New Politics Needed
Germany After the Election
By John Foster
The only thing good about the German election is that the results were as bad as expected.
The Christian Democrats (CDU) came out in front. Alternative für Deutschland performed as expected. And the Social Democrats (SPD) scored their worst result since the 19th century.
The question is how to stop the far-right rot. That is, if it can be stopped at all.
From a centre-right perspective, the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands’ achievement is reassuring.
Consider the context.
The narrative of German politics since 2015 has been the rise of the far right, a shocking development for a country whose lowest point was the Nazi genocide, the worst rightwing crime Europe has ever known.
For a country that has sold itself for several decades as having buried the fascism of the Third Reich, and turned itself into a liberal democracy, this has been hard to explain.
Did the project fail at a certain point, or was it impossible to begin with? One thing worth noting is the difference in the nature of the dynamics between the Weimar era and today.
In the period between the 1914 and Adolf Hitler’s election, Germany had suffered a catastrophic military defeat in a war, one for which the population was completely unprepared.
Occupation followed, as well as a bout of hyperinflation that severely damaged middle class confidence in the institutions of the state, the capitalist market, and the democratic system.
A decade of turmoil followed. It’s end saw another bout of economic crisis with the opening of the Great Depression and the gross mismanagement of the economy by Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s government.
A flight from the political centre followed, hastened by a cycle of political violence in the streets. The key feature of this dynamic was the tendency of middle-class parties to tack to the right in times of crisis.
The parties of the right, the Deutsche Volkspartei (DV) and the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) became more radically conservative. The Catholic Deutsche Zentrumspartei (DZ) and even the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DP) also shifted right.
Sound familiar?
On the surface, an important driver of this dynamic was the increasing power of the Communists and the radical left more generally.
The Communists did improve their electoral showings, winning 17% in 1932, and the overarching spectre of world communism in the wake of the victory of Bolshevism in Russia added to the atmosphere of crisis and threat.
Still, the threat of the radical left was more of an illusion and an alibi.
The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, never worse off than second place in the Reichstag, remained in the political centre, steadfastly refusing to take up the legacy of its origins in the radical workers movement.
The lurch to the political right had much more to do with the failure of the economic system to function smoothly and generate growth and profits in sufficient measure.
The threat of communism, as well as the even more hallucinatory claims of Antisemitism, were little more than camouflage for these underlying conditions.
Pace the hysterical claims of the modern right, most recently, AfD chief Alice Weidel, the Nazis were not, in fact, socialists.
The term was appended to the Nazi Party’s name as a means of attracting working class membership, not as an indicator of an actual political tendency, a point that Hitler and his associates made explicitly.
By and large, German businesses, at least those not owned by Jews and those in the defense industries, were free to operate as they had done, at least until the outbreak of war in 1939.
There were some innovations (a system of compulsory bonds for instance) but these measures were never much out of line with measures taken by the Allied powers in the context of the war economy.
The extirpation of Germany’s trade union movement had further positive effects on profitability.
Ultimately, it is worth noting that the relationship between National Socialism and German business was symbiotic.
The Nazis actively courted major industrialists. The bankers and business magnates never fled the country and made significant profits, at least until the whole system collapsed.
Present-day Germany bears some similarities to this condition. But the differences are more profound.
Germany’s economic growth and profitability have slowed. This is not due to a worldwide crisis on the model of 1929, although the general decline of returns on investment against those of speculation has certainly contributed.
Like the other states in the North Atlantic region, Germany still suffers from the lingering hangover of the 2008 crisis and after.
If the effects of those events were more muted due to the institutional structures put in place after the crisis of the 1930s, it is also certainly true that it left a hangover of distrust in the system not dissimilar to that which persisted in Germany after the crisis of the early 1920s.
As in the 1920s and early 1930s, the SPD remains marooned in the middle.
Caught between the Scylla of the radical left and the Charybdis of the far right, the party has achieved a level of institutional dysfunction that even the Weimar version never arrived at, and its poor electoral returns (just over 16%) reflect this.
The SPD, like most of the other parties of European social democracy, is suffering through the long hangover of the turn to technocracy.
The attempt to court middle-class voters that has been increasingly prominent since the 1970s alienated much of the party’s traditional voter base. Their party line (“We’ll run the economy sensibly”) has not proved compelling.
Unfortunately, the consequence of this commitment was SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s turn to neoliberalism, fixing the economy (or trying to) by making workers increasingly subject to the whims of their employers. This resulted in temporary gains. However, it evacuated the core of the party’s base.
In doing so, it also opened up a space into which the xenophobic culture which had brewed up in the Neue Bundesländer could flow.
This replaced the narrative of workers’ solidarity, displacing responsibility for the economic woes of the bottom 75% of German labourers onto refugees.
This scapegoat narrative has now taken on a life of its own. It can be seen in the prominence of Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which seems to have taken on the mantle of AfD with a human face and in the fate of the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP).
Both parties remain mostly irrelevant. In the case of BSW, their problems are aptly summed up by US President Harry Truman, who once remarked, “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.”
Wagenknecht’s problem is that she has too many ideas that sound like SPD policies to allow her xenophobic ideas to capture voters.
The situation of the libertarian FDP is, if not worse, at least more ironic.
This election happened because the FDP blew up the governing Ampelkoalition in an attempt to achieve some sort of electoral advantage. The results were underwhelming.
From the 91 seats the FDP had after the 2021 election, their total has dropped to zero. They received a smaller proportion than even the BSW.
The Free Democrats’ decline is an indication of the transformation of German politics. With the real world they have also abolished the apparent one.
The FDP’s free market nostrums can no longer compete with a politics in which the immigrant has taken on the role of the empty signifier.
None of the above should be taken to suggest that the current situation is not dangerous. Quite the contrary.
Alternative für Deutschland is not as radical is its German predecessors, at least for now. However, there is an persistent tendency in the former Der Flügel wing around Björn Höcke to minimise Nazi crimes.
While the CDU has shifted to the right, they haven’t reached the territory in which the DVP and DNVP thrived in the 1930s. Germany also lacks the critical mass of radicalised ex-soldiers that drove the far right forward in the 1920s and 1930s.
The CDU’s initial steps, following the election, to decry state subsidisation for progressive media and NGOs, echoing Hungary, and its prior openness to working with the AfD, are terrifying.
Still, the prevalence of xenophobia as an explanatory device in German political life is profoundly unsettling. Also deeply troubling is the lack of political forces ready to do anything about it.
For a country in which 20% of the population is of migrant descent, this is especially alarming. Germany’s minority population is far larger than in 1933, yet has few advocates in mainstream party politics.
The SPD hardly helps, with its border closures and migrant deportations, and repression of pro-Palestinian Jewish activists.
The legal consequences of the SPD-led government’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza have yet to be determined, in both international and German courts, where it is accused of complicity with genocide.
The most likely coalition will be one featuring Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, and Die Grünen, the latter having mutated into a somewhat squishier version of the liberal Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (DPD), the forerunner of the FDP.
This will likely result in more business-friendly economic moves (trying to improve the economy without fixing what’s wrong with it) and some light anti-immigrant hysteria.
While this is likely to keep the right wing of CDU onside for the present, it is unlikely to address the prevalence of racist narratives that have colonised the German public sphere.
The SPD’s unwillingness to take measures that might alienate centrist voters (such as income redistribution and altering the economy) means that the rightwards slide is likely to continue.
Einstein probably didn’t say that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That notwithstanding, it is a lesson that the SPD and the other forces of the social democratic left need to take onboard.
The policy of technocracy has failed. Without something new, the parties that pursued it will soon follow.
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Photograph courtesy of Rasande Tyskar. Published under a Creative Commons license.