The Last Stand of Germany’s Establishment
Germany will once again have a moderate government. If it fails, the far right will be at power’s door.
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On Friday evening, reports of a stabbing at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin began to circulate on social media. The details were sketchy. A man was allegedly in hospital, gravely injured. Bloodsoaked clothes were found on one of the concrete slabs of which the memorial is composed. A terrorist attack was suspected.
When I looked at a number of major German news sites on Saturday morning, I briefly considered that it must have been a bad dream. I was expecting the stabbing to be front page news. And yet, I couldn’t find a word about it anywhere.
Finally, I scrolled far enough down the page to learn the gruesome details. The stabbing had indeed been a terror attack. The presumptive culprit was a Syrian asylum seeker. When apprehended by the police, he allegedly said that he had intended to kill Jews.
A decade ago, this story would have dominated German headlines for a week. Now, it has come to be of minor, fleeting interest. After all, it was but the latest—and, thankfully, one of the least deadly—in a long series of recent terror attacks.
In December, a refugee from Saudi Arabia killed six people, including a nine-year-old boy, at a Christmas Market in Magdeburg. In January, an Afghan refugee fatally stabbed multiple people, including a two-year-old boy, at a park in Aschaffenburg. Ten days ago, another Afghan asylum seeker drove a car through a trade union protest, injuring dozens and killing two, in Munich. On the day after the stabbing at the Holocaust Memorial, there was another, more deadly one, in Alsace, just across the French border from Germany, also perpetrated by a failed asylum seeker.
That is the atmosphere in which Germany went to vote today—and the outcome of the election plainly reflects that atmosphere.
The Christian Democrats won the election with roughly 29% of the vote.1 During her two decades at the helm of the party, Angela Merkel led it into (what was then) the political center; it was Merkel who decided to keep Germany’s borders open at the height of an historic influx of refugees in 2015.
Friedrich Merz, her successor as party leader, has taken the Christian Democrats back to their conservative roots. Especially on the topic of migration, he has completely changed the party’s tune, promising energetic measures to secure the border and ensure that rejected asylum seekers actually leave the country. Though the Christian Democrats remain below their historic levels of support, that promise was likely enough to turn Merz into Germany’s next Chancellor.
But the real winner of the election is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the second biggest party in the country. The AfD is the only party whose support increased by double digits in this election, surpassing the 20% mark. It has also had an outsized impact on public debate. The oft-repeated mantra of Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, that Merz stole much of his program from her may be an overstatement. But it contains a kernel of truth. A decade ago, the AfD was the only party that resolutely opposed Merkel’s refugee policy; now, a majority of voters and a majority of newly-elected members of the Bundestag feel the same way.
This does not, however, mean that the AfD is about to take power. In the hours since the election, senior members of the Christian Democrats have repeatedly reaffirmed that they are considering neither a formal coalition nor an informal pact with the party. For the time being, the AfD will have to content itself with leading the opposition.
The biggest losers of the election are undoubtedly the Social Democrats. At the first German election at which I was old enough to vote, in 2002, the party got 39%, roughly in line with its typical strength since the founding of the Federal Republic. After steady declines over the last decades, the Social Democrats have now plummeted to about 16%, marking the first time in Germany’s postwar history that they did not take first or second place. The end of the road for Olaf Scholz, one of the most hapless and unpopular Chancellors in Germany’s postwar history, is nigh. As one German TV commentator put it, tonight’s preplanned election party at his party’s headquarters won’t be vergnügungssteuerpflichtig—which is to say that no attendee is going to have enough fun for it to be subject to tax.
The contours of the next government are now coming into view, though its precise composition remains uncertain.
In the run-up to the election, it was generally assumed that Germany would once again be governed by a so-called “grand coalition” of the two historically most popular parties: the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. But because both fared somewhat worse than polls had long predicted, it is not yet clear whether they will get enough seats to command a majority.
If one of two smaller parties fighting for representation in the Bundestag—which, under ordinary circumstances,2 requires gaining at least 5% of the nationwide vote—manages to get in, the grand coalition would for the first time in German history be too small to command a majority. Christian Democrats and Social Democrats would then need to add yet another party, likely the Greens or (if they somehow squeeze through) the Free Democrats, to their presumptive coalition.
But whatever the exact composition of the government turns out to be, one thing is already clear: It will be but the next turn in a game of musical chairs that has, with one brief interruption, characterized German politics for the past two decades. The rise of more extreme parties on the left and especially the right has placed ideologically cohesive political majorities out of reach for both the center left and the center right. As a result, governments are now composed of different combinations and permutations of the ever-same parties: the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats on the center right and the Social Democrats and the Greens on the center left—with most governments including both left-of-center and right-of-center parties.
Voters have good reason to be deeply frustrated with this state of affairs. As everyone can sense, few elections now bring about tangible change.
The next government faces an enormous set of tasks—a set of tasks it sadly looks unlikely to master.
As I have recently chronicled in these pages, the current state of Germany is deeply concerning. The economy is in recession. Major companies are barely innovating. The auto industry is in real peril. The trains no longer run on time. Inflation is eating away at the prosperity of the middle class. Public safety has markedly declined. Terrorist attacks have become a common occurrence.
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All of this has sufficiently upset Germans that even those who do not fit the traditional stereotype of far-right sympathizers are fed up. As a young German entrepreneur whose parents immigrated to the country from Ghana and who this year voted for the AfD out of frustration with the established parties explained his vote: “I just want someone to reestablish German order.”
To stabilize the country, the new government will now need to make radical reforms. Any realistic attempt to stem the flow of voters to the far right must start with taking the groundswell of concern about immigration seriously; to paraphrase David Frum, it is painfully evident that, if moderates don’t enforce borders, extremists will. But German political stability has always rested on broad-based prosperity, and securing a thriving future for the country will also take a wholesale reinvention of Germany’s economic model. If German elites persist with business-as-usual, the country’s prosperity will plummet, and its social compact will break.
Because of Elon Musk’s vocal (and, in my opinion, wrong-headed) support for the AfD, this German election has commanded more international attention than usual. Much of that attention rested on a misguided premise. There was never a realistic risk that the AfD could “win” this election in the narrow sense of leading—or, for that matter, even participating in—the next government. As should have been clear all along, the new German government will once again be composed of moderates.
But as an uncharacteristically pithy German saying holds, aufgeschoben ist nicht aufgehoben: to postpone an event is not to avert it. The German public, while increasingly alarmed, remains unwilling to countenance the big changes that would be required to make the country a real force in the 21st century. The parties that will compose the new government come from different political camps. Each of them is constrained by its own set of interest groups and ideological dogmas. All of them will enter the next coalition with significant apprehension and deep mutual mistrust. It’s hard to imagine a less auspicious start.
This is the last chance for Germany’s political establishment to stop a dangerously leaky ship from foundering. It is far from clear that it will be able to do what it takes. If it doesn’t, the far right really might be knocking on the doors of power in four years’ time.
All of the vote percentages in this article are based on electoral projections that are current at the time of publication; final results are likely to diverge moderately.
There are two technical exceptions. First, parties can gain representation despite falling below the 5% hurdle if three of their candidates win a plurality of the vote in their electoral districts (something that is unlikely to happen this year). And second, a party representing the Danish minority in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein is for historic reasons exempt from the 5% hurdle, and will likely take one seat in the Bundestag.
There is no possibility for democracy without free speech that also allows for criticism of fundamentalist religions. That no longer exists in Europe. This is simply backlash to censorship. And yes, it is frightening.