.

FS: Who has £20,000-£50,000?

WM: Quite — especially East Germans, whose house values may not be much higher than £50,000. The government handled this terribly. And the rise of the AfD came in waves, and this was the last wave — the mishandling. That’s where it came from, from 15% or 16% in support to about 20%.

FS: Do you see this as a rejection of Left-leaning, idealistic but impractical, policies whose real-world effects are starting to be felt?

WM: I would say it is not fundamentally an issue of the Left vs Right. It is an issue of three incompatible parties in coalition trying to compromise — any two of them could have managed it better. For example, had this been Britain or the US they would not have given themselves the same fiscal constraints, which led to chronic underinvestment. This was a country that, when I grew up, was a high-tech country. Today, it’s a low-tech country. It’s struggling with digital technologies, it’s not investing in modern industries. Which is why its dependency on the old industries has become stronger, including its dependency on old diesel cars.

FS: That giant car industry is especially vulnerable now, because they’re not as good at manufacturing electric cars as they were at petrol cars. China has overtaken them.

WM: To put it mildly. The Germans were shocked to see that China came out of nowhere and within three years, China became the largest car exporter in the world. And German companies are struggling to sell their cars in China. That was a big surprise to them. The Chinese actually like their own cars. They are cheaper and they have features that the Germans cannot offer. And the reason for that is that China has the role in the electric car industry that Germany had in the old car industry, where Germany owned the supply chain.

It wasn’t just that the cars were made in Germany — that was almost the minor thing. Germany also owned the factories in the Czech Republic and Spain and many Eastern European countries, and bought them in Asia and then the United States. It was a giant network of suppliers. They championed just-in-time production and they owned the whole thing. Now, China owns the supply chain of the electric car. The batteries, the rare-earth magnets, and all the things that matter for lithium — the new gold. The Germans panicked and got Intel to build a factory for chips. But it’s still essentially geared towards cars. This is a country that had the facility and the ability to be a major player in the digital world and has given up on that.

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FS: So where does the blame lie for this? Can we make the case that the whole settlement for those decades was inherently fragile, and Germany above all was naive to think it would last forever?

WM: That’s right — and at the root of it is a system of neo-mercantilism, a reliance on industry for exports and a government that follows the wishes of industry. You remember the diesel scandal where they introduced cheating devices — the reason this came up in the United States and not in the EU was that the EU was looking the other way. The EU testing of cars was defunded, basically, compared to the United States.

So the German government helped companies — indirectly, maybe unwittingly — helped companies commit crimes. And it also adjusted its foreign policies according to corporate needs. The foreign policy of Germany was a business-driven foreign policy. It was not driven by geopolitical or other security interests, it was business-driven, and this has changed with this government. Germany’s model was dependent on globalisation, the type of globalisation which we had from 1990 to about 2020, and it was already fading in the years running up to Covid. Germany was dependent on the Russian gas flowing forever, and on globalisation lasting forever.

FS: These populist backlashes, the rise of parties like the AfD, are in some way understandable, angry reactions to decades of naivety and incompetence.

WS: That’s exactly what it is. It’s the result of a country’s economic model running into the ground. If you work for an industrial company that supplies the car industry, you know that your job isn’t going to be secure. There are a lot of fears about the future. And rightly so — if you’re trained to be a mechanical technician, you are right to be worried because the country may not be able to support enough jobs for this particular, highly specialised segment.

FS: What might happen next? Because the whole world order that we’ve been used to for all these decades is built on countries like Germany fulfilling these roles.

WS: The irony of the situation is, the stronger the AfD gets, the harder it is for governments, because under systems of proportional representation, it is difficult for centrist parties to form classic coalitions of the Left or Right. No one would ever go into a coalition with the AfD. So there’s the hard Right, and there’s also the Left Party, which might disappear. But there’s a prospect of another Left Party coming, which is specifically focused on the Russia-Ukraine war, a party of the Left that’s anti-Nato, anti-weapons deliveries for Ukraine. There is a lot of support for that in Germany. The country is really split on this.

FS: Do you have a sense of what proportion of the population shares those doubts about the policy in Ukraine?

WM: I think it’s about half? There was a recent poll asking about the next stage of weapons, deliveries of cruise missiles, and there was a strong majority against. Now that’s a specific question. The other polls that I’ve seen were in the 50/50 area and weakening. A bit like in the United States, it started with very strong support, and the support is still there, but it’s weakening, though it’s not flipped completely. But the longer this goes on, the harder it will become.

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FS: Could you not make a similar argument there that voters are seeing the impacts of that policy — on energy prices, on dividing the world economy, on bringing in a kind of new Cold War situation with Russia and China — and they don’t think it’s worth it?

WM: Oh, absolutely, that’s exactly the reason. They are making the connection between the support of Ukraine and the fact that they know that Germany is dependent on China and Japan and Russia. And they see that this is a policy, or a change in the world environment, that is not in Germany’s favour. Voters are not entirely stupid. When they vote for the AfD or for parties that are opposing this, they may be dependent on that old structure, or they may have known nothing else. There is a sense that this is now interrupted, and it is interrupted due to politics, and the Government is doing something unreasonable by supporting Ukraine.

FS: So it’s rational whether you agree with it or not.

WM: The AfD captures a lot of that. But there may soon be a party on the Left led by Sahra Wagenknecht, a very sort of maverick politician, who has left or who is on the verge of leaving the Left Party, who may be forming a new party of the Left. And that party was also on opinion polls at potentially 20% of the electorate.

FS: What programme might a new party offer that might capture wider support?

WM: I think the least likely programme is the one that I would suggest, which is: we’re going through a transition and it’s going to be hard. We need to remedy the lack of investment in modern technologies and we should accept that the future doesn’t lie in machine tools. So we should deregulate our bureaucracy and let companies be companies, and deregulate their taxes, and while we may not subsidise them, we will certainly leave them to flourish. And the country has enough talent, so they should be able to figure this out. What I’m suggesting is very boring in many ways — I think it would work, but it’s not going to happen.

But if there were a Trump-like character with a “Germany First” approach to industrial policy, something like what Gerhard Schröder was. I always thought of him and Berlusconi as the first European populists. They were centrists and there was nothing extreme about them in terms of their political views. They were just very pro-business. And I think some characters like that could re-emerge, to say: “This has been a mistake, the support for Ukraine, our support for the United States.” I think it would start off with becoming more US-sceptic.

The Germans hated Trump so much that they thought anyone who came after him was good. And they didn’t quite see how dangerous for them Biden would be. First of all, there is the anti-China policy that is really not in Germany’s economic interest. The US Inflation Reduction Act is a massive programme of subsidies for companies to leave places like Europe to resettle in the United States. A programme like this is causing enormous difficulties for German companies. Volkswagen, instead of investing in a massive factory in Germany which they had planned, are now doing this in the United States. There’s an awful lot of stuff like that happening.

What I could see happening is that a character would come in opposition to the United States, and I think that would probably be the focus, in saying: “We’re not a geopolitical nation, we are not good at this stuff. Let’s trade, let’s do what we’ve always done, and let’s be friends with our companies and let the needs of our industry dictate where we stand politically.” A pragmatic view. And if the war ends, it’s not our business who runs Russia or China.

FS: That would have huge ramifications for the world, if a party became popular in Germany that was explicitly saying: “Let’s just be pragmatic. Let’s make friends again with Russia. Let’s make friends again with China. Let’s worry about our economy and our energy prices and our industrial heartlands first, and leave international adventures to one side.”

WM: Exactly. I think they would probably phrase it the way you do, not in the Trump language. It would be basically what Merkel did. It’s not fundamentally different. Merkel sort of dabbled in geopolitics, but ultimately, that was the policy she deployed. Her big shortcoming, for which she’ll be remembered historically more than anything else, is the fact that this economic decline that Germany’s seeing now has its root in policies that she undertook but that didn’t have immediate consequences. During the Eurozone crisis, we always talked about kicking the can down the road, and used metaphors of that sort. But that is exactly what happened. Everything they did resolved none of the problems. There was always a long timetable for everything.

FS: If this current decline trajectory continues, what do you think happens to Germany and to Europe, without a strong Germany at its centre?

WM: People often make the mistake when of thinking Europe will blow up. I always get questions from the Eurosceptic British media like “Does this mean they will leave? Is there going to be another Brexit?” The biggest danger to the EU is not that it blows up. It’s not going to blow up; we’ve seen with the UK how difficult it is to leave. And if you have the euro as your currency, it will be 10 times as difficult to leave. I don’t think any country can do it.

The much bigger danger for the EU is that it becomes toothless and ineffective.

FS: We talk quite often about the West being in decline, but it sounds like Europe in particular is going to face a tough future.

WM: It’s going to be a tough period, that’s for sure. These periods end and countries have gone through periods of decline and then recovered. The UK was an example in the Seventies and Eighties. I can’t exclude that we strike lucky at some point again. But this is going to be a difficult period, and what makes me particularly sceptical is that I don’t see anyone who has an idea, a bright idea, of how to solve the problem, even if that person was only a fringe political figure. Most of the political debate is between people who want to subsidise industry and want to subsidise green technologies, but there’s never somebody who tries arrest the decline to see how one could change and innovate this economic model, or reform this economic model. It’s all the same, again and again.

There is a decline in the Western dominance in the world. And the EU being very dependent on the US for its protection but also dependent for globalisation for its economic success is in an impossible position. And it hasn’t even started to discuss what it needs to do to survive in this new world.

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FS: Hearing you talk about the likely trajectory of Europe, it puts the Brexit question into a slightly different colour. Big picture, at least in the UK we are at liberty to make a radical new economic pivot if we want?

WM: Except that you don’t! There would have been one valid and good Brexit argument that I would have accepted: “We will do Brexit because we can improve on the economic model. We can do this differently.” That’s not happening. I think this is the great tragedy of Brexit. The UK’s economic model was shaped by the government of the Eighties, with development zones, and it’s very much geared towards the Single European Market. You probably remember Heseltine, the Thatcher government, trying to position the UK as the prime location for international investors that were entering the European Single Market. The Blair administration continued this process of European business integration. And that was the business model: the City was the Eurozone’s banker in the UK. The UK didn’t want to join the Eurozone, but it wanted to be the bank of another currency zone.

One could have conceivably thought of a new age, a digital model, but the UK still has the same old rules— on data protection laws, for example, and many others. And that’s to do with the fact that British governments did not focus on this, given that the UK has a strong foundation in science and technology, just as Germany does, they could have used these strengths to forge a new business model around these ideas. That didn’t happen, and that’s why we’re reading stories of Brexit being a disaster.

FS: It is too late now?

WM: It’s not too late, it can be done. I said I don’t see anyone in German politics who actually focuses on the economic model, but I don’t see this in UK politics either. A prime minister who thinks he can reduce inflation, or an Opposition which basically wants to do the same thing as the Government is doing — but nothing that pertains to this debate. Whatever the differences are, it is not essentially about the economic model.

FS: If you were a betting man, which of Germany and the UK do you think will be in a relatively stronger position in 10 years’ time?

WM: I would say the UK.

To understand how the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) became Germany’s second-largest party, consider the events of the past five days. In an interview with the state broadcaster ZDF on Sunday, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), made the mistake of suggesting that he would be willing to work in a coalition with the far-Right party. Less than 24 hours later, after facing a barrage of outrage, he was forced into a humiliating U-turn. This is how Germany’s political class hopes to deal with the rise of the AfD: their political resonance is recognised, but any breaking of the cordon sanitaire around them is regarded as dangerous legitimisation.

Much as the mainstream parties have failed to stop it, liberal commentators have also struggled to comprehend the phenomenon. They blame the party’s rise on extraneous factors, from an insufficiently democratic culture in the east (where the AfD enjoys extensive support) to Russian disinformation. A new taboo seems to have been erected around even discussions of the AfD’s popularity, whereby attempting to understand their rise is seen as some kind of endorsement. But the reality is that the party has benefitted from saying out loud the ugly things that others won’t. It would be simpler if the AfD could be shrugged off as another evanescent populist movement. But while gaining from a generalised political dissatisfaction, in their language and rhetoric, they give voice to some fundamental objections to Germany’s political culture — some of which date back to the refounding of the modern nation in 1989.

There are more extremist elements in the party’s ranks which date even further back in Germany’s history. The party was bitterly divided during the pandemic over whether to expel Andreas Kalbitz, an influential former candidate for premier of Brandenburg, when it surfaced that he had been a member of a banned neo-Nazi organisation, German Youths Loyal to the Fatherland. Kalbitz held considerable sway over the party’s more extremist eastern division, whose members were staunchly opposed to his removal. But the AfD’s middle-class libertarian wing in the West insisted on kicking him out; in the end, this more moderate wing had the final say.

Yet today, the party still retains some odious figures. In June, prosecutors in Halle brought charges against Björn Höcke, the incendiary leader of the party’s Thuringia chapter and of its extremist Der Flügel faction, for using the Nazi stormtrooper line “Alles für Deutschland” at a public event in Saxony-Anhalt. And the extremist Right-wing elements within the AfD have increasingly been viewed as a security risk. In 2021, the AfD became the first post-war opposition party to be placed under surveillance by the domestic intelligence agency over fears of extremism.

Despite its Rightwards shift in recent years, the party has only grown more popular. And rather than attributing this to a tradition of neo-Nazi extremism, the reason for the AfD’s proximate rise is more straightforward — and for Germany’s ruling parties, self-inflicted. Above all, the AfD has successfully capitalised on widespread disenchantment with the ruling coalition.

This dissatisfaction is rich and various: there is ample discontent with the coalition’s immigration policies, energy and climate approach, economic policy and foreign policy, especially with respect to the war in Ukraine. Indeed, it seems there is very little that voters are not dissatisfied with, and the little support that the coalition still enjoys stems from simply not being the AfD. After the relative calm of the Merkel years, the back-to-back cataclysms of the pandemic and war in Ukraine have proven crippling for Germany’s political mainstream.

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For many, then, the AfD is a simple protest party: two-thirds of AfD voters say their support derives from disappointment with conventional parties, and only a third say they vote for the AfD out of conviction for its programme. And this is in keeping with the party’s historic strategy. Since their foundation 10 years ago, the AfD has shaped itself into an adaptable and protean vehicle for oppositional politics. Prior to the 2015 refugee crisis, this primarily came in the form of economic frustration. Founded as a free-market Eurosceptic party at the pinnacle of the euro crisis in 2013, the AfD initially opposed bailouts for southern European states and criticised Germany’s role in the euro, bemoaning her lost economic sovereignty.

But the refugee crisis would forever change its course. In that year, Germany took in nearly one million migrants, and the AfD seized on the attendant controversy by embracing a virulent new anti-migrant politics. The shift paid off enormously in the following elections. In 2017, the party secured representation in 14 of the 16 state parliaments and won 94 seats at the federal level to become the third-largest party in Germany. Today, the party’s stance on immigration still provides its bedrock of support.

The AfD’s message has resonated especially well in eastern Germany, where many of the exalted promises of reunification never materialised. Its affluent west has long struggled to fully acknowledge that the unparalleled moment of liberal triumph had serious downsides in its east. Between 1989 and 1991, more than 2.5 million people lost their jobs, while the number of workers in the manufacturing sector fell from 3.3 million to 1.7 million. Over 90% of East German factories and firms were bought up by West German companies. Seizing on this phenomenon of democratic disappointment, recent AfD campaigns have invoked and repurposed the rhetoric of 1989 (the Wende or “turnabout” of reunification), with calls to “complete” the unfinished revolution. For the AfD, the “establishment”, embodied in the conventional parties, constitutes another undemocratic imposition that must be removed as the DDR leadership once was. For instance, the AfD borrowed heavily from the so-called “peaceful revolution” around the fall of the Berlin Wall for its 2019 campaign in the eastern state of Thuringia. Their campaign materials were headed “1989-2019: Be There When History Is Made” and posters spoke of a “Wende 2.0”. The local leader, Björn Höcke, made the appropriation more explicit: “We’re completing the revolution!” he shouted at one rally.

He was drawing on an widely unacknowledged thrum of despondency in Germany’s political firmament. For the country’s victorious liberals, 1989 and the next year’s unification were a moment of unparalleled triumph. “This is a day of undiminished rejoicing,” Nato Secretary-General and former Defence Minister of West Germany Manfred Worner said in 1990. With such a self-congratulatory historical record, few wish to discuss the limitations and broken promises of transition. Instead of acknowledging that the “peaceful revolution” failed to deliver on its assurance of prosperity, they opt to blame the AfD’s popularity on the east’s “anti-democratic culture” produced by the experience of the “two totalitarianisms”, and condemn them for their “misuse” of the memory of unification. They fundamentally see the AfD’s popularity in the former DDR as a symptom of East Germany’s political immaturity.

But it isn’t democracy — or the free market — that AfD supporters in the east are against, nor do they seek a return to the DDR. First, the AfD has always been a virulently anti-redistributionist party. This makes the AfD somewhat distinct from other far-Right populist parties in Europe: it has never adopted pro-welfare policies or rhetoric in an effort to court voters from lower socioeconomic strata. Even less affluent AfD supporters report a preference for lower redistribution than the most affluent non-AfD supporters. Meanwhile, whatever their political conditioning, East Germans are also overwhelmingly supportive of democracy. A recent survey by EFBI revealed that 91% of East Germans identify with democracy as an idea, though less than half find satisfaction with the everyday practice and experience of democracy. And even as AfD moves further Right, it is increasingly seen as a “normal democratic party”. According to a survey by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research, 17% of Germans described the party in those terms in 2016; today, that number has risen to 27%.

The subtlety that has been missed is that the language of democracy, along with the rest of the rhetoric of 1989, has proven ideologically malleable — as easily deployed in service of the far-Right as in service of socially liberal politics. A lurid example came with the recycling of the slogan “we are the people”, originally borne on the revolutionary streets of Leipzig in 1989. In 2016, a mob of demonstrators, some of them supporters of AfD, shouted the slogan to protest the arrival of a bus carrying migrants in Clausnitz.

Yet however odious the twin rise of the German far-Right and the country’s wartime remilitarisation might sound, it is also significant that the militaristic impulse is not being driven by the AfD. Instead, it is the once-pacifist Greens that are leading the hawkish charge on the war in Ukraine. Here, the AfD has positioned itself as the anti-war opposition, calling for peace negotiations and restraint on sending arms. And there is evidence that the AfD’s nose for popular outrage is still serving them well. The “traffic light” coalition’s Ukraine policies are increasingly unpopular with large swathes of the electorate. A recent YouGov poll revealed that 55% of Germans now favour peace negotiations to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine, while only 28% are opposed.

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A secondary outcome of the Ukraine war has also helped to propel the AfD. As energy prices soared over the winter and German cities discussed turning off their streetlights, the AfD defined itself in opposition to the so-called “Green agenda”. A much-reviled government plan to phase out oil and gas-heating systems caused immense public backlash (a single heat pump costs between €11,000 and €25,000 per household). Even with a partial government subsidy of up to 40%, this is simply not affordable for many people in Germany. As a result, relatively poor AfD voters now regard the Green Party as the antagonist of working Germans; according to one poll support for the climate movement in Germany has halved from 68% to 34% in the last two years).

Added to this, of course, is a broader, more chastening realisation: Germany is no longer Europe’s economic powerhouse, no longer the continent’s workshop. Earlier this year, the country slipped into a technical recession, and the IMF now predicts the country’s economy will shrink by 0.3% this year, contradicting Olaf Scholz’s predictions. The heady days of unification, then, with the Deutschmark as an idol of West German affluence and a post-war pacifist tradition firmly intact, have given way to a much bleaker wartime reality. And as long as the AfD articulates this disenchantment the most powerfully, it will be the chief beneficiary of Germany’s fall from the heights of exception.

But something went wrong. In fact, it appears that the exact opposite has happened. The Greens have been eclipsed by the far-Right they were supposed to counter: the Greens are currently polling at 13%, while the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has seen its popularity soar to 20%. Since last summer’s high of 23-24%, the German Greens have plummeted ten points in the polls. And in Bremen last month, they saw their worst regional election result in the northern state in over 20 years.

The poor showing in the north-western city is symbolically significant: it was there that the party entered a state parliament for the first time, in 1979, as the Bremen Green List. And while Germany’s smallest state is not considered a bellwether, the loss is a reminder that the party remains deeply unpopular with vast swaths of the poor and working class. In Bremen, fears that the Greens’ climate policies will inflict harm on Germany’s industrial base are felt especially acutely: when the city’s powerful shipbuilding industry collapsed in successive waves in the Eighties and Nineties, tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs. The end of the Cold War compounded the devastation, as the city-state’s booming defence industry was subject to dramatic cuts.

To this day, Bremen has not recovered. The current unemployment rate stands at 11.4% — about twice the national average and the highest in Germany. One in four people is at risk of poverty. While the Greens have paid lip service to voters’s economic concerns, claiming that climate-friendly policies need not “come at the expense of social justice”, many are unconvinced. It is not difficult to see why. One of the Greens’s most controversial plans, which will probably come into force next year, will phase out old oil and gas heating systems, replacing them with climate-friendly heat pumps. The process is expected to cost up to €13,000 per household.

The Greens have always been perceived — rightly or wrongly — as a party of privilege. In 1979, the US ambassador to West Germany, Walter J. Stoessel J, described party members as “unpolitical dreamers, mellow lifestylers, counter-culture, anti-nuclear, anti-technology, back to nature romantics with a few cynical leftists thrown in for good measure”. He also noted that they “drew most of their supporters from the urban areas, specifically from well-educated middle and upper-middle class voters under 30”.

In its earliest days, the party was comprised largely of young militants. The Green movement emerged out of the tear gas and violence of the 1968 student revolt. It was virulently opposed to prevailing social norms, which they understood as not only inherently oppressive, but also key to understanding their parents’ submission to Nazism: “authoritarian” social structures, embodied by both the state and the family, could explain why the previous generation had so tragically failed to resist. The Greens concluded that society could inoculate itself against the resurgence of fascism through the deliberate destruction of social taboos.

This line of thinking led the young Greens down a dark path. The protests of 1968 had revived interest in the works of Freud disciple Wilhelm Reich, who described the supposed links between authoritarian submission and sexual repression. In his book Mass Psychology of Fascism, he wrote: “Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, ‘good’ and ‘adjusted’ in the authoritarian sense … it paralyses the rebellious force.” Influenced by these works, early Green party members pushed for the removal of the two sections of Germany’s penal code that criminalised sex between adults and children.

There were also visible manifestations of paedophile activism during the Eighties. “Paedosexual” rights groups showed up at Green Party events in Nuremberg, bringing with them street children housed at the Indianerkommune. About a decade ago, the Greens ordered an investigation into the party’s past involvement with pro-paedophilia groups and child sexual abuse. During the investigation, it was discovered that the influence of paedophiles on the party was much stronger than previously thought — and that for a brief period in the mid-Eighties, the Greens “practically served as the parliamentary arm of the paedophile movement”. In November 2014, the party held a press conference, at which leaders apologised to the victims of sexual abuse.

It was a long, strange trip for the Greens from the tear-gas choked streets of 1968 to the Reichstag. But in 1998, the party at last entered national government as part of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s “third way” coalition. Power would quickly render them unrecognisable: within a year, the pacifist party was breaking the post-WWII German taboo of going to war.

The Greens occupied the foreign ministry then, and at its helm was Joschka Fischer, the leading figure of the party’s “Realo” wing – the realistic, more mainstream segment of the party that was amenable to compromise with established parties. The Realos clashed with the “Fundis” — party fundamentalists who believed that the Greens should never abandon their founding principles. This internal clash reached a zenith in 1999 with the Kosovo War. While Fischer supported participation in the Nato intervention on humanitarian grounds, the Fundis were wary about Germany bombing a city that the Nazis had attacked 58 years previously. After a bitter debate, Fischer’s Realos won out. The Green Party forever abandoned its pacifism, and Germany its unofficial prohibition on war.

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Schroeder and the Greens presided over an increasingly unpopular “neoliberal shock-therapy programme”, and in 2005, they were voted out. The Greens were in opposition for 16 years until 2021, when they returned to power with their strongest ever electoral showing. The party took about 14% of the vote in the federal election, and became part of the “traffic-light coalition”. The Greens had five key ministries, with party leader Annalena Baerbock becoming minister of foreign affairs, while her co-leader Robert Habeck became minister of economic affairs and climate action. They promised a new clean politics, uncomplicated by the baggage of the two major parties.

But it soon became clear that Greens can be as dirty as anyone else. This spring’s “best-man affair” revealed that Habeck’s state secretary, Patrick Graichen, had helped get the best man at his wedding appointed head of the state-owned German Energy Agency (Dena). Further investigation revealed that Graichen had also approved government funding for a climate protection project that his sister had worked on. A few days after the Greens were defeated in Bremen, Graichen resigned. He had been a major player in Germany’s decarbonisation efforts; his resignation signalled another stinging defeat. The scandal has also hurt Habeck’s popularity. In September 2022, 57% of Germans polled said Habeck was doing his job well; when asked the same question last month, that number had fallen to 39%.

More worrying for the party, however, is that their climate policies are increasingly unpopular. According to one Allensbach survey, 80% of Germans are opposed to the plan to phase out fossil fuel heating systems next year. Some say that voters are fatigued by the back-to-back shocks of Covid and the war in Ukraine, and are therefore reluctant to accept more dramatic transformations to their way of life. Indeed, the current conditions in Europe are not fertile ground for the Greens: recent academic research has shown that Green parties are most successful in good economic times. Meanwhile, far-Right ones thrive in times of crisis, and the Greens have provided them with plenty of fodder. The AfD have characterised the party’s environmental policies as “climate hysteria” and “eco-dictatorship” — aiming both to mobilise “climate sceptical” voters against the Greens and fuel polarisation against the issue.

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But the Greens are also under fire from their activist base for abandoning some of their own signature policies. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the German government scrambled to end its dependence on Russian gas. This entailed making compromises on coal and nuclear power. But for climate activists, the biggest betrayal was the Greens’s “backroom deal” with the German multinational energy firm RWE, which allowed for the razing of Lutzerath to make way for a coal mine. Well-publicised protests and activist occupation of the town followed; Greta Thunberg was even detained there by German police. Adding insult to injury, a long-time aide to the Green party leader took a job as chief lobbyist with RWE.

These days, it seems that the only thing the Greens will not compromise on is war, sometimes out-hawking Washington in their rhetoric. Critics have characterised Baerbock’s tenure as foreign minister as undiplomatic, even hostile to diplomacy; her defenders more charitably describe her approach as “straight talking”. In her opposition to peace negotiations, she is also opposed to German public opinion. Last month, a YouGov poll commissioned by DPA revealed that 55% of Germans now favour peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine; only 28% are against them. Furthermore, 54% of Germans are against inviting Ukraine to join Nato; only 27% support it. Meanwhile, the AfD have defined themselves in opposition to the Greens on the war in Ukraine, fashioning themselves as Germany’s “peace party”. AfD MP Petr Bystron claims that the party’s popularity surged in the polls immediately after the unveiling of their peace plan. Indeed, with their denunciations of BlackRock and American arms companies, AfD sound a lot like the Greens of yesteryear.

Keen observers note that AfD’s appropriation of peacenik rhetoric is a clever smokescreen for a worryingly pro-Russian agenda. Some media reports allege that Bystron recently made a secret trip to Belarus. Nevertheless, supporters of the Green’s foreign policy will eventually have to contend with the mounting public opposition to their current approach, beyond labelling critics Putinists or unwitting dupes of Russian propaganda. Opposition to uncompromising German militarism predates Putin, let alone Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, by many decades — and no one should understand it better than the formerly pacifist party.

In the failure of the party that was supposed to lead the “green wave” across Europe, there lies a lesson for environmentalists everywhere. Green parties cannot succeed unless they shake their associations with liberal privilege; from today’s vantage point, they seem like a luxury from better times. The public has roundly rejected the naïve idea that the Greens are “outsiders” charting a new, exciting kind of politics. Instead, voters see them as part of politics as usual, even if their machinations are hidden behind pretty verbiage and green paint. Far from embodying a hopeful, unifying message for Europe, then, Germany’s Green dream is out of reach for too many; in fact, it looks like little more than the right to purchase a clear conscience while demanding that the poor subsidise it.

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.

Anyone doubting that this remains the case need only consider the now resurgent debate around nationalism. Recent works by Yoram Hazony and Rich Lowry among others have addressed the case for nationalism, yet for all the strengths of their arguments, they all face one giant hurdle: the past.

Across the world nationalism is rarely seen as a problem in and of itself, let alone the worst political problem of all. Throughout Africa, the Middle East and Far East nationalism has been a mixed blessing, but aside from some religious conservatives (who have their own beef with it) it is rarely seen as the locus of bad ideas.

Only in Europe does nationalism ring differently, with something like a feeling that Europeans cannot be trusted with the stuff.

And yet it isn’t quite the case that nationalism is forbidden in Europe: the British are allowed some of it; the Scots certainly have a dose, and so do many other parts of the continent. The real problem is Germany. Even three-quarters of a century after the Second World War, it remains the case that the deepest problem with nationalism is that people are concerned about whether the Germans can be trusted with it. Try it for yourself: “Resurgent German nationalism”. How does it look to your mind’s eye? How does it poll in your personal barometer of political acceptability?

It is one of the reasons why, when you survey the moving political landscape in Europe, Germany is the country that is still different from all the others. The horrors of the 20th century are so well known that even mentioning the fact is a form of cliché, yet still, even in 2020, the country’s politics remain haunted by the mid-century crime scene.

The feeling remains that it was something in the blood, or the water, or the air, or the ideas or the philosophy or all of these and more. The feeling that even after all this time, all this study and knowledge, we’re still not completely certain why the country did what it did. And a feeling that in the meantime we have to keep an extra close eye on developments there.

This close attention was exemplified by the news in May that a sergeant-major in the German army had been arrested by police commandos at his house in Calw. There the officers found a cache of arms and explosives plus a quantity of Nazi memorabilia, including SS magazines.

While the foreign press might have got a tad over-excited, talking about the Calw arrest as though it was the start of a Robert Harris novel, the whole thing rings obvious warning bells. A potential Nazi in the ranks of the German army is more concerning than a potential Nazi in any other nation’s army, for reasons too obvious to be spelt out.

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A similar sensitivity exists in German politics. Where other countries might be trusted with Right-wing and even nationalist parties, the political consensus here is policed more strictly than anywhere else. Right-wing economics may be accepted, but on all cultural issues the borders of acceptable belief are strictly patrolled, and those that step over the line face the consequences.

No party has demonstrated this more clearly than Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), only founded in 2013 on the back of a movement involving a number of journalists, lawyers, academics and others. At that stage its manifesto and platform were centred almost entirely on criticism of the fiscal policies of the eurozone, the flatlining of the Mediterranean economies and the vast bailouts that resulted from the financial crash of 2008 and resulting eurozone crises.

Throughout this period the feeling was growing that Germany was constantly having to bail out its irresponsible southern partners, and so the potential was there for a fiscally separatist movement to arise.

But once it formed into a political party the AfD became explicitly anti-euro, losing those founding figures who favoured a constructive-critical attitude to the currency. Perhaps it was inevitable that a party defined by a policy that was still so far from the political mainstream would attract a certain number of the politically homeless and even malcontent, but the number of skins, and people, that the AfD shed throughout its formative years was striking by any standards.

This was also a result of the party’s extraordinarily swift growth. Within months of its founding the AfD was represented in all 16 German states, and in the Federal elections it won just under 5% of the vote, only just missing out on entering the Bundestag. But the party did manage to enter state parliaments for the first time, and the following year the European Parliament with seven members.

Over the following years this upward trajectory continued, and there was one factor — as in other countries across the continent — which particularly contributed to this: the 2015 European migration crisis partly created by German chancellor Angela Merkel.

By the time of the crisis the AfD had already begun to shift its focus, its eurozone-scepticism taking a back seat to a wider set of priorities which the American scholar of modern European political movements Daniel Pipes has characterised under the umbrella of “civilisationist” parties. With the election of Frauke Petry to the leadership of the party, the AfD was increasingly keen to talk about immigration, Islam and issues of identity.

Of course, Germany being Germany, every millimeter of this terrain was fought over with exceptional bitterness. The media here had already come to expose and condemn the statements of the most minor members of the party, but with each fresh scandal the core of the AfD was reduced, as a concoction might reduce over a sustained flame.

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Each accusation of xenophobia or right-wingery had the same effects seen in other countries in Europe; some moderate conservatives were chased away for fear of being associated with anything even accused of being “far-right”, while people who were genuinely far-right tried to migrate towards what they believed or hoped could be their home. People who were already in the party had to judge where their own personal political limits might lie.

In the aftermath of the migration crisis the AfD’s poll performance made a set of predictable leaps. In regional elections in Pomerania in September 2016 the party beat Merkel’s CDU into third place, while in Berlin it entered the state capital’s Parliament for the first time after receiving a 14.1 per cent share of the vote. Within four years of its founding the AfD was represented in most of the country’s states.

Of course this did not go unopposed. The day before the AfD’s success in Berlin the city’s mayor, Michael Müller (of the centre-left SDP) declared that a double-digit percentage return for the AfD would “be seen around the world as a sign of the return of the right wing and the Nazis in Germany”.

Despite such warnings, and increasingly fractious internal wrangles, the party continued to do well. Their success culminated in September 2017 when voters gave Merkel’s Christian Democrats their worst result since 1949 and the AfD became the third largest party in the Bundestag, with 94 seats. By any standards it is one of the most extraordinary political rises in recent European history: from nowhere to the official opposition in the Bundestag in just four years.

An hour after the Bundestag results came in the AfD’s joint leader, Alexander Gauland, declared that he would “hunt down the government, Mrs Merkel, and get our country and people back”. It was not exactly the sort of overheated declaration that would ease worries about the rise of the party, and that discomfort has grown since, both at home and abroad.

Outside of Germany this alam stems from a range of factors, one of which, without doubt, is sheer laziness. Then there is opportunism, so that in April 2019, when Jacob Rees-Mogg retweeted a speech by Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD’s deputies in the Bundestag, criticising the Merkel government’s handling of the Brexit negotiations, it was seized on by Labour MPs, who sought to paint the AfD as an out-and-out racist and even Nazi political party.

This is simplistic and incorrect, based on a very limited knowledge of the situation in Germany, yet there are certainly individuals near the top of the party who cause concern not only to outsiders but to party members themselves. For instance, I have spoken to several figures in the AfD who have expressed concern over the views of the leadership in Thuringia, in the former East Germany.

Bjorn Hocke in particular has become a lightning-rod of such concerns, not least after a 2017 speech in which he appeared to minimise the Holocaust. In contrast, in most of the statements of a figure like Beatrix von Storch there is nothing that would not be deemed perfectly normal political sentiment in the Conservative Party or Ukip in the period of Nigel Farage’s leadership.

Within the party there seems to me a knowledge that the whole thing could go in any number of ways, towards the more mainstream right or further towards and beyond the boundaries. A party in such flux and on such a swift trajectory as the AfD has been is worthy of serious psychological analysis, yet such analysis has been almost completely lacking in the German media, let alone in the wider international one.

The story of “far-right on the rise in Germany” is simply too potent — and legitimately potent — a force to be responded to by a phrase like “It’s more complicated than that”. But it is more complicated than is currently assumed, and a huge amount will be riding on whether Germany can cope with the complexities involved.

This will include the question of whether sentiment against mass immigration is permissible in Germany, as it has become permissible across the rest of the continent. It will rely on whether the right to defend or speak up for European identity are considered respectable in 21^st Century Germany or not. And hardest of all (and this is something that people can reasonably feel torn over) whether any defence of German cultural identity is possible in the wake of the 20^th century and the painful, jarring ringing that such calls inevitably cause for very many people.

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Personally, I remain torn on these questions. From my many visits to the country I have come to think that there is something not just wrong but cruel about saying to young Germans that they should in some way be treated with suspicion, or deprived of the right to feel pride in their culture, because of the reprehensible things that went on in their country before their birth.

And yet, like many others, I also feel nervous. Can anyone say with total confidence that they know what could and could not bubble up in an era such as the one we are entering? Could anyone honestly put their hand on their heart and say that they are as willing to allow the Germans to be nationalistic, as other nations are allowed to be? The question remains almost impossible to answer in the affirmative, and yet Germans must also be allowed to feel pride in their culture and wish to protect it.

These are not just civilisational issues: they are issues of deep, practical, day-to-day political concern. A concern that the AfD has the opportunity to answer, or to blow apart.

The furthest edge of the European Union has recently become the centre of the continental bloc’s attention; and what happened in Kastanies is reverberating in Brussels, Paris and Berlin, as Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, humiliated by the loss of at least 33 Turkish soldiers in an airstrike in Syria’s Idlib, takes his rage out on Europe.

Since the multi-billion Euro refugee deal with Europe in 2016, Erdogan, like Gaddafi before him, has wielded the prospect of unleashing an unstoppable wave of migrants as a threat against the soft, rich and disunited European powers he incessantly rails against.

Until now, the threat has always worked, both for extracting Danegeld at will from fearful European leaders, especially the perennially pliant Angela Merkel, and for ensuring European acquiescence to his military adventures in Northern Syria. Among them, the January 2018 invasion of the Kurdish region of Afrin, and the October 2019 invasion of the country’s Kurdish-dominated northeast each saw hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians flee their homes in the face of war crimes carried out by Turkey’s rebel proxy militias and a systematic Turkish campaign of ethnic cleansing and forced demographic change.

But this week, when Erdogan finally pulled the trigger, European leaders did something few expected, least of all the Turkish despot himself: they said no, and pulled together in what became the first display of European diplomatic unity and common purpose since Brexit unsettled the fragile union.

Erdogan had hoped that European leaders would support his faltering war against the Syrian government and its Russian backer in the county’s northwestern Idlib governorate. Here Assad’s forces, backed by brutal and indiscriminate airstrikes against civilians as well as the mixed rebel and al-Qaeda-linked jihadist forces backed by Turkey on the ground, are regaining territory lost in the first years of the almost decade-long war, causing one million civilians to flee their homes in the process.

Erdogan’s propaganda channels, like the state-run broadcaster TRT, linked the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of migrants at Greece’s border with the humanitarian crisis in Idlib, claiming that the huddled masses seeking to gain entrance to Europe were fleeing Russian and Syrian government bombing. Despite this claim being boosted by well-meaning Western commentators, it is entirely untrue. The dispossessed of Idlib remain trapped in Idlib, barred from entering Turkey by the second-largest wall on earth, manned by Turkish border guards ordered to use lethal force to prevent their entry.

Instead, the flow of migrants who appeared at Greece’s border demanding onward passage to the UK, Germany and Sweden were drawn from the migrant underclass of Istanbul and other Western Turkish cities, mostly Afghans from the country’s Hazara Shia minority working in the country’s booming sweatshops as well as Pakistanis, Moroccans and other recent migrants drawn in by visa-free travel to what has become the easiest point of access to the European Union.

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Lied to by the Turkish state, which informed them that Europe’s borders were now open, they were then bussed to the border in free coaches laid on by the Erdogan government for this sole purpose. When they realised that the border was closed, they attempted to gain entry by force, hurling rocks and tear gas grenades at the Greek soldiers and police guarding the border, or rushing weak sections of the border fence as Turkish police fired tear gas at Greek officials to distract them, and used armoured cars to pull down the border fence.

The images of an angry mass of mostly economic migrants attempting to enter Greece by force, urged on and openly supported by Turkish security forces, have awoken a strong feeling of patriotic and indeed nationalist sentiment in Greece, where the new conservative government has directly labelled the events at the border as a form of hybrid warfare, in which Erdogan utilises migrants as weapons and the Turkish and international media as a force multiplier to secure his aims.

Civilian hunters, fishermen and military reservists from border villages have formed semi-official patrol groups along the frontier, capturing and detaining migrants who have broken through and handing them to the Greek army and police for immediate return to Turkey. Convoys of military reinforcements trucked to the frontier have been met by applauding crowds as they trundle through the towns and villages of Greece’s border regions, where many Greeks see the sudden, forced migrant crisis as part of Erdogan’s longstanding campaign to weaken Greek sovereignty over areas of the nation only liberated from long centuries of Ottoman rule in 1913, and which Erdogan repeatedly threatens to take back under Turkish control.

It is unclear why Erdogan attempted to achieve his goals in this precise fashion, using unhappy humans as weapons in a manner directly contradicting claims that this crisis has its roots in Syria. Greek government statistics disseminated to journalists last week asserted that of the 252 migrants who had then been detained after illegally entering Greece over the land border, 69% were from Afghanistan, 19% from Pakistan and only 4% from Syria- fewer than the 5% from Turkey itself.

If Erdogan had wanted to round up a sufficient number of genuine Syrian refugees to hurl at the border, he could easily have done so. But by weaponising a random assortment of migrants of dubious or non-existent refugee status, the Turkish government not only weakened its case to be acting out of a humanitarian desire to assuage Syria’s human misery, but has also weakened the entire concept of asylum in the eyes of European observers and voters.

The Greek government’s response, halting all new asylum claims, whatever their merits, until the end of the border crisis and immediately returning all new arrivals to Turkey, has met with the warm approval of Europe’s political mainstream.  Greece has been termed Europe’s “shield” in a newly warlike turn of phrase, and €700m of support for new border infrastructure has been pledged, as well as hundreds of personnel to repel attempts to enter what is now an officially sanctioned Fortress Europe.

The massive disjunct between the Turkish government’s narrative of events at the border and that witnessed by journalists on the Greek side has also highlighted the sadly now firmly established weaponisation of media in 21^st century conflicts. In attempting to expand the Syrian war to the frontiers of Europe, Erdogan also expanded the online meta-conflict to the sphere of European politics, a trend which will not enhance ordinary consumers’ trust in the news they watch and read.

Accelerated by social media, the Syrian War has blurred the distinction between protagonist, activist, analyst and journalist like no previous conflict. As various factions and proxy militias battle on the ground, this meta-conflict between western commentators rages on social media, as each side, radicalised by the secret DM groups in which they communicate, attempts to sway the public narrative in their chosen direction.

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Consequently, those journalists and commentators keen to promote Western military intervention in Syria on behalf of either the civilians or armed rebel groups of Idlib have uncritically shared Turkish narratives of desperate Syrians pleading to enter the safety of Europe, despite their almost total lack of correspondence with reality.

As Stalin learned nearly a century ago, and other dictators have realised since, Western journalists will quite happily ignore the evidence of their own eyes if doing so allows them to flaunt their humanitarian and progressive values, a situation drastically exacerbated by Twitter.

Yet whatever the merits of Western military intervention in Syria, the dire situation of the country’s civilians will not be improved by allowing Turkish-resident Afghan and Pakistani economic migrants to enter Europe en masse whenever Erdogan deems it useful. Instead, by eroding the already-waning attachment of European voters to the very concept of asylum, Erdogan’s cynical border gambit will do great harm to those genuine victims of conflict, now and in future, who need it most.

What Erdogan did not realise is that the Europe of 2015 no longer exists, shunted into distant, unrecoverable history by the political hangover of that year’s refugee crisis. The wave of right-wing populism that has eviscerated Europe’s once dominant centre-left now threatens the continent’s centre-right, causing mainstream conservatives to shift dramatically rightwards for their own survival. In 2015, right-wing populists in Hungary and Poland were shunned outliers in the European system, written off as aberrations from an only semi-liberalised Mitteleuropa. Five years later, right-wing populists are the rising challengers even in the continent’s western heartlands.

In France, only a few percentage points separate Le Pen from Macron for dominance entering next year’s presidential election. In Italy, the likelihood is that Salvini will assume power within the next year or so, most likely in coalition with the far more radical Brothers of Italy party. In Spain, the outlandishly Francoist VOX party seeks to enter coalition government with mainstream conservatives nationally, as it already has in Madrid.

In Sweden and Finland, the heartlands of the Nordic social democracy so beloved by British and American liberals, right-wing populist parties seeing to halt migration and overturn the liberal consensus are the most popular political forces in each country.

In Germany itself, the entire political system has been paralysed by the rise of the right-wing AfD party in response to Merkel’s handling of the 2015 crisis, with Merkel taking six months to form a government after the 2017 election, and German politics now reducible to a series of experiments in unlikely and unstable coalitions just to keep the populists out of power.

The country has also been shaken by a series of extreme right-wing terror attacks against both ethnic minorities and pro-migration politicians alike, and a rolling drumbeat of alarming incidents of radicalisation within the German security forces, like the 2017 Day X plot in which troopers in the German equivalent of the SAS allegedly conspired to assassinate liberal politicians, including the country’s president, and launch a guerrilla campaign against the state.

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In Austria and Denmark, the onward march of right-wing populism has been halted, but only by centrist governments of right and left adopting the rhetoric and policies of the populist right, including a zero tolerance approach to illegal migration. It is little wonder that Orban himself has declared the European Union’s reponse to this crisis a moral victory: the policies he was shunned for in 2015 are now the stated policy of the European Union as a whole, with Europe’s mainstream conservatives falling over themselves to claim Greece’s hardline border policy as their own.

This is not, as an aside, the Europe that Britain’s FBPE contingent so idealised during our own long-running political crisis, but it is the continent’s political mainstream for the foreseeable future. Given that the majority of Afghan and Pakistani migrants will have aimed for the UK as their ultimate destination, drawn by long-existing communities of fellow kin and a facility with the national language, it is ironic that at the same time Turkish police were firing volleys of tear gas at their Greek counterparts to enable their entry, Dominic Raab was in Ankara declaring his full-throated support for Turkish foreign policy, despite the fact that its success at Europe’s borders would direly threaten his own government.

The European Union — with the exception of Merkel’s Germany, lumbering distractedly and painfully towards geopolitical irrelevance — has finally awoken to the threat posed to the continent by a Turkish autocrat lurching from one self-engineered crisis to another in his desire not to relinquish his hold on power.

Threatened at home by a secular Kemalist section of the electorate dissatisfied at the country’s bloody and so far unsuccessful war in Syria, by the presence of millions of refugees, by slow-motion economic collapse and by the country’s growing slide into authoritarian Islamism, Erdogan survives only by engineering crises which pit the Turkish nation against the world. Switching from the United States to Russia to Europe and back again as the existential foe of the moment, Erdogan’s Turkey is the greatest destabilising factor in our near abroad.

Claiming that Turkey’s borders as settled by the 1923 treaty are too small to contain the might and needs of the Turkish nation, Erdogan has effectively annexed large chunks of northern Syria, expanded its military presence in Iraq and Libya, claiming them to be within the Turkish “borders of the heart,” and threatens constantly to invade and annex Greece’s eastern islands.

It is only by chance that the 2016 coup attempt against him failed and that Turkey avoided a serious civil conflict, and Europe will need to be similarly fortunate to avoid being dragged into a conflict of the autocrat’s choosing in the near future. The chances of a peaceful transition of power away from Erdogan are exceedingly slim, and Europe, including Britain, will need to reassess its relations with its unhappy neighbour sooner rather than later, a process begun, it seems, at a sleepy Balkan border crossing the Turkish strongman last week turned, on a whim, into a battlefield.

It has been a given in Europe since the post-war period that parties of the Left can migrate. Many such groups had their origins in communist or other far-Left movements, but have found over time (especially once they gained some element of political power) that they lost their extreme elements and became parties of the political centre. Can this happen with parties from the other end of the spectrum?

To even ask this question is to raise concerns. During the 20th century the European continent was rocked between the twin nightmares of communism and fascism. And if those countries which suffered under communism remain particularly sensitive to parties which might like to replay their version of the 20th century, so it is inevitable that countries which suffered under Nazism and its catastrophic vision should remain sensitive to any efforts to replay that disaster.

For anyone surveying this landscape, two big questions stand out. The first is whether the appellation actually holds. Is “far-Right” an accurate description of the party in question? Or it is simply something that is said of a particular party by its political opponents in order to keep themselves in power and their opponents in political quarantine?

The second is whether, if the label was once accurate, it remains so. This is in some ways the harder question, because just as things can go one way, so they can go another, and just as a party may moderate, so it may de-moderate, or radicalise. Much depends on the intensity of the focus kept on them and the knowledge of the people doing the analysis.

On such a delicate question it is certainly the case that we can never know enough, but across Europe these questions need to be asked — not least in order to address a political conundrum which lies perhaps even below the questions raised above. Who can we trust?

Across the European continent, this question is made sharper by the fact that we live with a curious unsolved paradox. The continent had a different 20th century from Britain or America. So there are parties of the Right which undoubtedly had origins in — or at least survived through — the worst years of the last century.

This means that there are parties — Vlaams Belang, formerly Vlaams Blok, in Belgium might be a good example — which have histories mired in collaborationism and worse. Additionally there are parties which were formed after the war ended but whose founders were personally steeped in the same. The Freedom Party in Austria falls into this category, and for many voters such origins make these parties irrecoverably tainted.

But, if those old parties are compromised by their past, then what are we to make of new parties?  The experience of Germany and the reception of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party since its creation in 2013 highlights this difficulty. If old parties are suspect and new parties are suspect, then what are analysts to do and where are voters to go?

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One case study comes from Sweden, which in recent years has witnessed one of the most interesting political tales of our time, that of the Sweden Democrats.

Their story is interesting for a number of reasons, the first being that it is a story of a relatively new political party. Founded in 1988, the SD was then and for some years afterwards undeniably — indeed identifiably — a movement of the far-Right. Its party programme was racist. Its founders were open in their white nationalism and in stances that might be summed up as Swedish fascism. Their electoral performance was negligible, with voters understandably put off by the party’s extremism and militancy. SD events were patrolled by fellow extremists including, on occasion, members of the British neo-Nazi movement Combat 18.

At the same time, Sweden itself was undergoing significant changes. During the 1990s, immigration hugely increased, into what had previously been a highly ethnically homogenous country. Migration from the Balkans during the civil wars brought new challenges, including forms of criminality involving organised gang crime. This raised questions to do with integration and what Sweden expected of new arrivals, which in turn raised deeper questions of national identity and what it means to be Swedish.

A few writers and journalists began to question the confused Swedish consensus on these issues, among them Thomas Gür, a Swedish journalist of Turkish origin whose Staten och nykomlingarna came out in 1996. Gür, bravely for the time, described “the illusions of immigrant policy”, asking what values actually lay behind these policies and how integration policies were to be implemented. Such questions began to cut through because they were clearly on people’s minds.

But Sweden has another characteristic that is very striking to any outsider: a media and political class that is remarkably unified in its opinions. Back then it was in complete agreement on the issue, but even now the bandwidth of sayable, received opinion in Sweden remains narrower than in almost country in Europe, except perhaps Germany.

Research into the political sympathies of Swedish journalists carried out in 2011 showed that almost half were sympathetic to the Green Party, with the Left Party and Social Democratic Party following some way behind. In contrast just 14% of Swedish journalists had sympathy with the Moderate Party (Sweden’s centre-Right liberal-conservative party) while support for the Sweden Democrats was at 1%, which was within the margin of error (ie it could be closer to zero).

An example of their groupthink came in 1993, when the paper Expressen broke the immigration taboo and published an opinion poll which showed that 63% of the Swedish electorate wanted immigrants to return to their countries of origin. As the paper noted in its editorial: “The Swedish people have a firm opinion on immigration and refugee policies. Those in power have the opposite opinion. It does not add up. It is an opinion bomb about to go off.” The editor-in-chief was promptly sacked.

The opinion bomb that he predicted in fact turned out to be a slow and far less explosive release. In the 1990s the Sweden Democrats, perhaps seeing the electoral opportunity before them, began to moderate, though their party leadership and membership made the possibility of serious reform impossible.

Then in the 2000s, four young men from the next generation spied an opportunity. All were united in their worries about immigration, integration and the question of preserving Swedishness. All were concerned by the fact that conversations that were possible in the rest of Europe were not happening in Sweden. These men effectively had two options in front of them: to found a new party, or to take over an existing one. Perhaps mistakenly — for it may well have been easier to have just started from scratch — they decided to take over the Sweden Democrats.

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Throughout the 2000s, these men, led by Jimmie Akesson, carried out a steady purge of racist elements within the party. The biker gang types went, and as they went a new type of member became willing to join in their place. Five years ago I visited a SD conference in the centre of Sweden and saw it for myself. If the party had put a mere veneer on its racist front, then it would have been hard to sustain in such a place far outside of the respectable centres of Stockholm. The members were to a man and woman reasonable-sounding working- and middle-class Swedes whose conference centred on a desire to affirm Swedish national identity and integrate immigrants who wanted to stay.

In any case, the party started to come to the political centre despite the fact that the centre did not want them. In 2010, the Sweden Democrats entered Parliament for the first time with more than 5% of the vote. MPs from other parties refused to deal with the newcomers either in public or in private, going so far as to ignore them at private Parliamentary events. But throughout the years that followed this became harder, and in the 2014 election the SD more than doubled their share, gaining almost 13% of the vote.

It is not hard to see what the external factors were that helped the party get to this position, since their rise occurred in striking coordination with another. In 1990 non-European migrants accounted for around 3% of the population; by 2016, after the European migration crisis of the previous year, that had increased to around 13-14%. Meanwhile, at the 2018 election the Sweden Democrats share of the vote rose to 17.5%, becoming the third-largest party. Although they had failed to achieve quite the significant breakthrough that they were hoping for, this created the most serious crisis so far for the other parties in Parliament.

Throughout the SD’s rise from the margins, two questions have dominated: the first is whether or not they have genuinely sloughed off their far-Right elements and past; the second whether other parties can or should work with them.

The first question is a complex one. The party has inevitably attracted far-Right individuals, including criminals, but then all political parties can attract unsavoury elements. In recent years, there have been scandals in Swedish politics around the discovery that an Islamist had infiltrated the Centre Party, that the Greens had a member who refused to shake hands with women while another Green Party politician, then in coalition with Social Democrats, turned out to be a Turkish nationalist. In such cases there are two sub-questions. Does the party attract such people for a good reason? And are they — when they are discovered — dealt with and expelled by the party?

The first problem may be unsolvable. After all, if a party is routinely described in the media as a racist or far-Right party it is inevitable perhaps that people who are racist or far-Right will think that this is the party for them. The more important question is whether the party embraces them or not, and for the last 20 years, and especially under the leadership of Matthias Karlsson, the SD have made constant efforts to expel people with such views.

It is still the case that every month or so a person pops up in a local branch who is found to have views which bring the party into disrepute. But the telling fact is that when people are found to have expressed racist opinions, they are — unlike, say, the Labour party in Britain in recent years — consistently expelled. Yet it does happen, and while they might protest that there are some double-standards at play here — that when unsavoury figures are found to have infiltrated other parties this is not seen as defining the organisation — when a pattern consistently emerges it is fair for critics to point to it.

The Sweden Democrats argue that when a party grows at the rate that it has done in recent years there is a manpower problem. People are required to fill positions and are allowed into the party and not all the vetting that might have been done has been done. When a party is identified as being in some way extreme or unsavoury this problem of attracting talent obviously grows.

But five years ago the party did do something that should be recognised as a major step — it broke off its own youth wing. On a visit to the country around this time, I met some members of the group and was struck by their zealotry and desire for trouble. It became clear to the party leadership that the youth branch was veering into what has become known as “identitarianism”, a slightly inadequately-delineated ideology which might more commonly be described as “nativism” but which has had unsavoury displays across Europe in recent years.

Karlsson cut off the whole movement when he saw how toxic it was, and this decision has been vindicated in the years since. The SD youth wing morphed into a political party of its own called “Alternative for Sweden” and it has been clear in the years since that this new organisation does not have the SD’s desire to hive off and expel political extremists. Indeed one person who attended a party rally for research described it as including the sorts of skinhead gangs who had been attracted to the SD back at the time of their far-Right founding.

Despite the fact that there is now a party to the SD’s Right, the media in Sweden and abroad understandably still seeks out examples of extremism in the party and its platform. Accusations of anti-Semitism have been levelled in the same manner in which they have been rightly and wrongly levelled at similar parties across the continent.

In the case of the SD, this criticism has come as a results of its policies, including a ban on male circumcision and ritual slaughter. It is understandable that opposition to such Jewish traditions might raise alarm bells, though as ever the situation is more complex than it is often portrayed. In Sweden, hostility to male circumcision fits into a specific secular-humanist view of society and the rights of people to choose their religion. Shechita slaughter, meanwhile, is something that numerous parties with a platform of animal welfare have campaigned on. These are difficult areas to navigate because a particular highlighting of them may indeed be a dog-whistle in certain places — but the SD do not make a major issue of them, and the socially liberal Centre Party is also opposed to these practices,

To some extent, media critiques of the SD in Sweden appear desperate. One of the main evening news programmes — Agenda – recently ran a lead item on one of the members of a new think-tank set up by the SD to support their work. The person in question was found to have previously expressed opposition to divorce because of the negative effect it can have on children — hardly a “gotcha” moment.

If the media genuinely believes that the SD are merely doing a good job at disguising their true extremism, then such hit-jobs are understandable. But the truth is that it is exceptionally hard to argue that the SD have not moderated, and are not continuing to do so. If their opponents seem overly keen to say otherwise, it most likely comes from the clear fact that the cordon sanitaire which was in place around the SD from the time of their founding has now completely broken.

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Indeed, since the last election, the party has been increasingly accepted and even courted by other parties at the local and national political level. Last summer the head of the centre-Right Christian Democrats had a meatball lunch with Jimmie Akkeson. Although there was some uproar, a photo which would previously have been catastrophic for the more mainstream party had no negative results. In fact, as it became clear that the SD were crucial for the Christian Democrats to get legislation through, a poll of their party members found that some 90% approved of their leaders talking to the SD.

Around 50% of Moderate Party members also support dialogue, the Moderates being a more socially liberal but also more economically Right-wing party than the Christian Democrats. Indeed, the Moderate Party has been maintaining talks with the SD, and just last month the Left Party (who have their own communist history) cooperated with the SD in getting funding issues passed.

None of this is to say that the SD’s problems are solved. Although the situation has improved since entering Tye Riksdag, there are still huge problems for the party in attracting useful people like qualified lawyers, who are an asset of sorts to most political parties, and are noticeably absent in the SD, possibly because of how difficult it would be for them to return to work if their political activities were known.

For the time-being some stigma still exists. And it is inevitable that the party will continue to have challenges proving that it has become simply a party of the political centre-Right rather than one of the extremes.

Since he took control of the Greens in 2018, they have consolidated themselves as the main party of the centre-Left — and political home of the educated, professional class – making them the most likely coalition partner for the centre-right CDU/CSU in 2021. It is quite conceivable, if the Greens were to end up as the largest party after those federal elections, that Habeck—or even his co-leader Annalena Baerbock — could wear the German Chancellor’s crown

He certainly had an adoring audience of elite young Germans at the LSE, where I saw him speaking last week. The handsome 50-year-old father of four from the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein was a writer and translator (including the poems of Roger McGough and Ted Hughes) before becoming a politician in his late 30s. He has the same relaxed, articulate anti-establishment/establishment manner of a Blair or Macron. You can understand his appeal.

But how come a conservative-green alliance now seems such an uncontroversial possibility in Europe’s most important country? And what problems will such an alliance face in the future?

The new potential alliance is partly a matter of the contingencies of German politics — the further big strides to the centre taken by the Greens in recent years, and the implosion of the Social Democrats as the main party of the centre-Left.

But there is a deeper logic, too, that suggests it might be a historical accident that the green movement in general has hitherto ended up so definitively on the Left. After all, conservative and conservation share the same Latin root, con servare, meaning to protect from loss or harm. And there are many overlaps in the worldview of greens and conservatives: the belief that local is best, small is beautiful, a respect for limits, a belief in what is natural and harmonious, an interest in intergenerational continuity.

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There has also been a kind of policy convergence. On the one hand, environmental priorities have gone mainstream — whether de-carbonising the economy or, in Germany, closing the nuclear industry —and on the other hand, market mechanisms have become an increasingly popular means to green ends.

The Green party itself has certainly travelled a long way since its formation as a radical anti-nuclear, anti-Nato, alternative life-style movement in the early 1980s. It entered the Bundestag with 5.7% of the vote in 1983, but found itself out of step with the rest of the country in the reunification period (its slogan was “Everyone is talking about Germany, we are talking about the weather!”).

It bounced back later in the 1990s, and joined the red-green coalition government of Gerhard Schroder in 1998 (though only on 6.7% of the vote) with Joschka Fischer becoming foreign minister. It has been out of national government since 2005, but has been in 11 out of 16 state-level governments and has seen its support creep up as the Social Democrats have crumbled, hitting a high note of 20% in the 2019 European elections and even outstripping the governing CDU-CSU in some recent opinion polls.

Meanwhile the party, as symbolised by Habeck, has become completely salonfähig (meaning socially acceptable). It is friendly to business, happy with Nato membership and comfortable with the compromises of power. When Habeck and Annalena Baerbock were elected on a joint ticket in 2018, they were embraced, largely uncritically, by almost all of the German media.

This is partly because German politicians have been unusually bland and dull in recent years. There was a thirst for something new —remember how this country fell for Nick Clegg not that long ago? The two Greens are attractive and articulate. Also, their election was the final decisive victory for the moderate wing of a party that has traditionally been divided between “realos” and “fundis”.

At the LSE, Habeck delivered a mish-mash of mainly familiar centre-Left ideas with some nice phrases, for example about how populists offer “not competence but intimacy”, and a welcome acknowledgement, from a progressive politician, of the importance of emotions in politics, albeit in a Hegelian frame  — “recognition is the driver of human history”.

He repeated a story he likes to tell about talking to workers in the dirty, declining industries in the old east Germany (where the Greens do not poll strongly) and prefacing his remarks to them like this: “Before we talk about what comes next, I am going to say thank you to you and your parents for dedicating your life and health to building the old industrial heart of this country.”

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He sees that recognition, respect and status are as much the currency of society, and therefore politics, as money. And he also acknowledges that it is the neglect of these psychological factors in our politics that has been such a blessing for populist parties, who do not make the same mistake.

Fleetingly, it occurred to me as I listened that perhaps there was something to the incongruous idea that not just greens and conservatives but greens and populists are potential bedfellows. Both of them favour attachment to place and want to slow down the machine of liberal modernity. And consider what is happening in Vienna: Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz who heads the conservative-green alliance there talks about illegal immigration and climate change being equal threats to the Austrian way of life.

But this kind of rhetorical/policy combination is not going to happen in Germany, which Habeck’s speech really confirmed. Green party members, after all, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, are more highly educated, and sometimes more affluent, than members of most other parties, and especially populist parties whose members are usually at the bottom of both leagues.

Green party members and voters tend to flourish in the knowledge economy and post-industrial society. They mainly live in mobile metropolitan centres, favour openness, are comfortable with social and ethnic fluidity/uncomfortable with authority and tradition, lack strong group or national attachments and worry about discrimination and equalities of many kinds. Their green politics tends to be abstract and top-down and altruistic — a calling to save the planet. Populist party members and voters are almost exactly the opposite on all scores.

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Habeck wants a politics of recognition in name only. He may like to flatter the people of east Germany with stories of their heroism but he then tramples all over their political intuitions. “It is simply an illusion that things used to be better,” he said to the LSE audience. No doubt an illusion to the young men, and especially women, in the audience en route to upper professional jobs in government, business or NGOs. But according to countless surveys many people in the declining regions and classes of Europe very strongly believe that the past was better than the present for them.

He also likes to play the old Tony Blair tune that Left-Right has been replaced by open-closed. But has Habeck ever met anyone who wants to live in a closed society? I doubt it.

Yet there are plenty of people, no doubt some of them tempted to vote for Germany’s main populist party the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), who think that recent forms of openness have not benefited them as much as those who vote for Habeck’s Green party, many of whom have the option of frictionless professional work or study abroad under EU free movement rules.

Like mainstream German politicians of all stripes, his answer to almost all political problems is “more Europe”. He also reproduced the standard cognitive dissonance on this issue in his speech by calling at one moment for more democracy and bringing politics closer to people while a few moments later calling for the European Commission to become a European government, for more majority voting in the EU and for vast areas of policy to be handed over to only very indirectly accountable technocrats.

One area where he does break with the current German orthodoxy is on ending the anti-Keynesian strict limits on budget deficits both in Germany and the EU, but even that has become something of a new consensus in recent months.

In all other respects, he seems to be making the Green party safe for the average liberal-minded CDU voter. Reaching out to the more socially conservative sections of German society is not on the cards. Habeck rejects the old German idea of the Volkspartei a party that represents all sections of society, even if it may be grounded in one class or another. In its place, he wants an alliance party of different sections of society and value groups. Populists are not welcome. And Habeck is one of the loudest voices wanting to exclude the AfD from the political mainstream, even though they have almost 100 seats in the Bundestag.

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Green policy on the environment seems to be mainly a somewhat more radical version of existing German government policy. Though Habeck did speak with great warmth about the Fridays for Future (Extinction Rebellion) movement, and rather chillingly warned of the great dangers ahead if they do not get their way through democratic channels.

How well will this go down with ordinary Germans? Much of the policy, on reducing car use for example, will be a lot more comfortable for affluent Green voters in big cities with efficient public transport, or those able to afford electric cars, than for people in smaller towns and suburbs.

It is hard to see a Gilets Jaunes type movement in Germany coalescing around an increase in petrol taxes. Ordinary Germans worry about climate change too, but if they find that much of the cost of adaptation is falling on them, the love affair with the new Greens could quickly hit a barrier.

By the end of next year, Robert Habeck is highly likely to be grappling with these conservative-green dilemmas as, at the very least, a cabinet minister in Europe’s most powerful country. The progressive establishment in Germany has evidently found a new voice, as his performance at the LSE proved, but one without any discernible new ideas and with the same old intellectual evasions and silences.

Nor is it clear that the Green party as a whole has the personnel or experience to take the next step up to becoming the dominant party, rather than the junior one, in a German coalition. The Green co-leaders have had a long honeymoon but the closer the election looms, the more critical scrutiny they will draw. Despite the rock star appeal of Habeck, it remains to be seen how attractive his party will seem to middle-ground Germans.

That skiing accident, in 2014, when she broke her pelvis and was forced to slow down for a few weeks, was perhaps the earliest warning of her potential frailty. It also came at the worst possible time, arguably muffling Germany’s voice as the crisis in Ukraine was brewing.

Then there was the unusual difficulty the super-seasoned negotiator had in forming Germany’s current coalition after the last, 2017, election. Followed by those very public shaking fits — now apparently stabilised — which raised questions about whether her health would allow her to serve out her current, fourth, term. But the latest political developments in Germany could be the ones that really threaten her current retirement plans (bowing out gracefully at the next scheduled election in 2021).

These threats have nothing whatsoever to do with her own party, the Christian Democratic Union, or with her own personal authority — directly, at least. They concern an unexpected turn of events with her Social-Democrat coalition partner, the SPD.

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Under pressure since its lacklustre showing at the last election, and in the European and several local elections since, the SPD has just elected its second leader in as many years; members have shunned the favoured contenders, and choosing a left-wing duo of Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken instead.

If this only represented a sharp change of direction for the party, that would be one thing. But one of the defeated favourites was Deputy Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who is also Finance minister in Merkel’s government. The vote amounted to an expression of no confidence in him personally, and in the SPD’s participation in the coalition.

Now, it is true that there are a couple of factors that may help Merkel fight another day. The first is that any co-leadership has a tendency to be less stable than the conventional kind. So she might just be able to wait it out — something she is pretty good at. (Meanwhile, the relatively new CDU leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, has insisted that her party stand by the coalition.) The second is that, because of its poor performance in 2017, the SPD is more of a junior partner than it was in either of Merkel’s previous two “grand coalition” governments — and it has not improved its electoral showings since.

On the other hand, however, renegotiating the terms of the coalition was a central plank of the new SPD leadership proposals, for which they now have a mandate, and the words of their co-leader, Walter-Borjans, sounded pretty uncompromising. “If the coalition partner then takes an obstructive approach to these new tasks, then you have to make a decision that it cannot continue.”

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Being no strangers to the curse of coalitions, the new SPD leaders might also calculate that they are better severing their ties now than just before the next election. They might sense, too, that they are somehow swimming with a broader international tide — as the centre-left moves more Leftwards, and the centre-right moves to the Right. In this context, it would not only be the rejected candidates for the SPD who have run out of time, but also Angela Merkel and her colleagues on the centre-right.

If the coalition were to collapse, and if Angela Merkel were unable to find an alternative partner or partners — and the difficulties she experienced in 2017 suggest that it would be even harder this time around — the likely consequence would be a new election. Given that the Chancellor has already stated her intention to stand down in 2021, and that she has already passed the CDU leader’s baton to Krampf-Karrenbauer, an early election would almost certainly bring an early end to the Merkel era.

For all the periodic speculation, the departure of Angela Merkel from the Chancellery, whenever it comes, will be a huge shock for Germany. But the consequences would reverberate far beyond as well. It is hard to remember now the relatively timid public figure and almost apologetic campaigner who just squeaked into office in 2005. She has become not just a commanding figure in her homeland as Germany’s “Mutti”, but an immense force for moderation and international stability, too. Her absence would be felt at once — not least because there is no obvious successor.

Despite her best efforts to smoothe the transition, by passing the CDU leadership to her chosen successor last year, open jockeying for the succession has continued. Nor has Kramp-Karrenbauer — now not only party leader, but also defence minister since the departure of Ursula von der Leyen to the European Commission this autumn — done much to consolidate her authority. It is hard to see her leading the CDU into an election, let alone helping the party to win. Yet what looks like inevitable in-fighting will help the party even less.

An early indication of the gap Merkel’s departure will leave was the no-holds barred defence of Nato she made in a speech to the Bundestag in advance of the London Nato leaders’ meeting this week. For all the chiding of Germany (by the US and others) for its apparent dawdling on the way to meeting the 2% of GDP target for contributions to the alliance, Merkel offered her staunch support to the alliance, saying that “the preservation of Nato is in our fundamental interest, even more so than during the Cold War…For the time being, Europe can’t defend itself on its own — we are reliant on this transatlantic alliance.”

Her support was seen in part as a riposte to a statement the French President had made in a recent interview with the Economist, in which he described Nato as “brain-dead”. But it also highlighted another gap that will be left when Merkel departs. Since the UK voted to leave the European Union, there has been something of a reversion to the concept of the Franco-German “dynamo”, with the youthful Emmanuel Macron promoting himself as the thinker and leader of Europe’s future.

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Merkel — who opposes Macron’s calls for the EU to develop its own military capability and has been at odds with him, too, on whether to grant the UK more time to complete the Brexit process — has been a restraining influence on Macron’s ambitions, and so helped preserve an equilibrium at the top of the EU. It is hard to suggest anyone else in the European firmament, least of all a new and untried German leader, who would have the gravitas or the confidence to restrain Macron. Yet his particular enthusiasms make him a potentially divisive figure.

Merkel’s positive response to the refugee crisis of 2015 — which was hers, and hers alone — can be seen as unwise in the sense that it alienated many of the more ‘frontline’ European countries.

Her confident “wir schaffen das”  — we can do it — set the tone. Without her reassurance, and her stress on integration, the risk is that racist incidents and tensions increase. The assaults at Cologne station on New Year’s Eve 2015-16 and the country’s response — it was several days before the story broke, and then caused attitudes against immigration to harden and attacks on immigrants to increase — indicate what may lie just below the surface.

Merkel certainly paid a price at the polls for her attitude towards immigration. In terms of upholding “European values”, however, she offered a master-class in humanitarianism, which perhaps only she could have risked and has stoutly defended since.

This surely owed much to her background, which made her the ideal German leader for her time. A pastor’s daughter, who grew up and made her early career in East Germany, before joining the CDU and becoming a protegee of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Merkel was able to span the two halves of re-united Germany as no other politician could have done. She was able to convince all Germans, especially in the former East, that the objective is economic fairness across the country.

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Without her, that divide — in economic prospects and political sympathies — risks deepening resentment and allowing an ever more powerful right-wing Alternative für Deutschland to extend its appeal.

Merkel’s claim both to the moral high ground and to familiarity with the East German experience gives her a credibility that will be nigh-impossible for anyone to reproduce. German politics may be splintering, among shades of Left, Right and green, but Merkel was able to stay largely above the fray.

The crunch will come this weekend, when the new SPD leaders are confirmed at the party’s convention, and a vote of delegates will be taken on whether to stay in or leave the coalition. If the vote is to leave, Merkel will be faced with a choice as to agree to new, and probably protracted, negotiations, to soldier on as head of a minority government, or to resign.

Even if she survives, however, the developments of recent days have sounded an early warning. Not just for Germany; Europe and the world need to prepare for a world in which Angela Merkel’s steady hand is no longer on Germany’s helm.

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Die Linke, Germany’s equivalent of Corbynite Labour but (happily for Germany) its very own party, also did well in Thuringia — spectacularly so, hitting 31% and becoming the strongest single party in a state administration for the first time.

So, judging from those results, is German liberal democracy caught in a fatal pincer-movement of the populists, who claim to be mortal enemies but are both anti-EU, anti-NATO and pro-Putin?

Recent election posters from the populist “left” and “right”, accusing the establishment of NATO warmongering.

Well, yes and no. It depends on how you look at it; or rather, where you look at it. For talking about German politics nationally is becoming almost as meaningless as talking about the UK as if it were, in our days, a single political unit.

A map of the 2017 Bundestag election shows this division with extraordinary clarity.

But why do Easterners vote so differently from Westerners, thereby upsetting the political applecart of Europe’s most important economy? Right across the respectable political spectrum, Germans seek desperately for easy, modern explanations.

Conservatives tell themselves that the East Germans did, after all, unfairly pay the final bill for 1933-45, being traumatised by half a century of occupation by the Red Army, so that it’s no surprise they feel hard done-by; free-marketeers in the German ordoliberal tradition, which assigns the state a more active role in enabling and regulating than Anglo-Saxon classical liberals do, argue that more should be done to attract — effectively, to bribe — private enterprise into the old East.

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And then leftists claim that former East Germans are simply driven by righteous if misdirected anger at having been de-industrialised by predatory western capitalists, who asset-stripped perfectly viable ex-GDR State businesses (although they’d struggle to find any actual viable examples). Because of this they thus deserve massive, ongoing state help.

Meanwhile, the old West just keeps on footing the bill, and since 1990, well over €2 trillion has been pumped from Western taxpayers to the East. The so-called Reunification has dragged West Germany back into the role which Bismarck assigned it: to subsidise the economically moribund East because it is their patriotic duty.

Western German voters, rather sick of this, are more and more wary of keeping up this settlement, on top of their traditional role as paymasters of the stable Europe from which German industry benefits so greatly. Yet the Prussian myth of “reunification” has trumped economic reality, which goes to show something we in Britain should know all too well: that there is nothing worse for a country than to misunderstand its own history.

Southerners in the USA dwell on the Civil War as if it were yesterday, but who in western Germany now recalls that Germany was never “united” in the first place? It was militarily defeated by Bismarck’s Prussia in 1866, after which Austria was kicked out, some of the beaten states simply annexed by Prussia, and some allowed a sort of half-life until 1871. Who, today, dares to say that the only definition by which East Germany was more German than Austria is Bismarck’s definition?

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The founder of West Germany, Conrad Adenauer, knew his history. After the First World War he begged the French and British to help him split Prussia off from Germany. When he had to visit Berlin, he would always draw the curtains of his train compartment as he crossed the fatal River Elbe, muttering “Here we go, Asia again!” (“Schon wieder Asien!”) After the second war, though obliged in public to support re-unification, he told the British most secretly that he was determined it should never happen.

The most obvious sign that there are two countries is the confessional divide between Catholics and Lutherans. Anyone who doubts how significant that division is should just look at a map of the Nazi vote in 1932 superimposed onto a map of the Catholic population according to the 1934 census. They are, to all intents and purposes, mirror-images.

Religion in Germany is really just a sign of the Germany you come from: the one which partook centrally of western European civilisation right from the start — or the one which has a completely different trajectory. The classic line between these two Germanies is the River Elbe, which the Romans thought the natural limit of Germania. Charlemagne’s restored “Roman” Empire ended there, too.

While early medieval western Europe was developing its unique signature, the power-sharing of international Church and national-state, the lands beyond the river Elbe were still populated by pagan, illiterate tribes. No real attempt was made to exert German control and settlement beyond that point until 1147; Cologne had already been a flourishing western European city for 1,200 years when the first German conqueror-farmers reached Berlin.

If there’s one thing worse for everyone than a successful mass-colonisation, it’s a half-successful mass-colonisation — ask anyone in Ulster. East of the Elbe, the Germans never entirely supplanted the Slavs (some, the Sorbs, remain even in the truncated eastern Germany of today, just north of Dresden).

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For 800 years, generation upon generation experienced this same colonial reality. Within living memory, whether you called your hometown Posen or Poznan, Danzig or Gdansk, could be a matter of life and death, on both sides.

So while no one ever disputed that the western Germans belonged where they were, the eastern Germans always knew that the helots might rise up one day. Like the poor whites of the American South, the settlers of Rhodesia, the Protestants of Ulster or the Pieds-Noir of Algeria, the eastern Germans came to believe that they must, above all, have a political elite of their very own tribe, ready to respond instantly and ruthlessly if their supremacy was ever challenged.

Social psychologists call this “social dominance orientation”, the cultural belief that “we” have to at all costs lord it over “them”. The Germans of the east came to accept rule by a caste of warlords — the famous Prussian Junkers — and, later, the new Lutheran paradigm of a state which controlled its very own Church and against which there was hence no appeal.

Not for nothing did Friedrich Hayek see Prussia as the template for all modern totalitarian states, whether of the Left or of the Right. Max Weber constantly referred to a place he called Ostelbien, East Elbia, palpably different, for all its local variation, to ciselbian, western Germany

Of course, psychologists, philosophers and sociologists can all be wrong and often are. Electoral maps, however, do not lie. They show that ever since Germans have had votes, eastern Germans have voted very differently from western Germans.

Under the German Empire (1871-1918), the Prussian Conservatives — conservative in this context meaning supporters of royal and militarist rule under an agrarian Junker elite — depended almost completely on votes from the East, having scarcely any traction at all in the West.

The First World War changed nothing. In the first normal elections of the Weimar Republic, the extreme Prussian conservatives of the DNVP (officially anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, violently antidemocratic, their members implicated in several high-profile political murders) were the second largest party nationally but — exactly as with the AfD today — that position was entirely dependent on votes from the East.

And when the deluge finally came in 1933 it was, again, only thanks to heavy votes in the East that Hitler got 43.9% nationally, enabling him (with support from the rump DNVP) to seize power by semi-constitutional means. If the whole country had voted like the Rhineland or Munich, he could only have attempted an armed coup, which the Army would have crushed.

In short, wondering how voters in the East of Germany would go for antidemocratic, authoritarian and anti-EU politics, while the West of Germany sticks with the CDU and goes Green, is like asking how it can be that a Democrat should win New York at the same time as Arkansas and Alabama vote Republican. It’s all about cultural history, and Germany has its very own version of the Mason-Dixon line, but far older and deeper.

This is bad news, of course, for Germans wedded to the notion of a united and more or less culturally homogenous state. On the other hand, it is very good news for Germans who fear that the politics of eastern Germany might spread. They won’t, any more than New York is ever going to be an Open Carry state.

If the West holds its nerve — that means, on a practical level, no preferential financial treatment and never entering coalitions with the AfD or Die Linke, however awkward that may make things — the “spirit of the East”, as Adenauer called it, is no longer strong enough to pull Germany away from its natural place at the heart of Western Europe.

It’s election time in East Germany, and I’m talking to my host, Klaus, about those of his friends who had toyed with the idea of voting for the AfD (Alternative for Germany).

“Would you vote AfD?”, I ask him.

“My life is pretty good,” he replies, “Sure, we have problems, but I don’t want to say that it’s all the fault of foreign people. I’m not as angry as my friends really.”

In Leipzig, the faces of polished candidates stare down from the billboards lining the streets. It’s hard to avoid their gaze. It is strange to think that a few generations ago elections here were little more than a sham, an exercise in political legitimisation for the ruling Socialist Unity party and futility for everybody else.

This was once the beating heart of East German industry, and it is here that the far-Right has enjoyed particular success in recent times. Support for the AfD in East Germany is on average more than double that in the West. In this week’s elections to the European Parliament, the AfD was the biggest force in Saxony, winning a quarter (25.3%) of the vote. The party also finished first in Brandenburg.

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As with populist successes elsewhere, the reasons for the AfD’s rise are multifaceted. There is the decline of industry and resultant male resentment. There is the gap between the attitudes of younger city-dwellers and older voters toward multiculturalism and immigration. And there is a tired political establishment – in this case Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany – that has been in power for nearly a decade and a half.

The AfD has specifically harvested the anger and disenchantment towards foreigners. Its platform is virulently anti-migrant and its leading figures have talked of an “invasion of foreigners”. The AfD even wants to prosecute Chancellor Angela Merkel for her decision to let around 1.3 million refugees into the country, even though migrant numbers have fallen considerably in Germany in the past three years.

The East is receptive territory for such a narrative. Before the emergence of the AfD in 2013 there was the anti-Islam group Pegida. The group would stage weekly marches in the Saxony city of Dresden, attracting up to 20,000 people at their height.

The difference in attitudes to immigration between East and West is significant. According to a recent survey, 66% of respondents in the former East German states are not satisfied that their immigration concerns are being addressed, compared to 46% in the former West German states. There are fewer foreign-born citizens in the East than in the West, yet anger about immigration runs deeper. According to data collected by victim counselling centres, five people in the east fall victim to far-right violence every day. In Saxony, 317 attacks were recorded in 2018, up from 229 in 2017.

The city of Chemnitz was the scene of a particularly violent far-right protest in 2018 after a German man was killed by two immigrants. Protesters clashed with police while some protesters openly saluted Hitler. A 20-year-old migrant in the nearby eastern town of Wismar was beaten with an iron chain by three assailants.

Seemingly, the former communist regime in the East equipped those living within its borders poorly for the multicultural Germany that emerged after reunification. Barriers were put up to prevent its own citizens from escaping so the country remained predominantly German; in West Germany, however, there was a steady flow of migrants into the country from around the world. Discussion of ethnic conflict and cultural differences were suppressed by the Socialist Unity Party and the emphasis laid firmly on class conflict above all else.

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There are other factors at play in the party’s growth. The economy, for example. But often these are connected with immigration as low-skilled workers compete with immigrants for jobs. Though the AfD did well in areas with strong economic growth, support across Germany was typically stronger in areas with low household income. Those living in the former GDR are statistically several percentage points more likely to be living in poverty than those living in the west of Germany.

Traditional industries have been wound down over recent decades in East Germany and the beating heart of the Eastern economy is slowing. As Chancellor Merkel recently put it, everything changed in East Germany almost overnight, and some people have still not gotten over it. “On the day of the monetary union, 13 percent of the people in the East worked in agriculture,” Merkel told the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper. “The day after that it was 1.5 percent.”

This may explain the significant component of male resentment playing a role in the new party’s success: one-third of male voters in Saxony cast their ballots for the far-Right in 2017. The competition for low-skilled jobs is significant. But just as significant is the competition for sex. Between 1989 and 2001, 1.2 million people emigrated from East to West Germany. A high proportion of those leaving were young, educated women. As a result, today there is a significant imbalance in the male-female population in the former eastern states and much of the resentment directed at new arrivals on far-right online forums emphasises the protection of German women from foreigners. Indeed visit a nightclub in Görlitz or Chemnitz and this disparity is striking, with far more men on the dancefloor than women.

In a park in the suburbs of Leipzig I met a small group of men who insisted that life for them was better under the ancien régime. “You knew where you were, we had a good life,” one of the men said in between puffs on a cigarette.

It was a conversation that reminded me of similar encounters I had had with retired miners in south Wales. It wasn’t so much the GDR that the men I spoke with missed, just as the miners in south Wales had not actually wanted to venture back down into the bowels of nearby mountains to dig coal. Instead, what they yearn for was the security of the old system, and along with it the respect industrial work commanded for men from the working class.

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Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

The left-behind, anti-establishment narrative is a familiar one to those watching the rise of populism around the globe. And the AfD have been able to capitalise on the mood in Germany because they have a clarity of message that is missing on the Left. They operate in primary colours, stoking dormant fears of foreign invasion and drawing a crude division between white Europeans and outsiders.

In contrast, Die Linke, a party of the far-Left, is struggling to articulate a coherent Left-wing economic vision 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nobody believes in central planning any more. Nobody wants a return of the bureaucracy and officialdom associated with the overbearing East German state. And only a dwindling number of Marxists still believe in the dream of a workers’ paradise. Indeed, according to surveys, fewer than 15% of the former East Germany’s 16 million people say they would want the pre-89 regime back.

Die Linke is thus forced to grudgingly regurgitate fashionable capitalist bromides. Were it to win power, the party would probably run the economy along similar lines to how it is run now – albeit with higher welfare spending. This is hardly the heady stuff required to inspire a political revolution. Consequently, Die Linke won just 5.5% of the vote across Germany in this week’s elections.

The challenge this all presents to the German establishment is similar to the one facing politicians in Britain: how to placate a resentful rump of the population – predominantly living in small towns and former industrial areas – that sees multiculturalism and the global economy as an existential threat.

Some would argue that Germany’s politicians can safely ignore these ‘left behinds’, confined as they are to forgotten towns and the former industrial belt of a vanished state. Indeed, there may be a ceiling on the level of support the AfD can pick up, as demonstrated by the party’s inability to make significant inroads in the west of the country.

Yet ignoring similar resentments has cost the political establishment in other countries – most notably Britain and the United States – dearly in recent times.

Angry, disenfranchised men are now a noisy and influential minority in many post-industrial areas of Europe and the United States. Germany is no exception. The country’s politicians ignore such anger at their peril.

1. Germany

Germany’s state elections will be a test of the strength of blue-collar populists on the one hand, and the centrist anti-populist reaction on the other. State elections held last year showed that the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) has support even in parts of Western Germany. AfD entered the regional parliaments in Bavaria and Hesse, taking votes from both the centre-Right CDU/CSU and the centre-left SPD. But other voters abandoned the mainstream parties for the opposite reason – they thought the grand coalition too restrictive of migration, with the Greens being the greatest beneficiary.

Bremen’s election this year, scheduled on May 26, the day of the EU elections, will test the SPD’s resilience – the party has received the most votes there in every state election since 1946. No polls have been taken since the recent Green spurt, but in August the SPD were level with the CSU and only 6% ahead of the Greens. If the national poll trends since then – which show the SPD falling and the Greens rising – are occurring in Bremen too, the SPD is currently running behind the CDU in Bremen and running neck and neck with the Greens.

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Such a result would be a disaster for the SPD and would likely pile the pressure on them to abandon their grand coalition with Chancellor Merkel’s CDU/CSU. Should that occur, it is unlikely that Merkel or CDU party president, and presumed heir apparent, Annegret Kramp-Krannenbauer, could form a government since the only alternative to a grand coalition is a CDU/CSU-Green-FDP coalition. A governmental collapse would then send Germans to the polls in a snap federal election.

The other state elections occur in three former East German states, and the key question there is whether the AfD will take first place in any – or even all – contests. The most recent polls in Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia all show the AfD in second place, but only a few points behind the front runner. Moreover, each state’s poll shows the combined vote share for the AfD and the descendants of the former East German Communist party, Die Linke (“The Left”), at between 39% and 44%.

That would make for extremely fraught coalition talks, as the only possible outcome that excludes both parties involves four party administrations involving the CDU, SPD, the liberal FDP and the Greens. In Thuringia and Saxony, polls indicate that the only alternative to such a rainbow coalition would require the CDU to partner with the AfD or Die Linke, neither of which the party has ever been willing to do.

2. Spain

In conjunction with the EU vote on May 26^th, 13 of Spain’s regions will go to the polls. All three types of populists have parties contesting these elections, and two of them look to be rising. The Right-wing populist party, Vox, is poised to enter most regions’ parliaments. The centrist populist Ciudadanos are also poised for significant gains, giving them near equal status with Spain’s two traditional parties in many regions. But the Leftist populist Podemos, or Unidos Podemos in some regions where they have combined with the former United Left, are likely to slip in most states.

All three trends are apparent in the Madrid region. Vox’s staunch opposition to Catalonian separatism and migration has seen it skyrocket in the polls, where it currently receives 12-18%. Much of this support, seemingly, comes from the traditional party of the centre-Right, Partido Popular (PP). But support also seems to be coming from former Podemos voters too. Podemos and the United Left had received over 23% in 2015, but the new grouping Unidos Podemos was polling at only 18% in early January. Just as is the case with support for similar parties around the world, like the Sweden Democrats and Germany’s AfD, Vox’s support thus seems to come from both the Left and Right.

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Spain’s government is likely to become even less stable over the coming years. The current parliament is roughly split between a Left-populist bloc and a Right-centre bloc, with Vox currently unrepresented. The balance of power is held by a grab bag of regional parties and Catalonian separatists. If the government were to fall this year, unable to paper over the differences between these groups, Vox seem likely to gain enough seats to hold the balance of power.

This would present Spain with the same dilemma as other Europeans countries: either they create a grand coalition that weakens over time or they invite the populists into government in a centre-Right led coalition. Either course is likely to increase political instability in the EU’s fourth largest economy.

3. Estonia

Estonia’s election on March 1 is likely to see a new, Eurosceptic and ethno-nationalist party hold the balance of power. The Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) has recently been polling around 20%, making it the third largest party in the country. With the market-liberal Reform Party and the centre-Left, Centre Party running roughly even, the EKRE could decide which party takes the Prime Minister’s chair.

EKRE emphasises Estonian nationality above all else – arguing that Estonia has become a “vassal state” of the EU. It strongly opposes immigration and Russian involvement in the Ukraine and Georgia, and challenges the market forces it says have made Estonia a home of cheap labour for foreign capital. Inclusion of the EKRE in government would undoubtedly sound alarm bells among the European establishment, but their participation may be unavoidable if there is to be stable government.

4. Denmark

The Danish election, which must be held on or before 17 June, seems likely to further demonstrate populism’s impact. The Danish People’s Party (DF) is one of Europe’s more successful blue-collar populist parties and has been a mainstay of the current centre-Right governing coalition. Even the Social Democrats have backed some of the government’s anti-immigration proposals (at the expense of their link with longtime partners the Social Liberals). While the Social Democrats look set to finish in first place, Denmark’s fragmented party system requires at least three parties to coalesce to form a government. The Social Democrats’ shift on migration issues opens up the possibility of a European first: a centre-left-led government that includes a blue-collar populist party.

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DF has been so successful that it has now spawned a competitor, the New Right (Nye Boergerlige in Danish). Formed by former members of the Conservative People’s Party, the New Right argues that DF is too supportive of migrants. It is also well to DF’s right on economic matters, with its leader supporting the total elimination of corporate taxation. Polls show it is consistently above the 2% threshold for parliamentary representation.

5. Canada

Canada’s general election, scheduled for October 19^th, will be another test of populism’s appeal. Despite having one of the largest shares of immigrants in the Western world, Canada – thanks in part to a skills-based immigration policy – has largely avoided anti-migrant populism. But that will be put to the test by former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier’s new People’s Party of Canada.

Bernier left the Conservatives after narrowly losing his bid to become their leader. His new party will campaign on pro-market economics and lower levels of overall immigration. It is currently polling below 2% in the polls, and, like the UK, Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system prevents small parties from winning many, if any, seats. Its influence could nevertheless force the Conservatives to the Right in order to increase their chance of beating Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Even raising the issue threatens to break Canada’s pro-immigration consensus.

Bernier’s home province of Quebec is particularly interesting. Quebec is the only province allowed to admit its own economic immigrants, and the province’s desire to maintain its predominantly Francophone status has meant it is increasingly admitting migrants from North Africa. Quebec is also where anti-Muslim feelings are strongest, and a centre-Right party pledging to reduce immigration by 20% won a majority of seats in last year’s provincial election.

Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer recently said he wants to work with the Quebec government to give it more authority over non-economic migration in the province, a position widely believed to be crafted to court the Quebec centre-Right vote.

Much can happen in a year, but it’s hard to see the elites’ dream of a return to normalcy becoming a reality. Too many voters are dreaming of something quite different to the status quo, and the populist parties look most likely to deliver it for them.

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Bayreuth, the small Franconian city I found myself in the week after the Bavarian vote, is a perfect place to contemplate this question. The adopted home of composer Richard Wagner, its annual ‘Bayreuth Wagner Festival’ attracts thousands of opera lovers every summer. But as any visitor knows or soon learns, Wagner’s landmark operas, Der Ring des Nieblungen or ‘The Ring Cycle’, were Adolf Hitler’s favourite music. Nationalism and its potential consequences lie heavily in the modern German’s soul.

The standard interpretation of the recent vote is that the entrance of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, into the Bavarian Landtag (legislature) is another example of Germany’s inability to deal with its nationalistic element. In fact, a closer look shows that the real issue is not how to deal with nationalism but how to define it. All sides in the election were propounding their own views about what German nationalism, and its peculiar Bavarian interpretation, is about.

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The Christian Social Union (CSU) has long had a stranglehold on this issue. Its pro-market, pro-welfare state worldview reflects the social market economy the Christian Democrats pioneered after World War II. The party proudly embraced Bavaria’s Catholicism, backing social subsidies for traditional families and supporting the use of religious imagery in classrooms and other public buildings.

In a state which had never been part of Prussia (indeed, Bavaria fought against Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866) and with its own monarchical past, dialect, and rustic traditions, the CSU sought to be the political expression of Bavarianism. And for nearly six decades it succeeded so well that it nearly always ruled without a coalition partner, a virtually unheard-of circumstance in German’s rigidly proportional election model.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the CSU’s main competitor during this period, but it never amounted to much. A secular industrial workers’ party in a religious rural state, the SPD rarely broke 35% in elections. But together, the two parties regularly combined for 80-90% of the vote.

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This duopoly began to break down in the last decade under challenges from the Left and Right. The Green Party began to compete with the SPD for the support of younger Left-leaning voters; it’s communitarian and environmentally-focused platform expressing more thoroughly the concerns of younger and more educated Leftists.

Eating into CSU support, Free Voters, Freie Wahler (FW) in German, began to pick up those, especially in the rural areas, who increasingly felt neglected by a CSU whose attention was focused on Munich.

Yet as recently as the 2013 elections, neither party seriously challenged the duopoly. If you were comfortable with traditional Bavarian nationalism, you voted CSU. If not, you voted SPD.

Merkel’s 2015 immigration policy blunder changed that. Many of the migrants passed through southern Bavaria on their way to seek asylum; culturally homogenous towns suddenly had an influx of Islamic, mostly male, migrants. For many voters in these areas – and for similar types of voters elsewhere in Bavaria – German and Bavarian nationalism was inconsistent with large numbers of Muslim migrants, even if they lived far away from their villages.

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Their sense of nation included acceptance of change and growth, but only against the backdrop of an ethnic German supermajority and a Christian-influenced public morality. Feeling betrayed by the CSU, nearly one in eight Bavarians supported the radically anti-Islamic AfD in last year’s federal vote, with proportions rising in the CSU’s rural, Catholic heartland.

The CSU had predictably moved to its Right following this shock to its dominance. The CSU’s state premier, Markus Soder, pushed through a controversial law that extended the display of crucifixes in schools to all state-operated public buildings. The CSU’s leader and federal immigration minister, Horst Seehofer, forced the Merkel government to the Right on asylum and immigration policy, much to her chagrin and that of her other coalition partner, the SPD. The message was: we, not the AfD, remain the representatives of respectable German and Bavarian nationalism.

This move, however, raised a different question for voters less attached to the old Bavaria. Former SPD voters had always excepted themselves from this view, but now the SPD was complicit in supporting the very values of closed, ethnically-based German identity that it had traditionally opposed.

Urban, educated, secular voters experienced a similar quandary. The CSU’s move to the Right exposed priorities that were not shared by these voters. Should they back the CSU, whose economic record was spotless, despite their misgivings? Or was there an honourable alternative, a party that could give expression to their view of a Germany open to all, a Germany that firmly rejected even the whiff of its past?

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Enter the Green Party, who skyrocketed in the polls to become the second largest party in Bavaria. They, not the AfD, were the election’s big winners, garnering 17.5% of the vote and more than doubling their vote share. Many of their voters were former SPD backers (that party shed more than half of its vote, falling to a mere 9.7% and finishing in fifth place), but many others had backed the CSU in prior elections, especially in large cities such as Munich or Bavaria.

The Greens polled 26% in Bavaria’s largest cities, just a whisker behind the CSU’s 27%, and it won six urban seats that directly elected its representative via a first-past-the-post system. The Greens were easily the largest party in Munich, besting the CSU by over 7%.

The CSU therefore staved off catastrophic defeat, but only at a great cost. The AfD share of the vote dropped compared with the 2017 Bundestag election in rural regions and small towns, and some of those voters returned to the CSU. The FW, however, also gained some of these voters as they were a safe protest party for those who wanted to send the CSU a message.

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In the cities, the CSU defined itself in a way that proved unacceptable to economically conservative but culturally liberal voters who want a Germany that is open to migrants and the world. The SPD’s collapse also showed that the old ways no longer hold; the two parties combined for less than a majority of the vote. The centre held, but just barely.

And there is little expectation that this position can continue,  in part because CSU support skews heavily to the elderly. The exit poll showed that CSU support drops among each age cohort, from 52% among those 70 and older, to 27% among voters 18 to 24 (just a shade more than the 23% who backed the Greens). Incredibly, nearly a quarter million CSU voters died between the last election in 2013 and today, more than passed away for all the other parties combined. Without a change in path, tomorrow does not belong to the CSU.

The role of Germany’s past and its culture is unmistakably behind these trends. The exit poll included a question that, roughly translated, asked whether the respondent was worried that Germany’s culture was gradually being lost. An astounding 100% of AfD voters agreed with this, but so did 68% of FW voters, along with 61% of CSU voters. However, only 20% of the Green voters and 37% of SPD voters concurred.

Germany is now experiencing the same splits between its cities and its territories, and between its educated and its less educated, as the rest of the world. According to the exit poll, the CSU support among the least educated dropped from 57% to 43%; and the AfD finished second among this group with 16%. Among the most educated, the Greens leapt up from 15% to win 28% of the vote. The educated and the urban want a global, less territorial society; the rural and smaller town areas do not.

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Identical trends are sweeping other German states too. Recent polls show the Greens are now the second largest party in Germany with around 20%, more than double their showing just one year ago. The CDU/CSU union is now polling below  30%, their worst showing ever, and its coalition partner, the SPD, have dropped to their worst showing as well, below 15%. The trend is so pronounced that at a recent post-election event in Washington sponsored by the CSU’s Hans Seidel Foundation, one speaker said that the Greens were likely to become the main party on the centre-Left for years to come.

Meanwhile, the AfD is now the largest party in the former communist East. Combined with the party descended from the former Communists, Die Linke, nearly half of East Germany’s voters support a party of either the far Left or far Right. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seems that East Germany’s politics have more in common with those of their former Warsaw Pact allies, where Right or Left-wing populism is also rising, than of the western part of the nation they now call home.

Which brings us back to the city of Bayreuth. The creation of Germany in the late 19^th Century required the manufacture of a German culture that brought together Lutherans and Catholics, westerners used to civic governance and easterners who had long lived in a harsh monarchy. Wagner’s music was part of that effort, which idealised a homogenous, Christian, small-town Germany with a courageous – and, dare I say, martial – past. This cultural ideal reached its apotheosis during the last days of Imperial Germany, and was the touchstone that the Nazis drew upon after the twin despairs of Versailles and the Great Depression.

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The devastation that the Third Reich brought upon the homeland in turn drove the founders of the Federal Republic to actively suppress the political expression of such sentiments. The new Germany would renounce its closed and martial past in favour of commitment to economic growth, democracy, and peace.

The CDU/SPD domination of post-war Germany reflected this yearning for a new beginning devoted to comfort and security over conquest and adventurism. Despite occasional rumblings from the small neo-Nazi Right, it appeared that this new Germany had rooted itself in the German soul by the dawn of the 21^st Century. Those roots are still there, as the strong showing of the Greens demonstrates. But they are now in tension with milder expressions of the old nationalism.

Germany is not close to experiencing its Gotterdammerung. Virulent German nationalism required the twin calamities of national humiliation and economic collapse to give it life; neither event is on the horizon today. But a nation need not undergo collapse in order to experience extreme instability. Torn between a Left that has little that is distinctly German and a Right that has little that is distinctly modern, the old parties of the old order are slowly withering. The failure to create a new German national identity like their Bismarckian forefathers could drag the new Germany down with them.

Chancellor Merkel’s government currently relies on the support of its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). The party has dominated state politics for over six decades, largely with overwhelming support from the state’s numerous Catholics. But its vote share dropped dramatically in last year’s federal election as many former CSU voters switching to the populist and anti-immigrant AfD.

This switch seems seems counter-intuitive. The state, especially the rural parts where CSU support has been traditionally strongest, contains very few foreigners or refugees. The state is also prosperous, with a growing economy and low rates of unemployment. Thus, the two measures often associated with support for anti-immigrant populist parties – proximity to migrants and economic distress – are largely absent in Bavaria. Something else must at work.

Could that be Bavaria’s high level of religiosity? Bavarian culture is very different from the rest of Germany, and its intense Catholicism is perhaps the most important distinction.

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Most of Bavaria stayed loyal to the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation and has maintained its faith even as the rest of Europe has fallen away from organised Christianity. “Gruss Gott” – literally, “greet God” – is the local way to say “hello”, and it is normal to see ornate crosses in front of Bavarian homesteads. Even today, 54 % of Bavarians report that they are Catholic, with the share rising as high as 80% in the rural southeast.

This part of Bavaria has voted for the Catholic party for well over one hundred years. It backed the Catholic Centre Party during the days of Imperial Germany and gave that party’s Bavarian successor, the Bavarian People’s Party, the highest share of the vote in every free election during the Weimar Republic.

This pattern was resurrected after the Second World War, as Bavaria’s rural devout gave the BVP’s successor, the CSU, overwhelming support time and time again. So the fact that AfD support last autumn was strongest in this region made me wonder: are Catholics deserting their historic party?

Statistical analysis suggest they are. Support for the AfD rose in direct proportion to the share of Catholics in Bavaria’s election districts; the higher the share of Catholics, the more the AfD vote went up.

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This relationship holds even after controlling for other factors such as education, income, unemployment, and the share of migrants in the region. Alexander Roth of the Bruegel Institut ran such an analysis and found “a positive correlation between Catholic church membership and AfD voting in Bavaria, controlling for numerous other factors”. So we have a curious anomaly: Germany’s most Catholic party, one that recently passed a law mandating that crosses be posted in all government buildings, is losing support among Catholics.

It’s not clear exactly why this is happening, nor is it clear which types of Catholics are switching. But we do have some clues. In America, Donald Trump picked up some his strongest support from people who held a strong personal identity as Christians but rarely or never attended religious services.

Bavaria’s high number of Catholics almost certainly includes many for whom Catholicism is a cultural heritage rather than something that is a center of their lives. Only about 10% of German Catholics regularly attend mass, according to 2016 figures from the German Bishop’s Conference. These people may, like their American brethren, be afraid of Islam and migrants but be unconnected enough with the Church to pay attention to its stances on “Islamophobia” and migration.

That cultural identity may also combine with isolation from formal institutions to create a warm climate for anti-Islam fears. Data from Germany’s past and America’s present again reinforces that view. The vote share for the Centre Party and the BVP was relatively stable throughout the rise of Nazism: those Catholics close enough to the Church to vote for the Church’s party did not waver despite the Depression’s pressures. So, too, did more nominal Catholics who voted for parties with ties to strong unions such as the Social Democrats or Communists. But those who voted for other parties, presumably those without active membership in strong institutions, switched en masse.

Similarly, Trump’s most fervent support came from people and in regions with low levels of social capital or social interaction. His most intense backers watched more television than his other supporters, were least likely to know basic political facts, and were the most likely to believe they were powerless in society and that others were out for themselves.

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CSU efforts to regain these voters’ support has so far been unsuccessful. The most recent polls show the CSU receiving even fewer votes than in 2017, with AfD polling higher along with the more moderate Free Voters and the Greens. It may thus be that their efforts to reclaim the defectors’ loyalties has hurt them more than it has helped. As one AfD official told a reporter, “Voters are no fools. They can tell the copy from the original.”

Meanwhile, the CSU has dropped by as many as seven points since Seehofer threatened to resign over Merkel’s immigration policies. Too late to garner Catholic support, too strong to keep moderates: the CSU is beset on all sides now. Its decline among Catholics is instructive both for it and other mainstream centre-right parties.

Christian faith may be waning, but Christian identity still resonates across Europe. Any influx of immigrants into a society can cause tension, as British voters’ concerns over Eastern European migration shows. But couple that with the introduction of an alien religion traditionally in conflict with Christianity and whose radical adherents remain violently opposed to the West, and an entirely new challenge arises.

National and religious identity seems to comfort many people, giving them confidence in a society from which they otherwise feel disconnected. Threaten that, and they will be open to new voices that promise to restore the primacy of the identities that give their lives stability and meaning.

Europe’s largely secular elites seem to be unaware that millions of their citizens still derive sustenance from the old identities. For Germany’s and Europe’s sake, these elites need to rekindle their support for these notions before it is too late.

Further reading

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