“Make Germany Great Again!” It was with this slogan that Friedrich Merz emerged as the main victor in last Sunday’s general election in Germany.
Sounds familiar?
To be exact, the man who is set to become Germany’s next Chancellor borrowed the phrase made popular by Donald Trump in the United States. The slogan Merz used was “Restore Germany’s greatness and respect!” which expresses the same sentiment.
The German election put the twin center-right parties of Christian Democrat and Social Democrat on top with their highest score since the golden days of Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard, the men who rebuilt post-war Germany as a robust democracy. The twin also put the idea of Germany as a nation-state rather than as part of a globalist conglomeration at the center of the debate, pushing aside the 80-year trauma of seeing nationalism morph into a version of Nazism.
To be sure the dramatic rise of the rightist part Alternative for German (AfD), which doubled its votes, is still used by those who wish to keep that trauma alive for a verity of reasons.
All in all, however, despite efforts by label distributing circles, AfD isn’t what the Nazis Party was in the 1930s and could be seen as part of the radical right movement that led Britain to Brexit, brought Victor Orban to power in Hungary, made Georgia Meloni Prime Minister of Italy and elevated Marine Le Pen’s National Rally as France’s largest political party.
The election also saw the rise of the radical eft Die Linke (The Left) Party which some analysts regard as a crypto-Communist outfit with a support base in the former East Germany.
However, just as AfD isn’t the Nazi party designating Die Linke as communist is an exaggeration.
In fact, both parties campaigned on issues such as illegal immigration, fear of mass unemployment and unease about loss of national authority to trans-national bodies such as the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
In other words, both those radical parties belong to the undeclared coalition of “Germany First” inspire by the Trumpist movement’s “America First” shibboleth that has pushed the pendulum away from globalism.
The biggest losers in the elections were the Social Democrat Party (SPD), which survived in a truncated version, and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), which failed to gain entry into the Bundestag (parliament).
The Greens, also known as the Watermelon party because they are green outside and red - that is to say anti-capitalist - inside, also suffered defeat, especially losing a good many votes among younger electors who moved en-masse to either Die Linke or the AfD.
Regardless of party affiliations, the German electorate indicated that it believes that the politico-economic model developed since the 1950s is in deep crisis.
That model was based on five pillars.
The first was that Germany was covered by an American assurance policy for its national security, which enabled the nation to spend something around one percent of its GDP on defense. Many Germans now believe that those good old days are gone and support Merz’s plan for a massive rise in military expenditure.
President Donald Trump’s ambiguous attitude on NATO and his criticism of Europeans as “freeloaders” has produced a sense of insecurity never known since the 1930s.
The second pillar was a healthy demography initially energized by mass immigration to compensate for human losses sustained in World War II. Initially, the immigrants were ethnic Germans coming from Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and as far away as Romania and Bulgaria.
A good number also came from Türkiye, which acted as the greatest exporter of manpower for Europe until the 1980s.
In the past two decades, however, a majority of new immigrants have come from war-torn nations such as former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa and most dramatically Syria.
These newcomers helped reduce Germany’s demographic deficit, due to declining birth-rate, by created huge cultural, religious and security problems that foment xenophobia. An immigrant who has fled a war-torn country isn’t the same as one coming from a peaceful place with the hope of working and building a better life for himself and his loved ones in the old country.
The third pillar was stability as Germany for the first time since its emergence as a nation-state in 1870 had passed through seven decades of development as a well-established democracy. But in the past few years that pillar, too, has appeared shaky with rising insecurity including countless knife attacks, assassination of foreign political exiles, the emergence of extremist mini-groups and crises in intra-industrial dialogue, a hallmark of German democracy.
Built in the post-Soviet era, the fourth pillar was access to cheap oil and gas resources from Russia which enabled the federal republic to reduce its dependence on the more expensive producers in the Middle East and Africa.
Finally, the federal republic enjoyed a fifth pillar represented by almost unrestricted access to China’s fast growing market, making Germany the world’s greatest exporting power in history. But that pillar, too, is proving shaky as the People’s Republic enters a cycle of slowdown that nurtures economic nationalism and the cult of tariffs.
The election revealed some disturbing trends that if accentuated could threaten what has been an exemplary democracy highlighted by a massive 85 percent turnout in Sunday’s elections, the highest in the European Union. Almost 60 percent of young voters, those aged 18 to 25, voted for radical left and right parties plus the “Watermelons”.
By all accounts, Germany is heading for a bumpy road. Negotiating it is made more difficult because of the electoral system of proportional representation which prevents the emergence of a majority consensus on tackling major challenges any nation could face. Endless coalition building haggling and adoption of contradictory options consume much of the energy needed to govern a nation in crisis.
Is Merz up to the daunting task he faces at a time the entire European Union is in crisis? The fact that he is the first businessman to assume the chancellorship and the most “American” in style may help.
He is also an avid reader of Nietzsche who believed that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” But who knows?
