The interior of Fiat’s Lingotto factory in Turin, finished in the Twenties, literally resembled a cathedral with its soaring levels of concrete pillars and ribs. Even in the era of globalization, a powerful car industry centered in Germany and exporting to the world has been an enduring source of European prestige. So it is not entirely an exaggeration to say that the twilight of this car industry heralds a spiritual crisis for the continent. 

The reversal of fortunes has been swift and brutal, manifest in a wave of Chinese electric vehicles and hybrids now crashing over European trade barriers. As recently as 2021, just 1% of new cars sold in Europe came from Chinese brands; last month, one in every seven new cars did, despite EU tariffs of around 30% on Chinese EVs. The challenge could not have come at a worse time. Europe’s car makers have been crippled by the loss of Russian energy supplies, Trump’s tariffs, and the EU’s bungled efforts to phase out petrol engines. They are suffering an even worse mauling in the lucrative Chinese market. 

China has been the focal point of the car industry for decades; but until recently it was European marques selling their vehicles to the expanding Chinese middle class and bringing the profits back home. Volkswagen arrived there in the late Seventies as an auto-making god, teaching Chinese engineers the manufacturing standards that underpinned their own nascent industry. It would later hold the title of China’s top-selling brand for 25 years. Today, as VW undertakes a restructuring that threatens 100,000 jobs globally, it is partnering with Chinese brands to learn how to make the automobiles of the future. Some of those Chinese models may even be produced in its emptying German factories. Imagine if French wines were shouldered out of their own market by foreign upstarts; this gives some sense of the humiliation that will be entailed by VW making Chinese-designed cars in Saxony.

Embarrassed Europeans have typically blamed China’s export success on a sinister plot to deindustrialize Western countries by undercutting their manufacturers with heavily subsidized goods. As Rishi Sunak warned last month, Xi Jinping wants to “make the world dependent on China while China depends on no-one”. There is certainly some truth in this account, but it rests on a misleading image of China as a purveyor of cheap knock-offs. Sadly, the snobbery implied by the phrase “Temu Range Rover” — as the popular Jaecoo 7 has been nicknamed in Britain — has not been earned. Even if China cannot match the German mastery of the internal combustion engine, its car industry has bested the European one in innovation, entrepreneurship and industrial strategy.

The best illustration of this is BYD – an abbreviation of the pinyin name Biyadi – the Shenzhen-based firm which displaced VW as China’s largest brand in 2023, and which has since become the global leader in EVs and hybrids. Fifteen years ago, when BYD was seeking a toehold in the United States, a baby-faced Elon Musk dismissed the challenge to Tesla with a scoff: “have you seen their cars?” It has indeed been a long road for a company founded by the son of rice farmers in rural Anhui province, which started out in the Nineties making batteries for laptops and mobile phones. Yet Musk’s Silicon Valley approach to cars, focusing on a tiny range of products to serve everyone, has proved inferior to BYD’s strategy of challenging incumbents across a wide spectrum of vehicles, from city runabouts to monster pick-ups. 

As of this year, BYD has two models tailored to the European market. According to the company’s adviser for the region, these will answer peculiar conditions such as German Autobahns, Italian mountain roads, and British potholes. They look just like European cars, and deliberately so: BYD is offering something familiar for a lower price, along with an assortment of clever tech to dispel any residual uncertainty about buying a Chinese product. Who has not wished for a tiny vent to douse your smartphone with cool air while it charges wirelessly?

Like the Chinese auto industry at large, BYD rose through a combination of imitation, innovation, and shrewdly adapting itself to government programs at both national and city levels. Its earliest vehicles, not yet electric, were closely modeled on Japanese brands such as Toyota. It released the world’s first mass-market plug-in hybrid in 2008. Around the same time, the Chinese leadership began to throw its weight behind EVs in earnest, offering a range of subsidies for both producers and consumers. It had long shown an interest in developing homegrown “new energy” vehicles, which promised to provide China with a niche in the global market and to alleviate its dependence on imported oil. 

But academics Fengming Lu and Xiao Ma argue that China’s cities were the most important drivers of the industry. BYD entered partnerships with numerous municipal governments, beginning with Shenzhen and Changsha. These deals often proved hugely profitable for both parties. The company received favorable access to land, infrastructure, electricity and labor, in exchange for which it invested in local car-making plants and provided the cities with electric buses and taxis. BYD even opened a railway division to make the most of municipal transport programs. 

Private capital also played an important role. Stock markets allowed local governments to cash in on the shares they had acquired in EV makers and begin the investment cycle again. Venture capital funds, both Chinese and foreign, were crucial to the boom in EV start-ups that took place after 2015, with hundreds of entrepreneurs from the tech sector flooding into the industry. China thus ended up with an absurdly large number of carmakers. This intense competition did not just force companies to innovate, but encouraged brands like BYD to become export giants, exploiting less competitive EV markets overseas.  

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So BYD is not so much a creature of state subsidies as the product of a state-engineered process of Darwinian struggle. The central government used tools such as credit availability, tax incentives and influence over local government priorities to stimulate an explosion of private and municipal ventures, before tightening business conditions so that only the fittest could survive. Since the early part of this decade, China’s EV industry has been in this second phase of cutthroat consolidation. 

One reason that BYD has emerged as a victor is its high degree of vertical integration: rather than outsourcing the production of every last nut and bolt as most Western carmakers have done, it controls most of its supply chain. It has partnered with mining companies around the world to ensure access to crucial minerals such as lithium, which it processes in its own refineries. It develops and produces its own batteries, powertrains, semiconductors and software systems. Consequently, the company is protected against supply shocks, can respond swiftly to market demand, and is able to innovate across numerous domains. 

This all amounts to a humbling lesson for Europe, a continent which long viewed the clean energy transition as an opportunity to show that it can still shape history and determine its own destiny. Instead, the EU is scrabbling to build defenses against the tide of Chinese EVs. Decarbonization targets may be relaxed, and a “Made in Europe” drive is underway to limit state support to European suppliers. 

The situation in Britain is somewhat better or even worse, depending on your perspective. Its government has done little to protect a long-suffering domestic car industry, and its drivers have little sentimental attachment to national car marques, most of which are foreign-owned servants of the luxury market. Britain last year produced its lowest car output since 1952. The country is less threatened by China’s dominance because it has no pretense of even being in the race. Indeed, Chinese EV imports are integral to the Government’s goals of reaching Net Zero and bringing down inflation, since they are cheap and don’t produce CO2 emissions — at least, not after they leave the factory. And the policy is working: though BYD only began selling its cars here in 2023, it was Britain’s second-most-popular brand in September. Hence the irony of a Labour Party that longs to reverse Brexit insisting that the freedom to set its own EV tariffs is a “red line” in negotiations with Europe. 

Why was Europe’s mighty car industry blindsided by the challenge from China? According to historian and commentator Adam Tooze, one reason may simply be corporate greed. Tooze argues that European brands used the post-Covid supply shortages of the early 2020s as cover for a profit-maximizing strategy, making fewer cars and aiming them at the higher end of the market. The deeper causes, however, take us to the fundamentals of political economy. The Chinese state has been ruthless at building up the supply chains, energy security and industrial base needed to succeed in high-tech manufacturing, but it has been equally ruthless in using market competition to foster innovation. Europe, by contrast, has long neglected industrial strategy through a naive faith in global free trade, yet it still allowed its powerful legacy industries to squat over the political system in such a way that new players and technologies have been denied space to breathe. 

However, such bloodless explanations feel insufficient for a matter of deep significance to Europe’s history and identity. They do not pass the cathedral test. One can tell that Europe’s cars are long past their creative peak simply by looking at them: a mass of SUVs with different names but near identical appearances and dimensions, fat blobs in shades of white, silver and black. Gone is the chic elegance of the Citroën that inspired Barthes; gone is the cold, Teutonic glamour of the old Mercedes, the charisma of the red Alfa Romeo driven by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. The decline can be measured in the reaction of passers-by when a vintage car rolls along the street, with its elegant profile, purring engine and rich color palette: they stop, point, let out a spontaneous groan of appreciation. True, cars now accelerate faster than they once did, but the thrill is dampened by an optimization for comfort that gives the impression of being wrapped in cling film.

My neighbor, a professional mechanic, explains the problem concisely: “Old cars have character. Today they’re all made of plastic, and they all look the same.” Some of this is due to government regulation, and the sharing of designs in a heavily consolidated industry; but it also reflects artistic failure in the form of a herd-like pursuit of the average consumer. As a result, we are forced to seek distinction in utilitarian matters such as battery range, trunk space, and, of course, price. The erotics of form has been replaced by the fetish for technological trimmings that dominates YouTube’s vast catalog of car reviews: the voice assistants, the 540-degree parking cameras, the entertainment systems and cruise control settings. If cost, efficiency and gadgetry are what matter now, then it’s not obvious why European consumers should ignore the fruits of China’s booming auto industry, which does these things rather well.

Perhaps cars offer us a barometer of civilizational vitality. Even if automated production lines do not employ the millions they once did, the fact that cars have around 30,000 components and require extensive research and engineering skills makes them fundamental to any serious industrial nation. Developing countries are acutely aware of this, hence why so many of them long to have their own brands. The rise of the AfD amid the bitterness of Germany’s disintegrating automotive sector certainly carries a whiff of Untergang. As for China, the unique prestige of automobiles is undoubtedly a reason that its leaders put so much emphasis on beating the world at EVs. Its industry may be conquering the globe on the basis of efficiency and clever software, but it is still young. It may yet develop a poetry of its own.

Since 2017, Germany has led NATO’s multinational force in Lithuania, with troops from eight other countries rotating in and out to serve alongside German forces. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted Vilnius to seek firmer guarantees that its allies would come to its defense if the Baltic states became the Kremlin’s next target. Berlin responded by committing to permanently station an armored brigade in Lithuania, establishing a combat-ready deterrent on NATO’s northeastern flank. The move is unprecedented for the Bundeswehr: this is its first permanent military deployment abroad since the Second World War. Latvia and Estonia sought similar commitments from Canada and the UK, respectively, but Lithuania alone secured an entire brigade.

Addressing parliament in Vilnius two years ago, Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius promised that German troops would stand shoulder to shoulder with their Lithuanian counterparts, ready to defend the country — part of a wider Alliance commitment to protect every inch of NATO territory. A year later, in May 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz attended the commissioning ceremony of the newly created 45th Panzer Brigade against the backdrop of a grand neoclassical basilica in Vilnius’s Cathedral Square. “The security of Lithuania is also our security”, he declared. “The protection of Vilnius is the protection of Berlin.” 

The brigade has its own coat of arms, worn on every soldier’s uniform. A black Staufer lion, the heraldic emblem of Germany’s medieval Hohenstaufen dynasty, stands next to a sword and Gediminas’s Tower, one of Vilnius’s most famous landmarks. Green, red, black and gold, the colors of the German and Lithuanian flags, tie the design together. 

Germany’s newly formed brigade will be supplied with state-of-the-art equipment designed to repel a potential Russian attack, including kamikaze drones, Leopard 2 A8 main battle tanks, Puma infantry fighting vehicles, and Panzerhaubitze 2000 self-propelled howitzers. It brings together combat battalions from Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, backed by artillery, reconnaissance, armored engineers, logistics and signals units. Next month, more than 700 drones will take to the skies as the 45th Brigade puts new reconnaissance, strike and loitering munition capabilities to the test. 

The arrival of the 45th Brigade marks a major shift in how NATO plans to defend the Baltics. Under the old “tripwire” strategy, a small force would be expected to hold off an attack until allies arrived to push the invaders back. Now, the aim is to stop an invasion from the outset. That means keeping tanks and other heavy equipment in Lithuania, ready to fight, rather than waiting weeks for them to arrive from Germany or other NATO countries.

One of the brigade’s main jobs is protecting the Suwałki Gap, a 40-mile strip of land along the border between Poland and Lithuania — the vital land link between the Baltic states and the rest of NATO. It’s the region’s Achilles Heel or “neuralgic point”, as the German Lieutenant Colonel escorting me puts it. 

We drive through a small village and stop at a level crossing. A freight train rumbles past, heading west from neighboring Belarus towards Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad. Perched on the Baltic Sea, it is a Russian island inside the European Union, sandwiched between Poland to the south and Lithuania to the north and east. The wagons are marked “Sodruzhestvo”, the name of Russia’s top agro-industrial conglomerate. Lithuanian border guards constantly monitor the trains to prevent illegal military equipment from passing through the European Union corridor. 

Western intelligence agencies have long suspected Russia may have nuclear weapons stockpiled in Kaliningrad. Since 2016, Moscow has stationed 9K720 Iskander short-range missiles there, capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Yet new research conducted by the Baltic International Security Centre (BISC), a nonprofit policy institute, suggests that the region has been “stripped bare” of ground forces and air defenses because Russia is diverting resources to the war in Ukraine. 

“They may have nuclear warheads,” says Edward Lucas, security expert and director of the BISC, “but they haven’t got anything to launch them on because the missiles are all busy bombarding Ukrainian cities.” He adds that there is no real difference from NATO’s point of view whether a nuclear warhead is launched from Kaliningrad or from a missile on a Sukhoi Su-57 bomber or from a submarine because “in the end, if Russia wants to go nuclear, it’s not going to be the nuclear warheads in Kaliningrad that are decisive”.

However, he stresses that the exclave remains an important hub for hybrid operations such as GPS electronic warfare or propaganda and, crucially, serves as a useful pretext for escalation. In September, Moscow accused NATO of plotting to blockade Kaliningrad and threatened nuclear retaliation. More recently, the Russian military website Voennoye Delo suggested that a hypothetical blockade might require Russia to seize a 100-kilometer swathe of Baltic territory to secure access to the exclave. 

Such sabre rattling, Lucas tells me, has led to a complete overhaul of defense policy in both Poland and the Baltic States. “I can’t quote him by name,” he says, “but a Baltic official once told me, “If a seagull shits in the harbour, we know what it had for breakfast when it last went to Russia, who it dates, where it nests. And what its parents did during the Soviet era”.” In other words, monitoring Kaliningrad is a priority for the Valstybės Saugumo Departamentas (VSD), Lithuania’s counterintelligence agency.

Despite heightened vigilance, Lithuanians feel increasingly exposed. In May, residents of Vilnius received emergency alerts on their phones ordering them to immediately take cover amid suspected drone activity near the Belarusian border. It was the first major alert to send people in an EU and NATO capital scrambling for shelter since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Then, in September, an Italian fighter jet on a NATO mission shot down a drone over Lithuanian airspace. A Ukrainian military source identified the wreckage as belonging to a Geran-2, a long-range attack drone widely used by Russia. 

Across Vilnius, bright yellow signs reading “Priedanga” — “shelter” — sprung up following Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine in 2022. But when frightened residents rushed to them in May, some found the doors locked. Others described them as unfit for purpose: dilapidated and covered in cobwebs. The chaos and complaints prompted Prime Minister Inga Ruginienė, who had sheltered with the President in a strategic government bunker, to apologize and promise a review. But many fear their country is woefully unprepared for worst-case scenarios. In 2016, the US think tank RAND war-gamed a Russian attack on the Baltics and reached a chilling conclusion: without more NATO troops on the ground, Russian forces could overrun the Baltic states in just 36 to 60 hours. Lithuania has been a NATO member for more than two decades but that did not prevent an MP from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party publicly questioning Lithuania’s independence in Russia’s State Duma four years ago.

Most Lithuanians know from bitter experience what it means to be controlled by Russia. Memories of the Soviet occupation, which lasted nearly half a century after the Second World War, are still fresh. Almost every family has relatives who were murdered or sent to gulags in Siberia. There’s a dark history with the Germans too. Vilnius was once known as the “Jerusalem of the North”, home to at least 55,000 Jews and a celebrated tradition of Torah scholarship. Across Lithuania, Jews made up nearly a tenth of the population. But under Nazi occupation, the country suffered one of the highest per-capita rates of Jewish murder in Europe.

Today, though, Lithuanians are grateful for German support. The government has pledged up to €1.7 billion to construct housing, training areas and support facilities while the Germans supply the military hardware and the troops. Bundeswehr soldiers are applauded in the streets and people buy them drinks. Lithuania’s national army has surrendered its new garrison at Rokantiškės to the Bundeswehr; men from its own infantry are sleeping in tents and portacabins until the Germans’ facility is ready. 

Germany’s ambassador to Lithuania recently praised the new modern barracks at Rūdninkai, near the Belarusian border. Each soldier gets a private en-suite room, a queen-size bed and a kitchenette. With gleaming sports facilities and vast windows overlooking the pine forest, the barracks could almost pass for a hotel rather than a military base. For soldiers bringing their families to Lithuania, homes in or near Vilnius are less than an hour away. German schools and kindergartens have opened in both the capital and Kaunas, the country’s second-largest city.

Despite the warm welcome and all the perks on offer, the Bundeswehr is struggling to find enough volunteers for the brigade, which is due to be fully operational by the end of next year. The German defense ministry says around 80% of the brigade’s 5,000 posts are filled, but key roles remain vacant, particularly IT technicians, tank mechanics and medics. These specialists are in short supply across the Bundeswehr, which struggles to compete with civilian employers.

Ambivalent attitudes towards the military may in part explain the Bundeswehr’s recruitment problems. In Berlin, soldiers were once warned for their own safety to change into civvies before going home from work. Germany’s unease with its army was shaped by the atrocities of the Nazi era and decades of anti-militarist sentiment. Now uniformed soldiers get free train tickets, and nobody bats an eyelid. Yet growing respect for the military has not erased divisions over plans to introduce a new form of military service. The prospect of a draft has already fueled protests, particularly after the government introduced mandatory medical checks this January for 18-year-old men. Last month, tens of thousands of students walked out of class in cities across Germany carrying banners with anti-war messages including “conscription means cannon fodder” and “We are peaceful, what about you?” 

All this gives political ammunition to those at the extremes of Germany’s political spectrum who resent government funds spent on Ukraine and who lobby to get sanctions against Russia lifted. Sahra Wagenknecht and Amira Mohamed Ali, co-leaders of the populist Left-wing BSW, have denounced Merz’s military service reform as “absolute madness” and empty warmongering. On the far-Right, the AfD is divided: while some back conscription for 18- to 25-year-olds, others rally behind the slogan “Keine Wehrpflicht für fremde Kriege” — “No Conscription for Foreign Wars”. They argue that young Germans should not be drafted to fight for “foreign geopolitical or power interests”, a thinly veiled swipe at NATO and German support for Ukraine.

During a coffee break at the Rukla base, I meet Staff Sgt Phil — Bundeswehr protocol insists that the media use only first names — from Hamburg, who trained as tank commander and drone operator. I ask him whether tanks are becoming obsolete in the age of drone warfare. He shakes his head. “They deliver a lot of firepower and can move speedily on the battlefield,” he says. “Plus you still need heavy armor to take and hold ground.” He adds that in Lithuania, German crews are fitting their Leopard tanks with anti-drone cages, electronic jammers and active protection systems to counter incoming threats. 

He says Lithuanians he meets in cafes and shops often tell him they feel safer because of the brigade’s presence. In Germany too, he adds, he is now increasingly thanked for his service. Like many in the Bundeswehr he believes that conscription is needed — the sooner the better — because you cannot create a combat-ready reserve overnight. The war in Ukraine, he says, has forced a change in mindset: “We’re beginning to understand that we can no longer take our liberty for granted.” 

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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The lesson of Weimar? Don’t ban the AfD

By Katja Hoyer

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 bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines — which had up until then supplied Germany with cheap Russian gas — revealed an aspect of Ukraine’s military defense strategy that had previously been hidden. It became clear that the Ukrainians were seeking to break up the Russian-German relationship, which they saw as a direct threat to their own security.

The first of the Nord Stream criminal trials will start on 26 October in Hamburg. It will expose many unsavory details. The prosecutors might ask questions such as: who ordered the attacks? What did President Volodymyr Zelensky know? When did he know it? The attack left Germany in a perma-energy crisis. And while I don’t think the trial will affect Germany’s support for Ukraine in the short run, it could — depending on what is revealed — make Germany more reluctant to support Ukraine’s membership of the EU and Nato in the future.

The pipeline explosions have a long pre-history. Germany’s energy relationship with Russia dates back to the Seventies. Gerhard Schröder, a former German chancellor and personal friend of Vladimir Putin, supercharged this relationship when he proposed the Baltic Sea pipeline projects in the early 2000s. The project later became known as Nord Stream. The first pipeline, which became operational in 2011, ran from near St Petersburg in Russia to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in eastern Germany. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Nord Stream 1 provided Germany with 55% of its gas supplies. Nord Stream 2, which was only completed in 2021, had the capacity to increase the gas flows substantially.

The Germans treated their business dealings with Russia as separate from geopolitics. The standard answer you got from German officials before the war was that the best way to foster democracy in Russia was through trade. They called it Wandel durch Handel — change through trade. If it rhymes, it must be true.

Eastern European countries, notably Poland, treated the Nord Stream pipelines as a security threat. If Germany made itself dependent on Russia for its gas, Poland would once again be surrounded by a hostile alliance. Later, France joined the group of critics. More importantly, the US Congress passed successive acts, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, to impose sanctions on Germans involved in the pipeline project. They did not go after Schröder personally. He was the supervisory board chairman of the project. But they went after Matthias Warnig, the Nord Stream CEO. Warnig was a former East German Stasi officer and another close friend of Putin. The pipeline diplomacy became particularly heated in the two years leading up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022. I myself criticized the pipelines on the grounds that they made Germany dependent on Russian gas and undermined European solidarity. At that time, virtually nobody in Germany thought about energy in geopolitical terms — but everybody else did.

A few days before Putin invaded Ukraine, the German government agreed to suspend the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which by then had been constructed but not yet used. It still needed certification. When Putin invaded, the project died. But Nord Stream 1, the older pipeline, was still operational. Even the Green Party, the only big German party that opposed the construction of Nord Stream 2, favored the continued operation of Nord Stream 1. By that time, the Greens were responsible for energy policy in the German government. As Germany was phasing out nuclear energy and coal, the country had no alternative to gas. Even when most of their energy was coming from renewable sources, they still needed gas to cover periods when there would be no wind and no sun.

There were alternative gas suppliers back then. The US and Qatar, for instance, sold gas in liquefied form (LNG) — but during this period, Germany did not have the infrastructure in place to process it. Russia’s gas, meanwhile, was pumped directly into the gas grid.

Each of the pipelines, the old Nord Stream 1 and the new Nord Stream 2, consisted of two big tubes. On 26 September 2022, three of the four tubes exploded near the Danish island of Bornholm, including the two that made up Nord Stream 1. Initially, everybody suspected the Russians. Then the US journalist Seymour Hersh wrote an article claiming that the explosion came at the behest of the CIA.

The German prosecutor eventually established that the attack was launched from a sailing yacht chartered in Germany by a group of Ukrainian citizens, with links to the Ukrainian army and secret service. Initially, the Ukrainian government tried to deflect attention from this evidence, arguing that the plot was funded by a wealthy private individual. But that story has since been debunked.

The operatives were highly trained explosives experts and deep-sea divers. The pipelines were located 80 meters below sea level. Diving that deep is not something you learn at your local scuba-diving club. The German prosecutor established that this was a military operation through and through. The estimated physical weight of the C4 explosives used to detonate the pipelines was in the order of 50-100 kilograms. Only governments have explosives on this scale.

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The German prosecutor issued a European Arrest Warrant for the operatives. The first successful arrest came in August last year, when Italian police detained Serhiy Kuznetsov, the suspected ringleader of the operation, who carelessly went on holiday to Italy. He was extradited to Germany and placed in a high-security prison. His trial is due to start this autumn.

What confuses me is why Kuznetsov thought it safe to go on holiday in the EU. Even more astonishing is the fact that the second suspect, Volodymyr Zhuravlev, whom the Polish authorities previously refused to extradite, also thought it safe to go on holiday abroad. Last week, the Croatian police arrested him. He is now awaiting extradition to Germany. This is one aspect of the story that I find puzzling. These are highly trained operatives with fake passports. Why would they go on holiday in unsafe locations?

So far, this all makes for a gripping spy story. But it may soon become a political one. Details will matter. The Wall Street Journal journalist Bojan Pancevski claims in his book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, that the attack was orchestrated by the Ukrainian military and intelligence network, and that Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces and now Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, was the most senior officer involved. We don’t know whether Zelensky gave the order or was informed. I don’t think it really matters. As president, he is responsible for the actions of his military and his intelligence service. What matters is that a Ukrainian commando sabotaged the critical energy infrastructure of a friendly country.

The media covered the pipeline explosions and the immediate aftermath half-heartedly. I suspect editors did not want to be accused of disseminating anti-Ukraine propaganda. The media supported Ukraine — and the pipeline story did not sit well with the hero worship of Zelensky. The German government also did not comment on the prosecutor’s action. But it’s worth remembering that both Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz could have stopped the investigation if they had wanted to. The Poles are outraged that they did not. Last week, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, said that the bigger crime was the construction of the pipelines, not their destruction. I recall a tweet by the current Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who was an MEP in Brussels at the time of the explosions. “Thank you, USA,” he wrote.

So, was it really a conspiracy? Over the course of my journalistic life, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are many fewer real conspiracies than most people think. What looks like a conspiracy is usually just a series of blunders. I think this was the case here too. A giant miscalculation by the Ukrainians. Back in the summer of 2022, they had pushed back the Russians. The war was going their way. Everybody wanted a photo with Zelensky. The Ukrainians thought it within their power to ensure that the Germans would not revert to their previously cozy relationship with the Russians. But after the Trump administration ended financial and most military support for Ukraine, Germany became Ukraine’s biggest supporter. What were the Ukrainians thinking?

However this story ends, I don’t expect Germany to revert to its old, naive pro-Russian reflexes. Germany will not make itself dependent on Russian gas once again. But I cannot exclude the possibility that Germany may, after the war has ended, reopen at least one of the pipelines. Germany has become reliant on natural gas — and Russia could become one of its several suppliers. We are one cold winter away from an energy crisis in Germany. And when that happens, we’ll remember who bombed the pipelines. Even without a winter crisis, I suspect that Germany’s future support for Ukraine will be less enthusiastic than it might otherwise have been.

The upcoming trial is going to release a lot of juicy information into the public domain. The media will cover it. The Alternative for Germany, the party of the far-Right, is already making a big deal out of the Nord Stream explosions. They are asking: why support a country that bombs our infrastructure? It is a hard question to answer. The German government, for sure, has not answered it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The year of the 2018 World Cup also marked a turning point for the German economy. Until then, it was considered one the most successful in the world, a reputation it had enjoyed almost without interruption since the Second World War. I spent a lot of time back then warning that Germany’s strategy was not sustainable — even if it superficially seemed to work. From 1945 to 2018, after all, Germany was Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse. The last eight years, though, have been marked by deindustrialization, price spikes, and persistent economic disappointment.

In short, the parallels between the pitch and the boardroom are hard to miss. But there is one important difference: those in charge of German soccer are at least starting to act. They fired the coach, Julian Nagelsmann, and have started talking to Jürgen Klopp, probably the most famous German alive. The former coach of Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund wants to change the entire way the German national soccer is organized, and seems to have the backing of all the influential people in the country’s soccer establishment.

Alas, Friedrich Merz is no Klopp. He has difficulty tapping into the basic mood of the nation, let alone building a successful team. “What a game,” he tweeted blithely after the Nationalmannschaft lost to Paraguay on penalties last week. “With your commitment and team spirit at this World Cup you have thrilled our country.” Many Germans were left wondering whether their Chancellor had even been watching the same game. Welches Spiel (“which game”) soon trended on the country’s social media.

To be fair to Merz, he’s not so much the cause as the symptom — of a country that’s too old, too inflexible, too corporatist, too bureaucratic. There’s no one of Klopp’s caliber in German politics to speak truth to power, and put the economy on a different path. Besides, even if Klopp were to succeed in transforming the national team, it would take him some time to drag it back to its glory days. Achieving this for the German economy is incomparably harder.

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Welcome to the age of uncertainty

By Wolfgang Munchau

The biggest thing that happened to Germany in the last 40 years is that it’s turned from one of the most innovative countries on Earth into a nerve center of Luddism. Germans were the champions of 19th-century industrialization, during which their scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs, not least the invention of the motor car, transformed the world forever. These days, though, Germany is one of the least digitized advanced nations around.

Of course, Germany isn’t alone here. France is hardly a beacon of technological innovation either. Still, France is one of the very few European country with an AI foundation model, even if recent rankings put Mistral, the firm in question, between 50th and 100th place in global league tables. The UK is also doing comparatively well, thanks to Google’s Deep Mind and its offshoots, but can hardly compete with the Silicon Valley giants.

The frustrating thing here is that Germany should have had a particular interest in digital technologies. Certainly, the German car industry should be at the forefront of AI research: autonomous driving will become the big earner for the sector this century. But the world leaders in this segment are American, Chinese and Israeli. The Germans tried to develop their own systems, but they have not succeeded.

Germany’s decline is to a large extent a “typewriter-versus-computer” story. In other words: they bet on the wrong technology. Fax machines still rattle in German doctors’ offices, and the country’s broadband connections lag far behind its peers.

There are other reasons for German decline too. China has been pursuing an aggressive policy to build up its manufacturing capacity. And, until 10 years ago, these developments complemented Germany’s own industrial strategy. The Chinese made consumer goods, while the Germans sold them plant machinery. That has since changed. China is now competing head on with Germany in segments, like cars and chemicals, that used to be German specialties. Not that I’d blame China for Germany’s decline, which is due mostly due to its own complacency, arrogance, and resultant lack of investment.

That’s also the story in football. One of the team’s apparent problems was a lack of training — and too much leisure. The successful teams of previous generations spent much of their time locked in training bootcamps. This is not a football-specific issue, but reflects shifts across society at large. In a recent survey of advanced industrial nations, Germans had the lowest number of working hours per year: 1,331. The country with the highest, at 1,898, was Greece. Of course, this is contrary to how Germans perceive both themselves and others, but the old stereotypes of hard-nosed Teutons and feckless Southern Europeans no longer hold.

When nations, companies, or football teams decline, delusion and denial often play an important role. I was in Germany after the first match in the group stage of the World Cup, when they beat Curaçao 7-1. After the victory, most Germans thought they’d already won the trophy. Ahead of the second game against Cote d’Ivoire, a local radio station in North-Rhine Westphalia asked listeners to predict the score. Around 100 people took part in the poll, and every single respondent predicted victory, with many expecting a romp. Germany won the game in the end, but it was close — not the kind of victory that should have warranted such a high degree of certainty. Against Paraguay, the final game, one fan-site poll had 89% in favor of a German victory. The reason the shock of defeat was so profound was the same reason Germans think Greeks are lazy: ignorance and arrogance.

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Finger-pointing is a natural first response to a shock. In the football, everyone blamed the coach. Lothar Matthäus, a former World Cup winner, blamed the wives. They were a distraction, apparently. But neither the wives, nor the coach, can explain the phenomenon of three consecutive failures.

Same in politics. Germany’s decline didn’t start recently. In 2024, I published Kaput, a book on the German economy, in which I argued that Germany’s primary problem was not cost competitiveness, but a lack of innovation and scale. There’s no exchange rate that can make a typewriter competitive again. By the same token, petrol cars are still being sold, but they are a declining product, with declining profit margins. What happened to industry, then, is what happened in football. The world changed, but Germany didn’t. Why would they, when they were still rich and comfortable? Germany has one of the world’s most generous welfare systems, but this also means that there’s less urgency when the economy tanks.

To be fair, Germany still has several highly specialized companies in areas like mechanical and chemical engineering. One of those is Zeiss, best known for its camera lenses, but which is now more focused on precision-optics for semiconductors. Another is Trumpf, which had humble origins as a machine-tool manufacturer, and which is now one of the world’s leaders in laser technology. Leica, the old-school camera maker, is still in business and very profitable, having found a niche at the very top end of the market.

But if there’s still excellence around, there’s less than before. Certainly, decline will continue for some years to come, as the car industry shrinks. They will still make cars in Germany, but they will be made in factories owned or operated by China. And just as German car companies re-circulated their profits into the German economy, the Chinese will do the same back home. Hardly a week goes by without another German car-component manufacturer registering for insolvency. All the while, Germany’s industrial sector will continue to shrink, and it won’t come back. Remember what happened to Detroit? That city’s on the mend now, but it’s taken decades, and Germany doesn’t have the relatively dynamic, decentralized politics of the US.

Coalitions, constitutional law, the EU — all these conspire against change. So too do Germany’s politicians. Angela Merkel never saw her role as solving problems, but she was at least a competent manager of politics. Her successor, Olaf Scholz, was also well briefed, but politically not very effective. Friedrich Merz, though, is the worst-briefed German chancellor at an EU level, and totally ineffective. His deputy, Lars Klingbeil, the co-chief of the SPD, is also a deeply unimpressive figure, whose political support in his own party is questionable. Apart from the parties of the hard Left and Right, then, the Federal Republic’s leadership is poor. If a system doesn’t allow to produce change, it doesn’t attract the best people.

For football, at least, there’s hope. Klopp has dragged things back before. But there are no Klopps in European politics, let alone Germany’s. This is where politics and football differ. National teams reinvent themselves from time to time. But Germany seems unable to. And, for now, its people don’t even have football to distract them.

Donald Trump was made for America 250. The looks, the flair, the beguiling mix of arrogance and fun — the 47th president is his country in flabby flesh and bone. In his own clumsy way, Trump seems to grasp this too, nestling into the festivities like a hot dog in a bun. Liberal columnists might be right about its crassness, but cage fighting on the White House lawn feels as suited to this birthday as Johnny Cash and Kojak were to the bicentennial in 1976. “We’ve never reached so high,” as Trump proclaimed last month. “This is our heritage.” America’s heritage, perhaps, but what of Trump’s own?

We know, by now, of his Scottish mother. Yet even after a decade as ringmaster of the national circus, the President’s other side, his German side, is far less familiar. Unlike Joe Biden with his Irishness, Trump rarely mentions it. Though his paternal grandfather came to America from the Rhineland, his family long denied the Teutonic connection. Its most famous manifestation remains essentially negative, when liberal comedians revived the family surname to mockingly call him “Drumpf”. Still, while Trump might seem the most American of men, he, like his country today, couldn’t exist without its German ancestry, with the community so deeply rooted in the republic’s soul that the two are now inseparable.

Germans have been coming to the New World since before the US existed. Across the 17th century, as Europe tumbled into sectarian slaughter, thousands headed west; Mennonites and Amish gasping for free religious air. It’s later, though, that German America truly took root. In the 40 years from 1850, some five million Germans made the Atlantic crossing, and almost as soon as they arrived set about transforming their New World home. As one German-American activist pointedly claimed in 1874, his countrymen’s presence heralded the “improvement” of national life.

This confidence was partly economic. Unlike the Irish or Italians — destitute, illiterate, condemned to years in rat-hole tenements — German Americans were generally richer and more educated. Most were farmers, dodging the East Coast slums and traveling west with the republic, founding towns like Oldenburg, Indiana, and Dutzow, Missouri, and Germantowns almost everywhere. Like many of their countrymen, my wife’s family chose the rich soil of Wisconsin, but an ethnic map of the nation today shows a German plurality stretching across a dozen states and 1,000 heartland counties, an unbroken chain from Philadelphia to Oregon.

Their spread was largely welcomed. Linguistically, culturally and ethnically closer to their Anglo compatriots than the classic Ellis Islander, they were accepted far more readily. As early as 1858, Abraham Lincoln reassured Chicago Germans that they were “like the blood of the blood of the Founders”. To be sure, tensions existed. Prim WASP clergymen, sober in more ways than one, dreaded the rise of “lager bier”. Yet compared with the Irish (“foreign barbarians”), let alone the Chinese (“degraded and inferior”), German Americans were generally accepted into what Victorian Social Darwinists blithely called the “Anglo-Teutonic” race.

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It’s tempting, here, to talk of “assimilation” — but that isn’t quite right. German Americans were doubtless accepted faster than other settlers. Ironically, though, and especially given their wealth, numbers and vast geographic reach, that helped them shape habits without anyone really noticing. At Trump’s cage fight, after all, punters were offered that “All-American” staple: hot dogs. Like the hamburger, however, frankfurters first arrived in the cookbooks of German migrants.

It wasn’t just their food that morphed the mainstream. Almost uniquely among migrants, German Americans developed their own architectural vernacular, and Milwaukee would be their Florence. Wisconsin’s biggest city, around one-in-three residents were German natives in 1860. They came — why else? — to brew. Ice from the Milwaukee River kept their lager cool, while docks on Lake Michigan made it easy to export. Brands like Pabst and Miller rapidly turned Milwaukee into “Brew City” and its streetscape into the most Teutonic in America. Even now, after years of deindustrialization, Milwaukee’s churches look German, and its downtown offices too, and the mansions sigh for Saxony. The city hall, finished in 1895, might have lumbered to the Midwest from Hamburg, its square squat tower, complete with beer-stein sculptures, primed for a post-binge brawl.

This urban landscape has become America’s too. The gables, the timbering, the sharp roofs and curved arches — you can find them on main streets everywhere, not just in Fredericksburg, Texas, or Over-the-Rhine, Ohio, but in regions that received far smaller German flows. Then there’s how these places feel. Take Von Trier, a historic beer hall not far from Milwaukee city hall. As you enter, you’ll hear the growl of conversation, and the numbing clunk of glasses. Waitresses bustle past, carrying beer jugs and half-eaten plates of pretzels. The atmosphere is homely, convivial, a place to drink but also eat and talk, distinct from both brandy-soaked colonial taverns and the modern English pub. No, Von Trier is impeccably Teutonic — just like almost every bar in America.

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By Andrea Valentino

This boldness was matched elsewhere. If some Italians rejected the strictures of mainstream America — the mafia was called cosa nostra (“our thing”) precisely to obscure it — Germans instead shaped New World morals to their taste. “May German diligence, steadfastness, and loyalty continue to be the hallmarks of the German element in the United States”, said one pamphlet from 1899, “and imprint themselves ever more indelibly upon the American national character!”

Indeed, probably the most enduring German contribution is how they balanced work and play. Until the mid-19th century, Anglo-America largely followed the Puritan Sabbath, with its devotion to family and faith. Germans, whether Catholic or Lutheran, were more relaxed. They built bandstands and picnic grounds everywhere they went, and Milwaukee became known as the “German Athens” for its proliferation of social clubs. Gambling was also popular. My in-laws have spent hours trying to teach me Sheepshead, a bewildering Bavarian card game now played wherever Wisconsinites meet. Taken together, anyway, the German Sonntagsspaziergang (“Sunday outing”) soon became an American staple — and this helped inform what the good life truly meant. To quote James Truslow Adams, the historian who in 1931 coined the phrase “American Dream”, “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone”. That fullness would hardly have been possible without the distinctly German, distinctly American, waltz between toil and joy.

Trump himself was surely shaped by these ideas. Whatever his actual business acumen, he’s clearly proud of his success, once crowing that he’d “never lost” in life. A lifetime of dealmaking was never for the glory of God: but for pleasures of the flesh. Those private jets and endless rounds of golf are at bottom aspirational, with the President promising his voters that “you’re not gonna know where to spend all that money”. It hasn’t quite turned out that way — but in his blend of labor, leisure and over-weaning pride, Trump is as German American as an Independence Day hot dog.

That raises an obvious question: if even the commander-in-chief was forged by German America, why is he indifferent to his background? There’s an equally obvious answer: two world wars and a torrent of anti-German feeling. Things were particularly hysterical when America fought the Kaiser from 1917. Germans were spat at in the street and their dachshunds pelted with rocks. Books were banned, plays pulled, and sauerkraut rechristened “liberty cabbage”. The Second World War saw less trouble, but German Americans were nonetheless prodded into quiet. Schools closed and presses shuttered and several Germantowns changed their names. Surnames also changed, from Müller to Miller, Schmidt to Smith. Drumpf to Trump, too, with Donald’s landlord father pretending he was Swedish to avoid awkwardness with Jewish tenants.

If this implies the end of German America was merely a function of 20th-century disasters, I’d suggest a more subtle dynamic. Closeness to the Anglo, after all, is what gave the Germans strength. But when the moment came, that same closeness ensured assimilation was both rapid and near total — far more total than groups that struggled. According to the 2020 census, some 45 million citizens claim German heritage, among white Americans second only to English. Where, though, is German America today? Where is its Rocky, its Seinfeld, even its Big Fat Greek Wedding? Where are its songs, its stories? Where, come to that, are its politicians? Forget Biden’s plastic Irishness: Barack Obama has half-seriously adopted the Emerald Isle too, while everyone from Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders exploits their ethnic backgrounds for political ends. Not so Trump, who echoed the Swedish story as late as 2016, and whose German-American Day comments feel like an afterthought, focusing more on defense spending than any ancestral affection.

Yet to borrow Wren’s epitaph, if you seek German America, simply look around you. In fundamental ways, the modern United States was made by red-faced Rhenish farmers and hard-nosed Saxon brewers. And whatever the undoubted achievements of other migrant groups, in movies, music or sport, their self-conscious othering means their mores are less likely to spread. Think again of food. Unlike the trusty hot dog, bagels, gyros and pizza retain a vaguely hyphenated air, something true of some Americans themselves. Reacting, perhaps, to a legacy of WASP stereotyping, Larry David still plays up his neurosis, while Martin Scorsese makes mob flicks five decades from his first. The point of these clichés isn’t their veracity — but that they guarantee a certain distance from the American mainstream, limiting their ability to shape the deeper, embedded culture.

This matters, not least in appreciating the contours of American life over recent decades. The relative cultural silence of heartland America — those flyover counties where Germans most gathered — doesn’t preclude power. Trump’s rise since 2016 certainly suggests as much, even before you recall that the country will down the equivalent of 22 Reflecting Pools of (mostly) “lager beer” this 4 July. The same principles also offer lessons for the future. It’s tempting, particularly on the Right, to see the spread of new music or food as outriders of more thoroughgoing shifts in American life. But using German America and its European cousins as a guide suggests this link is far from straightforward. It’s certainly true that 21st-century immigration will sway the national experience. Yet just as The Godfather didn’t fundamentally alter the tenor of the American Dream, it’s unlikely that Yemeni coffee or Hispanic rap will either.

The opposite, in a sense, is true as well. Think again to those early German settlers. The Amish still live much like their bearded forebears, planting and praying in the Pennsylvania soil. Yet if they, almost uniquely among German Americans, preserve their tongue and customs, centuries in the New World have left few indelible traces. In other words, and as the mass of German migrants belatedly learned, the ultimate mark of influence is to be drowned in the American tide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite this dubious assertion, Twenties post-Kaiser Germany remains a solid analogy for 2020s post-liberal America — just not in the way conservatives often claim. Though moderate by interwar standards, the Weimar regime paved the way for Nazi terror by normalizing state violence and repression. The Weimar’s SPD leaders did so by unleashing law enforcement, often in alliance with Right-wing paramilitaries, to crush and kill Leftist radicals. This brand of state violence occurred not only during the 1919 Berlin Revolution, when the Freikorps murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, but for over a decade afterwards.

Of course, the comparison between Good and Luxemburg only goes so far. Yet one can see in the Minneapolis killing the same kind of insecure, panicky overreaction that often took place under the Weimar government’s violent suppression of radical protest movements and wannabe revolutionaries. Particularly relevant here is the social media bloodlust surrounding Good’s death, and the desire of so many in government and the commentariat to justify Good’s death, grimly echoing Weimar-era targeting of radical women by Right-wing paramilitaries acting with state approval.

After violently suppressing Luxemburg’s Spartacists in 1919, after all, many army officers went out of their way to declare that any women who happened to stray into their gunfire were fair game. Radical women were, in their view, essential obstacles to restoring order. The Weimar military’s overt and unapologetic contempt for women, especially those of a radical Left persuasion, derived not merely from their association with the fiery Luxemburg, but from General Arnold Lequis’s attempt to excuse a failed military operation.

In a battle to retake the Hohenzollern palace from radicals, Lequis gave an order to attack, but was thwarted by rebel gunfire from the roof. In excusing his failure, Lequis gave the following response to a Berlin newspaper: “My soldiers don’t fire on women and children. That was where the mistake was made. A rank of my troops was driven back, they laid down their arms, and the rest went back to the university.” The message — that the government’s effort to free the palace had been derailed by women’s resistance — spread swiftly among military circles. From that point on, there would be no hesitation, as Weimar troops were instructed to fire at any hostile mob: including if women and children were involved or even just nearby.

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In Trump’s America, a similar sentiment seems to have spread among ICE agents, now with a decade of cultural war baggage behind them. Yet their contempt for female activists, especially in the LGBT community, also has far deeper roots. Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Good, was dragged over 100 yards by another anti-ICE protestor in a vehicle last June. Ross, likely still traumatized by that event, may have made the same psychological leap General Lequis did in 1919: next time, there will be no hesitation, women or children be damned.

Securing stability through uncompromising state violence carried long-term consequences for the German psyche. The Weimar officials’ embrace of violence in pursuit of order normalized it, particularly against Leftist opponents. When the Nazis employed street violence and the assassination of political enemies — not only while in government but also during their ascent to power — it was far harder for ordinary citizens to recognize these acts as uniquely dangerous. For a while, at least, the suppression looked rather familiar.

Put the specifics of Renee Good’s case — or even ICE generally — aside for a moment. Normalizing state violence, and even violence between warring political factions, is the greatest danger of our current American moment. Certainly, it’s far more serious than a putative slide into “fascism”, whatever that means in the America of 2025, so different from the fragile democracies of interwar Europe. What is unfolding in the United States is clearly something different. It is an authoritarian movement, yes, but one that’s deeply American in character, shaped by frontier mythology and market absolutism. Projecting 20th-century fascism onto American politics therefore does little to help us understand what we are actually facing, or how to resist it.

The Social Democrats charged with governing Weimar Germany faced obscene challenges, many outside their control. Their menu of viable choices was extremely narrow, and under those conditions it is not surprising that the decisions they made were deeply flawed. After all, the Treaty of Versailles saddled them with unpayable debts for a war launched by a previous regime, one many Social Democrats had opposed. They also faced relentless risings from both Left and Right, each attempting to establish breakaway republics or overthrow the fragile national government altogether.

Which brings us to the actual solution to America’s accelerating descent toward an illiberal future — and it is not the election of a president with the “right” ideology. There is only one plausible way out of America’s Groundhog Day cycle of dysfunction, and it is the same structural change that might have prevented the Nazi seizure of power in Germany: accepting that our governing institutions are too large, too centralized, and too culturally incoherent to sustain democratic legitimacy.

There was far more ideological fluidity in Twenties German politics than is generally acknowledged. Across the decade, there were several radical uprisings, each attempting to create local worker-led governments. But whether in Hamburg, Saxony, or Halle, each of these experiments was brutally repressed by the Weimar regime. Had the Berlin government perhaps allowed more experimentation, echoed their Bismarckian predecessor in giving into some demands to weaken radicalism generally, things might have turned out differently. There’s a chance, of course, that the German far Left would have been further emboldened, but based on the experiences of the pre-1914 period, it’s more likely that they’d have lost purchase with everyday citizens. The same, incidentally, might be said of the Right — with a more flexible approach to governance potentially encouraging alternatives to Hitlerism, notably among economically radical nationalists like Otto Strasser.

Relitigating Hitler’s rise to power isn’t the point. In general, local democratic experimentation is something people in power detest, but it might also be the only way to free ourselves from the zero-sum politics poisoning American life. There is a fundamental urge, deep in the human psyche, to have control over our own localities without the oversight of distant governing bodies. Massive representative structures — of the sort now governing the 350 million Americans — no longer scratches our democratic itch. Much of what we’re arguing about online is a distraction from addressing that fundamental urge.

The down side of an intensely localist approach is, of course, the possibility of chaos ensuing. But given the reckless self-interest of those currently in charge of the United States, chaos increasingly seems to appear anyway. More fundamentally, recall that the republic wasn’t founded under the assumption that a powerful federal government should decide, over the objections of local populations, who counts as a citizen. It was fought in defense of small‑r republicanism — of local control, regional autonomy, and minimal centralized interference. The Constitution of 1789 represented a significant retreat from those principles, not their fulfillment. To avoid descending into outright dysfunction, and the normalization of political violence that follows, the United States must return to its original localist instincts. Breaking the United States into an “American Union” of six or seven regional political units, where state governments are framed by robust constitutions, executives, and greater autonomy — somewhat similar to how the European Union operates today — may be the only remaining solution to our culture-war deadlock.

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Germany required total war, genocide and foreign occupation before being divided — and even then it lost nearly a third of its territory and has never recovered its pre-1939 standing. If America continues on its present trajectory, it’s hard to see why a similar outcome couldn’t happen here. Yes, Wall Street and national corporate entities would fiercely oppose such decentralization, since it would place meaningful limits on their power. But why should ordinary citizens care about that?

Besides, if you could go back and poll the Germans who survived the Nazi catastrophe on whether it would have been better to break up their nation in advance — allowing more room for the country’s various factions to experiment with different forms of governance — it’s fair to assume almost everyone would have preferred that option to the country destroying itself under Hitler.

There’s a broader issue here too. Though Weimar’s state repression wasn’t justified, at a certain point those in power must answer how they’ll deal with opponents who refuse to back down. Despite initial readings of the situation, it seems increasingly clear that Renee Good and her wife Becca were indeed obstructing ICE efforts before the shooting, with Becca taunting Ross in a highly reckless manner. None of this justifies Good’s killing, which was easily avoidable. But this is precisely how civil wars erupt. Flash‑bulb moments that have less to do with the immediate facts than with what they come to symbolize. If Renee Good’s death doesn’t trigger a national breakup, something else will. When these protests reach their denouement, the key questions will be who holds federal power, what their ideology is, and how they choose to respond. Yet as long as the two‑party cartel remains intact, the answer will almost certainly be law‑and‑order brutality that demonizes protestors — one way or another.

The mythic sanctity of a 50-state America still pervades, but cracks are forming. Red‑state secessionism, like the Greater Idaho movement, is real. Yet once Trump returned to power, much of that rhetoric evaporated, revealing that many Americans still cling to the illusion that they can eventually win outright and impose their will on unwilling regions. Blue‑state secessionism, by contrast, has never got off the ground. Fundamentally, this cuts to the core of progressives’ self‑conception, much as Twenties Marxist internationalists rejected settling for control over a single German province. Unlike deep‑red states such as Texas and Idaho — which flirt with secession when they’re out of power — deep‑blue states like Minnesota and Washington reject the idea entirely: they openly wish to impose their progressive vision on the rest of the country, imagining they enjoy widespread support in regions they’ve never even visited.

As an American who has lived in eight states, I find our conflict deeply sad and also deeply stupid. If we could recognize the problem for what it is — an irreconcilable divide in moral, religious, and cultural norms that cannot be solved by a federal government as powerful as ours — we might escape our march towards a second civil war and an illiberal, undemocratic future. But both sides still want to control the entire country, and that doesn’t bode well, just as it didn’t during Germany’s Weimar years. And at least they only had newspapers and the radio to contend with. These days, of course, social media pours constant, second‑by‑second fuel onto the red‑blue fire.

More anger means more engagement, which means more profit. Effectively speaking, big tech has exercised an outsized control over American governance since the Obama administration, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. The upshot is that the culture wars will continue to consume any possibility of a rational, broad‑based democratic movement capable of challenging America’s existing power structure. So until people abandon social media en masse, efforts to impose national unity through force will only escalate — until state terror becomes routine, regardless of which side happens to be wielding it. The sky isn’t falling yet, but the only way forward to halt our escalating dysfunction is to embrace the fact that local regions ought to decide basic governance decisions, like who is a citizen and who is not. Either that, or we accept many more Renee Goods over the months and years ahead.

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.

It’s true that the two leaders do get on quite well on a personal level. Donald Tusk, Poland’s premier, is probably the most pro-German politician you can find in Poland. Meanwhile, there hasn’t been a more pro-Polish German chancellor in recent times than Friedrich Merz. The two are members of the same party in the European Parliament, and yet they both keep messing it up.

Tusk has a reputation for making serial misjudgments. In the UK, he is best known for his unhelpful interventions in the Brexit referendum while president of the European Council. Misunderstanding Britain’s internal political dynamics when making the case for Europe back in 2016, he ended up driving doubting Remain voters into the Brexit camp.

Last week, we had another one of those Tusk blunders — in the form of a tweet about Nord Stream 2, the Baltic Sea gas pipelines which were blown up by Ukrainian commandos in 2021. Responding to Germany’s request to extradite one of the men allegedly involved, Tusk wrote: “The problem with Nord Stream 2 is not that it was blown up. The problem is that it was built.”

In one respect he is right. Poland has long argued that the pipelines made Europe too dependent on Russian energy. Germany massively damaged Europe’s security interests by seeking private commercial deals with Russia back then, even after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea.

But to condone such violent destruction is an act of political madness. Imagine someone had said: “The problem is not that President X got assassinated. The problem is that he or she was elected in the first place.” You would presumably be appalled, regardless of your political position in respect to the president in question. Mercifully, nobody was killed when the explosions ended the gas supplies to Germany overnight. And luckily the sabotage didn’t leave Germany without power — it was a mild winter and the government did a good job managing the transition to new suppliers.

But the destruction was unequivocally a criminal act. The pipelines had been legally constructed and commissioned. They were private property. And we now know, thanks to the German prosecutor, that a group of operatives with links to the Ukrainian military and secret service are suspected of carrying out the sabotage. It was, without a doubt, the military operation of a state. From Tusk’s comment, then, you would think that Poland now officially condones an act of terrorism.

But Tusk wasn’t the first Polish politician to support the violent destruction of the pipelines. Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s current foreign minister, was an MEP at the time of the explosion, and he tweeted: “Thank you, USA”, in what turned out to be a mistaken reference to the US as the force behind the explosions. Given such comments, and given what we now know about the explosions, it is politically impossible for Germany to adopt pro-Polish positions.

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The Germans, though, are as much at fault when it comes to provoking its neighbor. Despite his emollient diplomacy towards Poland, Merz’s first political act after being elected chancellor in May was to erect border controls to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. Acting unilaterally, the premier ditched the rules of the Schengen passport-free travel zone by invoking emergency clauses over immigration, causing chaos in Poland. His reasons for doing so were barely credible, and some would say even risked breaking EU asylum law. After all, the last big wave of immigrants came from Ukraine in 2022, after Russia’s invasion. The numbers had stabilized. For now, Poland and Germany both have one million Ukrainian immigrants. But this is a far bigger load for Poland, which has only half the population, and a fifth of Germany’s economic output. To close the German-Polish border to stem the flow of immigrants constitutes a naked act of beggar-thy-neighbor politics.

But, then, this is the same mindset which caused Nord Stream to be built in the first place — it’s Merkel’s mindset. She and Gerhard Schröder both masterminded the deal and after leaving office, Schröder even became the head of the consortium that built it.

Merkel, meanwhile, might no longer be politically active, but she has reappeared on the scene to defend her record and stoke internal discord within the EU. In an interview with the Hungarian media company Partizán last week she inflamed the Poles by blaming them for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “In June 2021, I felt that the Minsk Agreement was no longer being taken seriously by Putin, and this is why I wanted a new format in which we, as the European Union, would speak directly with Putin,” she said. “This was not supported by some. These were mainly the Baltic states, but Poland was also against it.”

There were good reasons why Poland and the Baltic Republics did not support another Merkel-led diplomatic initiative. They saw it as another way for Germany to maintain its toxic relationship with Russia to the detriment of Eastern Europe. I thought at the time that Poland’s objections to Merkel’s suggestion were reasonable.

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But virtually all of Merkel’s later foreign policy initiatives were failures. She will go down in history both as one of the architects of the Russian-German political romance, and as a leader who failed to arrest Germany’s still ongoing economic decline. I criticized her often over her refusal to resolve the eurozone’s crisis for reasons of political expediency. I see this failure as the quintessential cause behind the EU’s political weakness today.

These growing fractures in key relationships binding the EU together will have an unavoidable and significant effect on national politics. The current investigation into the Nord Stream sabotage is a case in point. As Poland deliberates over Germany’s extradition request for Volodymyr Z, one of the suspected Ukrainian perpetrators, Tusk’s comments appeared to exonerate him. This has enormous potential for blowing up in the faces of the German and Polish leaders, and it plays straight into the hands of the AfD, which is currently outpolling Merz’s CDU/CSU. For the Right-wing nationalists, deeply critical of Ukraine, it is a story that will keep on giving. The German court trial will reveal a lot of unpleasant details of the operation. There will be a lot of emphasis on the links between the perpetrators and the powers that were behind it. I don’t for a moment believe the story that this was a privately funded operation. This trial could have a profound impact on German public opinion.

As things escalate, we will inevitably see the rise of bilateral tensions over Ukraine’s EU accession. Germany’s current coalition supports it, but on one condition: the EU budget has to be reformed first. Germany does not want to have to bankroll the reconstruction of Ukraine by itself. If the Germans get their way, this would invariably be at Poland’s expense. Right now, Poland is the biggest net recipient of the EU budget, and Germany the biggest net contributor.

For the EU to continue to function as a serious geopolitical force, then, a repair in the German-Polish relationship is a minimal requirement. But the way both sides are behaving at the moment suggests this is not going to happen. If they remain unresolved, though, these current political squabbles could prove explosive.

Welcome to Oktoberfest, the world’s biggest beer festival, which began in 1810 to celebrate a royal wedding and this year drew over six million revelers from across the world. Like a giant Christmas party, it is filled with good-natured revelers and resounds with goofy German humor. Locals mix with tourists and celebrities. The Bayern Munich football team had visited for a few steins, with Harry Kane dutifully decked out in lederhosen — while Arnold Schwarzenegger was spotted a couple of days earlier chaotically conducting a band. Armies of waiting staff rush around delivering plates piled high with pork and vast glasses of frothy booze. “It’s better than I thought it would be,” says Osvaldo from Mexico City, having polished off his fifth stein. “We don’t have good beer because it is mixed with other shit,” he says. “But here it’s different — you don’t need lemon and all that other stuff.”

Beer, of course, is more than just a drink in Germany. It has special significance; it is part of their nation’s cultural heritage. And it also has economic clout: Germany is one of the world’s biggest beer producers with around 1,500 breweries, many of them based in Bavaria. But beyond the revelry, all is not well for this cornerstone of German culture. For just like the country’s pivotal car industry, the cherished brewing sector is struggling. Sales of alcoholic drinks fell more than 6% in the first half of this year compared with last year. And the average German now consumes only 88 liters of beer a year, down from 126 at the start of the century — a decline fueled in large part by abstemious younger generations.

Even here at Oktoberfest, the problems are apparent. “I don’t really like beer — it’s so heavy,” confesses one young woman outside a raucous tent. Her friend agrees. Young Germans, she tells me, are significantly changing their approach to well-being. “They want to live healthier.”

Not that everyone is into wellness. In one tent, I come across a lively group snorting what I presume was cocaine from the top of a bald man’s shiny head. One gives me a big grin as he sniffs deeply, then wipes his nose. Two tables down, another ebullient gang of pals pass around a mirror with chunky white lines laid out on it. Minutes later, I pass yet another high-spirited gaggle tapping small piles of powder onto their clenched fists. Yet as Benedict, a 24-year-old data analyst, tells me when I describe these enthusiastic scenes of debauchery, Oktoberfest “is the biggest drug festival in the world if you count alcohol as a drug”. And it seems many do. In a YouGov survey, almost half the 18-24 age group said they were teetotal — the highest in Europe. Consumption of alcohol among younger teenagers is at an all-time low, storing up future problems for the beer sector.

The German drinks industry is far from alone in confronting such a situation. Times are tough in Britain, too, with scores of breweries and hundreds of pubs closing annually; wine sales in France have crashed, and in the US increasing numbers of the young in the land that once had prohibition are more likely to be teetotal.

But in Bavaria, the heartland of the traditional brewing industry, the crisis is hitting hard.  Schönbrunn, close to the Czechia border, has been the home of the Lang-Bräu brewery for 172 years, surviving some of the most tumultuous events in European history. But after struggling for the past two decades, it has closed. When I visit, the brewer Richard Hopf, 38, explains what it was like to close a family-run firm after six generations. “Some people were crying — most of the village is very sad,” he says, trying to capture the significance of small breweries in these close communities. “In the past there was the church, but for the last 30 years it was the brewery,” he tells me “People would come here, buy your beer, drink one, talk. It was a big place for getting together. Everyone knows each other here.”

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Hopf shows me around the maze of rooms where for decades his family fermented, cooled and stored their beer, pointing out proudly the machines which could fill 6,000 bottles an hour, but now stand silent. This plant used to produce 1.5 million liters annually, exporting about 20% of their output to China and Korea at one point — although most sales have been within a 30-mile radius.

As we tour the ghostly plant, he tells me about his father winning a burst of global media attention after making “Erotik bier” — with a highly-suggestive label — as a joke. But those carefree days are long gone. As the cost of energy and staff rose in recent years — and with cut-throat supermarkets dominating sales — beer prices remained largely static. “The end result,” he says wistfully, “is the market just goes down and down and down.” And in such a climate, the family firm could not get the financing needed to modernize — so these days their storage rooms are stacked high with empty bottles.

While the closure has been painful, Hopf and his brother were left with little choice. The machinery and buildings were constructed in the decades after the Second World War and were too dated for efficiency. “You must think 20 years in the future,” he explains. “You have to forecast the beer you might sell then, but we knew things were only going to get worse because the baby boom generation is dying and younger ones drink less beer.”

It is a similar story in Bamberg. A hundred kilometers away, set in rolling hills, it reflects centuries of history and is famed for its number of breweries and its diversity of beers — including the local specialty, Rauchbier, a smoked draft served straight from oak barrels. Inside Schlenkerla, a bustling time-warp tavern, one manager explains the appeal beer’s appeal, telling me their brands sell around the world. “I was recently in Lviv, in Ukraine,” she says, “and I saw a whole shelf of our beer there.”

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But having survived the war largely unscathed, its breweries know they face a struggle. And it soon becomes clear that this 28-year-old saleswoman is emblematic of the sector’s problems. “Bavarians are more likely to drink beer than other parts of Germany but I prefer wine,” she tells me. “I don’t drink so much personally. I am very boring. When you work here it seems like only older people drink.” When I ask her what she meant by “old”, she replies: 40.

The manager of an Irish pub over the road echoes the sentiment. “I know it is a national symbol but it’s not for me,” he confesses. In Wirtshaus Graser, the town’s newest microbrewery, the barmaid says business is good — but even she sounds a warning, admitting that Gen Z Germans seem far more abstemious than their predecessors. “I am from the generation that partied and drank a lot during their teenage times.”

Falling sales, rising costs and generational change have created an existential crisis for German beer makers — and sales of the alcohol-free products that now comprise almost one-tenth of their output will not fully plug the gap. But exports are falling even faster than the intensifying domestic decline, leading the head of one major brewery to warn two months ago about a “landslide” that would sweep away both big and small firms. “The brewing world is crumbling,” says Stefan Blaschak, managing director of Oettinger, which is closing one of its four plants. It is a huge dent in the self-image and confidence of the nation that powers the European economy — something which cannot be masked by all the beer-soaked revelry, drinking chants and sea of lederhosen at Oktoberfest.

Concealed by the jollity of Bavaria’s biergartens and the frenzied Oktoberfest partying, another national champion is flailing in an economy that is strugging to adapt to a world of rapid political, societal and technological change. The number of German jobless hit 3.02 million in August, the highest figure for a decade, as the manufacturing giants that drove the post-war economic boom shed staff. Industrial output slid 4.3% on the previous month as car production crashed to its lowest level since the start of this century. All those dirndl-clad waitresses clutching overflowing steins of golden Helles might be the nation’s fetching global image, but it is pretty sobering to see that Germans, of all people, are losing their thirst for beer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Combating human trafficking is all the rage in Europe these days, and for good reason — but while Germany, along with the rest of the EU, might be eager to cooperate with external neighbors such as Britain on the issue, internally, the challenge of irregular migration has produced bitter division, a resurgence of hard borders, and localized frontier policies that together threaten the unity of the Schengen Area itself.

Earlier this month, Poland became the latest Schengen state to reintroduce border controls along its frontiers, both in the west with Germany and in the northeast with Lithuania. The reason? Partly to combat people smuggling, but also the involuntary return of individuals across internal EU borders — by member states themselves. Unimaginable in the End of History days when Schengen was first devised, Poland is far from alone in subverting the zone. The Germans themselves, after all, are increasingly conducting their own border checks, with Poland and Czechia, along the way rejecting thousands of migrants trying to enter the country. In one especially surreal incident, vividly underscoring the contrast between how Berlin treats countries like the UK and its eastern neighbors, German police effectively abandoned an Afghan man in Polish territory, under cover of darkness, making their escape before Polish authorities could arrive.

The revival of European borders is nothing new. Several countries have restarted controls since the 2015 migration crisis, and then during the pandemic. What is new, however, is a growing sense that Schengen was always built on a false premise: that the countries of the zone share a common approach to territorial sovereignty, and can therefore function like a uniform state. This has never been true of course, but only in the last few years has it become so clear. And with its cross-border antics into Poland, Germany has demonstrated that even the EU’s prime mover no longer approaches Schengen in the spirit it was intended, and that what happens just beyond its own borders is no longer its concern. It all speaks, with shocking vividness, to how migration continues to haunt Europe, even if ultimate blame lies less with migrants themselves than with the continent’s bickering, bloviating leaders.

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Border security in a structure like Schengen only works if everyone is on the same page — and over the past decades, Europeans have made it abundantly clear that they are not. For years, this core paradox at the heart of how the system works has been written into the so-called Dublin Regulation, the system governing asylum applications in the EU. Under this regime, asylum claims may only be adjudicated by the country in which an asylum seeker is first fingerprinted by authorities, usually the first EU or Schengen country they step foot in. 

But because asylum seekers by definition arrive on the external borders of Schengen, this naturally puts enormous pressure on so-called “frontline” migration states, which by default are burdened with handling all the asylum cases for the entire bloc. For years, this piled pressure on Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Greece. But, starting in 2021, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia found themselves in similar straits, with the start of the migration crisis engineered by Lukashenko’s Belarus.

On the surface, Belarus’s antics were an attempt to weaponize migration, putting pressure on the external borders of the EU. But as time went on, it became increasingly clear that Minsk’s strategy strained the internal structure of Schengen too. Just as during the 2015 migrant crisis, when Syrian refugees made use of Schengen’s open borders to reach Germany and its generous immigration system, few migrants and refugees crossing into the EU from Belarus wished to stay in Poland — once again making their way to the social democracies of northwest Europe. For them, the fiction of Schengen as a single unified political entity is obvious, even from within its theoretically borderless expanse. The fact remains that certain countries are more attractive as destinations not just for economic reasons, but for policy reasons too.

Here, the Dublin system made it necessary for states to either refuse entry to migrants wishing to cross internal Schengen boundaries, or deport them back to their first country of entry — precisely setting the stage for the crisis underway today. Though Germany’s forcible transfer of that Afghan migrant made news in Poland, eliciting sharp words from officials in Warsaw, many similar returns were undertaken under the auspices of Dublin and thus were entirely legal.

Ultimately, though, Germany came to the same conclusion as Poland did when it came to dealing with asylum applicants on its own soil: if migrants are stopped from even entering its territory, then the whole asylum farrago can neatly be avoided. Poland took this approach to its logical conclusion when it suspended the right to asylum altogether in late 2024, swiftly copied by other EU states. And after Warsaw’s move was approved as legal by the bloc’s officials in April of this year, Germany’s new government decided to formally enshrine its practice of turning migrants back at the Polish border — something that, in an ironic twist, likely led to the very rise in migrant returns that convinced Poland to enact its own border checks.

If, however, Dublin isn’t working, the EU’s solution looks doomed too, albeit for basically the opposite reason. Passed in April 2024, the EU Migration Pact tries to bring order to the continent’s migratory Wild West. It implements a whole host of provisions, from streamlined asylum processing to expedited deportation procedures, but its most controversial element is the burden-sharing mechanism: requiring all EU member states to host migrants entering the bloc, or else to make financial contributions towards them elsewhere.

This kind of solidarity is all well and good in theory. Yet in the way it mandates a unified set of migration rules and procedures across the EU, while also asking states to take on responsibilities not directly on behalf of their own citizens, the Pact butts up against the precious autonomy that so many EU states have sought to carve out in this, the current age of independence-minded nationalism. While Dublin erred in making migration an exclusively local issue, subject to the whims of national governments, the Migration Pact errs in dramatically misreading the room.

Yet having rejected the Migration Pact, countries such as Poland and Hungary now believe they can engage in a spot of cakeism — preserving their sovereignty, and avoiding hosting migrants from other parts of the EU, while also continuing to bask in the warming sun of Schengen. In a sense, this approach is the essence of the new European Right’s vision of a Europe of sovereign states, where the EU exists as a weaker, purely economic union, while ties between individual members are constantly negotiated and renegotiated according to national interests.

But while the temporary border controls erected by countries across the EU may today seem like a compelling solution for filtering out illegal migration — while letting trade, tourists, and intra-EU labor flow with minimal hassle — such protocols would finally squeeze the ease of movement that has allowed Schengen to revolutionize European life since the end of the Cold War. Over time, it would kill the common visa policy too, and amid the constantly shifting geopolitical relationships of such a Europe, instability would inevitably soar, making border policy ever more fraught and complex.

Poland and Germany’s ongoing spat has already strained their relationship, while Austria, Germany, and Italy have pursued unilateral migration policies that have hurt their relations not just with Brussels — but also with each other. Despite not being a member of the EU, Turkey’s years-long confrontation with Greece over migration, which has at times spilled over into dangerous geopolitical posturing, presents an extreme case study in what may await Europe if states continue to dig in.

Where does all this leave Europeans? As bleak as it may seem, the answer is that there is no good way of bolstering the sovereign liberty of EU states on migration matters without also undermining the foundations of the Schengen Area itself. Conversely, crafting a continent-wide migration policy that actually works is impossible so long as Schengen members behave like fully independent states. Seeing as there is likely to be little appetite for a federal Europe anytime soon, the current border regimes are a shadow of the Europe that lies ahead — a divided, multi-polar continent, where realpolitik rules and where everyone is out for themselves.

While this may not seem like such a bad outcome for European conservatives tired of Brussels overreach, the truth is that countries like Poland and Greece would still need to deal with the same migration problems they face today. Now, though, they’d be going it alone, without recourse to any of the international laws or bodies that have given them support in their current struggles, however limited that may have been in practice.

Socio-cultural concerns about foreigners would also be moot here. With only one minor post-pandemic uptick, in 2021, the continent’s birth rates have continued to fall every year since 2016. With little hope that things will change course anytime soon, legal workers will regardless have to fill gaps in the labor force of this newly splintered Europe, changing the face of the continent with or without illegal migrants. Just this month, Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy announced it would issue 500,000 visas for workers from outside the EU; for years, Poland has led the EU in issuing residence permits for non-EU immigrants.

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Policies like these show that, on some level at least, European politicians understand that the current status quo of border checks and chest-thumping, absent any new ideas, is fundamentally untenable for the continent’s long-term future. And yet, trapped by a continent-wide attitude that favors retreat into a familiar yet narrow view of national interest, they have abdicated any sort of thinking about what European identity, and its place in the world, will look like in this new historical age. However naive the Europe of the Nineties may have been, it was nevertheless ambitious, imaginative, and boundary-pushing in its way. Today, that ambition, to imagine something better, has been replaced by a politics of fear, not just of migrants, but of what might come after the end of post-historical Europe.

While Euroscepticism is at an all-time high, very few actors on the continent actually want to leave the EU — they just want to rebuild it in their own image. The central question that Europeans need to ask themselves, then, is how committed they actually are to the European project, assuming they cannot cooperate enough to solve a problem like migration. Are European national identities really so fragile that they can’t survive collective action? Are they really willing to sacrifice something as groundbreaking as Schengen for short-term gains?

The unfortunate answer European leaders seem to have given is “yes”. Though some Schengen states may sooner or later be forced to band together, clarifying their open-border relationships in the face of threats like Russia, the truth is that there is little evidence that EU states will mature enough to solve their fundamental border problems.

For the moment, of course, Schengen isn’t dead — nor should it necessarily be dismantled merely because national leaders seem unwilling to coordinate. The benefits it offers Europeans continues to dramatically outweigh the costs. But keep stumbling and it might all count for nothing, as Schengen falls and Europe’s walls only continue to rise.

The idea of rearming the German military dates back to Olaf Scholz’s 2022 Zeitenwende speech — the so-called “turning point” announced in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Scholz promised a €100 billion fund for the military and pledged to meet Nato’s then 2% spending target. Yet that “turning point” largely failed to materialize. Two years later, the German Council on Foreign Relations bluntly concluded that little had changed.

Now, Merz is determined to deliver what Scholz only gestured towards. He has made defense and security the cornerstone of his chancellorship, launching the most ambitious rearmament campaign since the Second World War. The scale is staggering: a proposed €400 billion in defense and security investments, including a plan to raise annual defense spending to 5% of GDP — as demanded by Nato. That would represent nearly half of the federal budget — around €225 billion — a transformation with sweeping political and social consequences. On Monday, Berlin confirmed that its military spending will reach 3.5% of GDP by 2029, with the 5% target to be reached in the years to come.

To achieve this, Merz rammed through a constitutional amendment to reform the “debt brake”, a fiscal mechanism that has been enshrined in Germany’s Basic Law since 2009 and has since capped the federal structural deficit. Despite pledging during the campaign that the debt brake would remain untouched — and failing to mention his rearmament plans — Merz reversed course immediately after his election. His government exploited the final session of the outgoing parliament — even though a new Bundestag had already been elected — to approve the change. The aim was explicitly stated: to unlock vast new funding for military expansion.

On 19 May, Germany’s top-ranking military official, Inspector General Carsten Breuer, issued a directive laying out a sweeping vision for the Bundeswehr. The goal: to achieve “full operational readiness” by 2029. The list of priorities is extensive and ambitious. It includes fully equipping and digitalizing all troop formations, reviving conscription, building up anti-drone and missile defense, expanding offensive cyber and electronic warfare capabilities, and even developing space-based defense systems. Plans also include strengthening Germany’s role in Nato nuclear-sharing arrangements and enhancing the country’s long-range strike capacity — a major symbolic and strategic departure.

These changes are not just about military doctrine: they reflect a deeper transformation in Germany’s foreign policy posture. Merz has rapidly embraced a confrontational approach toward Russia, echoing some of the most hawkish voices in Nato. He has warned that Russia is “waging an aggressive hybrid war every day”, and declared that “there is a threat to us all from Russia”. Ahead of the Nato summit, he said that “we have to fear that Russia will continue the war beyond Ukraine”, implying that Russia represents a direct military threat to Europe in the near-to-medium term.

Meanwhile, just the other day, Reuters reported on a leaked Bundeswehr strategy document describing Russia as an “existential risk” and outlining Kremlin preparations for large-scale conflict with Nato “by the decade’s end”. The notion that Russia could launch a full-scale attack on Europe within a few years has become an official talking point among EU and Nato leaders — despite the fact that Moscow has neither the capacity nor strategic interest in such a move.

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Immediately upon taking office, Merz launched an active foreign policy campaign. He toured European capitals to coordinate policy toward Moscow and Kyiv. One of his first acts was to travel to Kyiv alongside the leaders of France, Britain and Poland — a symbolic show of unity with Ukraine and a signal of defiance toward Trump, who had publicly advocated for a negotiated settlement with Russia. In Berlin, Merz hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and floated the delivery of German-made Taurus missiles, which have a range of more than 500 kilometers. Although domestic opposition forced him to partially retreat, he quickly pivoted to a new strategy: a €5 billion agreement to co-produce long-range missiles on Ukrainian territory using German technology.

Even more provocatively, Merz announced that Western-supplied weapons are no longer subject to range restrictions. “Ukraine can now also defend itself by attacking military positions in Russia,” he declared — effectively giving the green light for strikes deep into Russian territory with Western equipment. For the first time since 1945, Germany is now not only rearming at scale but actively encouraging direct military engagement with Russia, a nuclear-armed power. To underline this shift, Merz also confirmed that new German air defense systems would be delivered to Ukraine under a long-term, multi-year plan.

But what makes this rearmament campaign especially significant is that it is not limited to the military sphere. Merz’s vision is one of total mobilization — a “whole-of-society” approach that seeks to prepare not just the armed forces, but the entire German economy and civil infrastructure for confrontation with Russia. Media, education, industrial policy and civil defense are all being aligned to support this new war footing. Dissent — whether political, journalistic, or academic — is increasingly stigmatized as subversive or even a threat to national security. Renowned journalists and intellectuals such as Ulrike Guérot, Gabriele Krone-Schmalz and Patrik Baab have been attacked and professionally marginalized for urging diplomatic solutions to the Ukraine conflict.

This is a profound rupture. For most of the postwar period, Germany deliberately defined itself in opposition to its militaristic past. It wielded influence not through tanks or missiles, but through trade, diplomacy and its leadership within the EU. The doctrine of Zivilmacht — civilian power — was not only a policy orientation, but a moral commitment forged in the ashes of Nazi militarism. Germany saw itself as a peacekeeper, not a power-broker. The Bundeswehr was a “parliamentary army”, structured to prevent misuse by the executive and embedded in multilateral institutions designed to constrain sovereign adventurism.

Merz’s aggressive anti-Russian rhetoric — and broader strategic posture — also marks a radical departure from Germany’s postwar tradition. Even his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, though a firm supporter of Ukraine, stopped short of authorizing the use of Western-supplied weapons for strikes inside Russian territory — a red line that Merz has now crossed. Moscow has warned that such actions could trigger retaliatory strikes against NATO targets. Not long ago, this would have been unthinkable for a German chancellor.

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Indeed, throughout most of the postwar period, despite the Cold War, German policy was aimed at improving relations with Russia, then the Soviet Union — a policy known as Ostpolitik (East politics). At its core, Ostpolitik was built on the conviction that political stability and peace in Europe could be achieved through closer economic ties and sustained dialogue with the Soviet Union. Rather than confrontation, it pursued détente — a strategy of engagement grounded in the idea that interdependence would foster trust, reduce tensions and gradually open space for political reconciliation.

This was the German consensus for over 50 years — essentially up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — though over time the country’s political leadership, most notably Merkel, found it increasingly difficult to balance Germany’s strategic interests with its transatlantic ties, amid growing US pressure to destabilize Russia via Ukraine. In her memoir, for example, Merkel recounts her commitment to getting Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements, which were intended to bring an end to the civil war in eastern Ukraine. As Merkel recalls, talks ultimately collapsed due to powerful forces in the US and elsewhere who were advocating for a military resolution to the conflict. This was in no small part designed to drive a wedge between Russia and Europe, and Germany in particular.

Since 2022, however, the postwar consensus started being dismantled — and is now being radically overturned. But how did we go, in the span of just a few years, from Ostpolitik to Merz vowing to do “everything” to ensure the Nord Stream pipeline never reopens, embarking on a massive rearmament program and even flippantly talking about helping Ukraine bomb Russia? Is this simply a “natural” reaction to Russia’s invasion and the new post-Ukraine geopolitical reality, further exacerbated by Trump’s decision to disengage from Europe?

According to some observers, this shift signals a dangerous resurgence of German nationalism and chauvinism — long simmering beneath the surface among segments of the elite, and even within broader society. For decades, this narrative goes, this latent impulse was restrained by the postwar consensus and contained within the framework of the US-led security order.

Now, with Washington increasingly preoccupied elsewhere and hinting at strategic disengagement from Europe, that restraint is eroding. According to this narrative, Germany is seizing the moment to reassert its dominance on the continent, using the vacuum left by American retrenchment to reclaim a hegemonic role — this time not through economic leverage alone, but through an assertive military posture, and doing so with a confidence that recalls far darker chapters of the 20th century.

But this interpretation is, in my view, mistaken. What we are witnessing is not a return of German nationalism, but its opposite. The policies now being implemented — from massive rearmament to the escalation of conflict with Russia — are not rooted in a cold pursuit of German national interests, but in their negation. They are the expression of a political class that has internalized the Atlantic ideology so thoroughly that it can no longer distinguish between national strategy and transatlantic loyalty.

This is the long-term consequence of how the German question was “resolved” after the Second World War: not through the restoration of sovereignty, but through the absorption of Germany into the “collective West” under US strategic guardianship. As noted, throughout most of the postwar period, German leadership attempted to balance this with the pursuit of the national interest, but in the years following the coup in Ukraine, the “American” wing of the German establishment began taking over — and with Merz, a former BlackRock representative, it is firmly in the driving seat.

Now the leadership thinks only in terms of alignment with a Western project whose priorities are often defined elsewhere. In an op-ed published yesterday in the Financial Times, for example, Merz and Macron once again reaffirmed their commitment to the transatlantic relationship and NATO — which has always entailed Europe’s strategic subordination to Washington — despite their recent rhetorical gestures toward a more autonomous European policy.

It is telling in this sense that Merz, while publicly critical of Trump, is in fact executing Trump’s vision: pressuring Germany to drastically increase defense spending, take over leadership in the Ukraine war and sever energy ties with Russia. And yet they are presented as expressions of German and European sovereignty. Contrary to Merkel’s courageous stance against the US invasion of Iraq 20 years ago, Merz has also offered a full-throated endorsement of Trump’s recent attack on Iran.

The problem today then, is not German ambition, but German submission. And the tragedy is that this submission is being dressed up as strategic autonomy — a grim parody of sovereignty in an age of ideological dependency. If German leaders once understood that peace with Russia was in Germany’s fundamental interest, today’s leaders act as if permanent conflict is a condition of responsible statecraft. That reversal is not only dangerous for Germany, but for Europe as a whole.

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The good news is that Germany’s militaristic ambitions collide with an unyielding reality: the Bundeswehr can’t find enough people to fight its wars. The military is short of 30,000 personnel, and one in four recruits quits within six months. NATO has asked Berlin to raise seven new brigades — requiring 60,000 more soldiers — a goal even Defense Minister Boris Pistorius calls unrealistic.

Pistorius says that for now conscription is “off the table”, not for lack of will but because it’s logistically impossible. “We don’t have the capacity — not in barracks, not in training,” he told Parliament. Still, he hinted that this might only be a transitory phase, subject to the military finding enough volunteers.

But the real barrier may be cultural, not logistical. A YouGov poll found that 63% of Germans aged 18-29 oppose conscription; just 19% would fight if Germany were attacked. Among those over 60 — long past draft age — support is strongest. As the researchers Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes put it: “This generational divergence is more than just an attitudinal shift. It reflects two vastly different lived realities. Postwar Germans came of age in a Cold War world with a shared civic mission: defend democracy against Soviet expansionism. In return, the state offered stable jobs, affordable housing, and a sense of national purpose.”

But this social contract has broken down, amid deteriorating social and economic prospects for young people. “For many, the call to serve in uniform doesn’t feel like patriotism — it feels like one more extraction by a system that hasn’t given back,” Reiter and Wilkes wrote.

“When you ignore our concerns and then ask us to die for the state — that’s absurd,” said influencer Simon David Dressler in a televised forum. This feeling was probably best articulated by 27-year-old German journalist Ole Nymoen in a book titled Why I Would Never Fight for My Country, in which the author addresses his generation’s widespread opposition to militarization, conscription and rearmament. That disillusionment is also reshaping politics. In recent elections, nearly half of young voters rejected establishment parties, turning to Die Linke or the AfD — not necessarily out of ideological alignment, but as a rejection of NATO’s agenda and skepticism towards the rearmament push.

Ultimately, this may be the greatest obstacle to rearmament, in Germany and beyond: that a growing number of people are beginning to realize that their real enemies are not in Moscow, but within their own political and economic elites.

Labour’s primary economic goal has been reduced to avoiding US tariffs and scoring a half-cocked half-trade deal with Trump. In a bid to appease the President, the government will likely jettison the Digital Services Tax, levied on 2% of US Big Tech revenues here and bringing in $700 million a year — an all-but direct transfer from the UK’s poorest to Mark Zuckerberg’s pockets. Moreover, Starmer has funneled money away from welfare and towards a supposedly Trump-pleasing increase in defense spending. That’s while the Government’s own figures show that 250,000 more people, including 50,000 children, are expected to be pushed into poverty by the end of the decade. When Starmer says “everything has changed”, like Prince Tancredi in The Leopard, he is making sure everything stays the same.

Perhaps he thinks this will help Britain avoid “jumping into a trade war” — as if he had much say in the matter. If you don’t want to fight a war and someone else very much does, you will, by default, lose.

And his government has won strikingly little. Britain gained no special treatment, compared to any other large economy with a US trade deficit. Brazil and Australia, for example, both had the same 10% tariff applied. The crude, mechanical formula the Trump administration used to calculate tariffs was levied on the UK the same as almost everywhere else. Canada and Mexico, two countries whose leaderships have been notably more forthright, won a relative reprieve for negotiations.

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Contrast this unhappy island with the peculiar joy that has been overflowing the banks of the Spree. Following Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz’s announcement of a dramatic, debt-funded expansion of government spending, there has been a sudden, electric transformation of Germany’s possible economic fortunes. The cracking of the postwar European security system, somewhere between JD Vance’s speech in Munich and Volodymyr Zelensky’s dressing down in Washington, has provoked a deep recalibration of priorities across the continent. Germany must become, in Merz’s words, “independent of the USA”.

A consensus has incinerated Germany’s dogged commitment to the debt brake that had been promoted to a hallowed status. In a deal with the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, the one-time radical peaceniks in the Green Party are now happy to nod through an immense expansion of the Federal military budget with the questionable promise of a few more EV charging points. A split in the Left Party dotted the umlauts. Undesirables to the Left and Right shoved to the margins.

For 15 years, austerity has seen Germany banging its head against a fiscal wall — and it feels great to stop. After the government pledged for “whatever it takes” on defense spending, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange soared, led by arms manufacturer Rheinmetall whose share prices were up 140%. A further half a trillion euros has been set aside for domestic investment and some social spending, in the hopes of repairing the country’s crumbling infrastructure. Germany’s once-famed railways have got so bad that the US Department of Defense issued a complaint about delays in moving materiel to the Ukrainian frontline. Altogether, Germany is pledging more borrowing and spending than Reunification, and the Marshall Plan, the two foundational moments in the construction of its modern economy. This is a serious, genuine, 180-degree shift in orientation. Trump’s tariffs have only underlined the need for a recalibration.

While Trump’s re-election has transmogrified Germany’s fiscally constipated Christian Democrats into partisans for debt-fueled military Keynesianism, the opposite has happened in Britain. It has warped the Labour Party into steely-eyed austerians more than prepared to trim the supposed fat of the British state for the benefit of British Aerospace’s profits. Starmer is targeting an “overcautious, flabby” government for cuts beyond the brutal slicing of welfare. Labour ministers will point to Reeves’ tax-and-spend first Budget, in October last year, and claim that this new enthusiasm for the fiscal knife isn’t austerity. But last year’s sudden £70 billion flurry of generosity will not make any noticeable difference to the 800,000 Personal Independence Payment claimants, who are now losing on average £4,500. This is austerity, with a vengeance. But it is Labour austerity: cynically trying to buy off a few potentially noisy complainants in the public sector unions while shoving those without an institutional voice under a Motability car, all justified in the name of “security, dignity and agency”.

Starmer may not care too much. The Prime Minister’s various international appearances since January have been greeted with a chorus of happy barks from Britain’s commentariat. His first six months after his election victory saw him thank the country by spending an extraordinary amount of time out of it: and he clearly would rather strut around the international stage than grub around in the murk of Workplace Capability Assessments. It is not clear what his plan to win the next election might be.

The generous interpretation is that Starmer is playing to his strengths, and that his diplomatic efforts since last summer are now producing dividends in his close relationship with Trump. But handshakes in Washington do little for local elections, such as in Runcorn where the party expects a Reform victory in a once-safe seat. Defense spending, which is increasingly tech- and equipment-focused, has (as government assessments show) limited impact on jobs. The content and purpose of the planned increase in defense spending remains unclear. Pointing at Russia and making scary noises do not actually constitute a strategic plan. Britain’s military, and its notoriously wasteful contractors, have been gifted a blank check.

Labour has decided to remove one of Britain’s actual advantages in the world by chopping its significant foreign aid spending. Humanitarian costs aside, the hard-nosed calculation ought to have been that soft power can be leveraged in a world in the near-future where the Global South will matter more, and the old West far less. Britain’s “coalition of the willing” is anything but: those European countries pledged to Ukraine’s defense are locked in mutual disagreement over how, and even whether, to provide military support for any peace deal.

And, as everyone who has ever dealt with Trump discovers, a personal pledge at lunchtime can become a vitriolic tweet by midnight. Choosing to align so closely with a regime that views uncertainty as a weapon and treats all relationships as purely transactional is an invitation to failure. There are, it is true, hard economic reasons that encourage Starmer’s attitude: outside the EU, with few friends in the world, lumbering around with failing institutions, a stagnant economy, and some extraordinary external liabilities, the country’s elite may see few options beyond supplication. The Government’s notional opposition agrees: both the Tories and, even more so, Reform, offer no alternatives beyond national forelock-tugging with more or less enthusiasm.

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But that doesn’t mean other options don’t exist. One Euro-optimistic vision, towards which the world’s stock markets have been pointing, is a prolonged period of turbulence and lower growth in the US. As the Trump administration tears out the wiring of the global economic order, big money flees frightened by rumors of capital controls and the reality of on again, off again tariffs. Already The Telegraph reports America’s ultrarich are rushing to open Swiss bank accounts. As Trump’s America slides, Europe, led by a freely-spending Germany, attracts the investment; relations with China are normalized, trade accelerates; the war in Ukraine at least paused. Where once US growth meant European prosperity, that link has now shattered: in Trump’s first decade as a national political figure, a soaring US, floated aloft on cheap gas and demand for dollars, was mirrored by a stagnant Europe. If recent stock prices are any guide, we have been heading for a reversal: US flatlining, European growth.

It is certainly too soon after the tariff shock to make robust predictions, and too soon to declare that Europe is heading for a rebound. Already the fiscal strains of the attempted rearmament drive are beginning to show, and the EU’s infrastructure pledges do not meet even the requirements detailed in Mario Draghi’s blockbuster report last year. A 20% US tariff will be hard going, even if the EU has a meaningful capacity to retaliate, and to negotiate. But it is plausible to think that the era of “American exceptionalism”, of its uniquely rapid growth in a stagnant developed world, may well be over. And Britain, on current showing, is going to find itself on the wrong side of that Atlantic divide.

Britain’s economic fundamentals are substantially worse than other, similar economies. Our weakness when it comes to productivity growth, the size of government debt, and our import dependencies for essentials such as food and energy means that we have fewer options. Or rather few options that would not now involve seriously challenging power and wealth in this country. Calls for a wealth tax are growing. The absurd, £130 billion hand-out to the Bank of England “losses” is finally attracting political attention — although among national parties only Reform has been brave enough so far to call for its removal. The Treasury itself could finally learn to invest outside London and the southeast. If everything has changed, everything must change.

Yet this confidence is misplaced. Years of underinvestment have left Germany’s military and defense industry depleted, while a deeper failure to reckon with the past has drained societal will. The common thread running through the country’s economic, political and social struggles is a lack of cohesion — an underdeveloped sense of togetherness that saps Germany’s ability to act with resolve. Money alone won’t fix what is broken.

The Bundeswehr, once a formidable force, is now a shadow of its former self. At its Cold War peak, the Federal Republic’s armed forces boasted more than 500,000 soldiers, sailors and aviators. Today, that number has shrunk to barely 180,000, with one-in-four new sign-ups quitting within six months. Despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende pledge following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, battle-readiness has deteriorated. Just half of brigades are deployable, down from nearly two-thirds in 2022, while soldiers on Nato’s eastern flank lack basic communications gear. A parliamentary oversight report exposed critical deficiencies in weapons, equipment and infrastructure. The head of Germany’s armed forces association put it bluntly: the Bundeswehr is “blanker than blank”.

Part of the blame lies in what Germany is supposed to be so good at: making stuff. But the inconvenient truth is that the country’s defense industry is fragmented. Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems, a maker of non-nuclear submarines and surface vessels, can’t match the scale or capabilities of Britain’s BAE Systems, much less giants such as America’s General Dynamics, Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation or the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Rheinmetall, a manufacturer of land weapons systems and Germany’s largest defense contractor, took two years to open a new munitions factory after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. So, while Moscow has long since shifted to a war economy, Germany is struggling with logistical and industrial shortcomings.

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Beyond military weakness, Germany’s economic entanglement with China presents another grave vulnerability. Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, BASF, along with a host of smaller manufacturers, derive a substantial share of their revenues from the Chinese market. And given that China maintains its strategic alliance with Russia, Germany might struggle to stand its ground with regard to Ukraine. Any diplomatic pressure from China might lead to more Scholzing.

We have already seen Germany’s reluctance to challenge China. The 2022 purchase of the Tollerort shipping terminal in Hamburg, by China’s state-backed COSCO shipping company sparked alarm, but it went through all the same — albeit for a reduced stake — after Scholz intervened, wary of China’s reaction if it were blocked. Duisburg, home to Europe’s largest inland port at the confluence of the Rhine and the Ruhr rivers, is a crucial node in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and over 100 firms from the country have set up offices there. Leipzig-Halle Airport has seen Chinese investment in cargo operations. China’s Huawei has been a major supplier of telecommunications infrastructure to Germany, despite warnings from allies of espionage risk.

Germany’s Western loyalties are also undercut by a rogue’s gallery of Kremlin and Beijing sympathisers. That’s especially true for the Alternative für Deutschland, which doubled support to become the second-strongest party in the February election. The far-Right nationalists want to reestablish normal relations with Russia, including restarting gas imports, and would unwind Germany’s integration with Europe. It’s not just the political fringe though. The Social Democrats have had an ambivalent relationship to Moscow, even after Gerhard Schröder left the chancellery for well-paid roles in Russian boardrooms.

And compounding these political shortcomings is Germany’s fragmented counterintelligence system, a byproduct of the country’s federalist mindset. Unlike the British or American centralised services, Germany’s apparatus is divided across multiple agencies with overlapping jurisdictions. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) monitors domestic threats, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) handles foreign spying, and the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) focuses on defense-related espionage. Complicating matters, Germany has 16 regional intelligence services, charged with roles from counterespionage through to monitoring extremists. The result is bureaucratic inefficiencies and inter-agency rivalries that have left Germany vulnerable to foreign infiltration.

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These weaknesses were laid bare last year, when a German general inadvertently provided intelligence on the Taurus missile system on an unsecured Webex call. The information was swiftly leaked by Russian media. Former UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has warned that German intelligence and political networks are deeply infiltrated by Russian operatives. Carsten Breuer, inspector general of the German armed forces, called the division between internal and external security a “gateway” for hybrid Russian attacks.

Germany’s inability to take clear positions stems from decades of failing to create a cohesive national identity. As we have detailed, only a thin fabric holds the country together: a shared economic prosperity — known as Wohlstand für Alle — and the uninspiring concept of not being Nazis. As the economy sputters, and ethnic nationalism reemerges, the country is left with little consensus. This fragility was evident in Merz having to push his spending reforms through the parliament that was voted out of office in the February election. That’s because in the new Bundestag, the AfD and other fringe parties had enough votes to block constitutional changes. So even if he has the authorization to raise money, it’s based on a frail foundation that’s ill-suited for long-term military revival.

And the internal divisions run deep. The trauma of reunification left parts of the East with lingering affinities for Russia. The growing ranks of the poor see no reason to fight for a system that has left them behind. The wealthy are comfortable and detached with little interest in the suffering of the broader populace. Immigrants are often treated as outsiders, and show little loyalty to a nation that doesn’t fully embrace them. A broader societal reckoning is needed, and Germany is far from having it.

While Germany has been one of the prime beneficiaries of the postwar order, there is scant support for defending it. Despite rising concern about Russia, only about 15% of Germans support a significant increase in military spending or troop numbers, according to a recent study from the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr. While Germans strongly back NATO, they are less supportive of aiding the Baltics or taking a leadership role in the alliance, and most Germans under 50 say they wouldn’t take up arms to defend their country.

Young Germans, in particular, are opposed to the build-up, and are already more polarized than the rest of the population. In the latest election, the two strongest parties among voters under 25 were the Left-wing Die Linke, which is against Germany’s rearmament, and the Russia-friendly AfD. Both parties opposed Merz’s spending plan when it was pushed through the old Bundestag, driving a deeper wedge in society. The entire process of securing the billions for defense creates an existential risk for Merz.

So, at a time when young people face dwindling prospects from Germany’s sputtering economy and are being tasked with paying pensions for a growing number of retirees, a 69-year-old conservative is laying the groundwork for them to fight and potentially die for their country or some vague notion of Western ideals. That was already a foreign concept for a country that embraced demilitarization after reunification and deepened that post-security attitude after compulsory service was suspended in 2011.

Just how difficult it will be to win over the younger generation is evident in Ole Nymoen’s new book called Why I Would Never Fight for My Country. “Yes, I’d rather live less freely than be dead,” the young German writer told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, summing up the apathy of his generation. For a country where militarism has brought only pain and suffering, there is no tradition of heroism. No “Greatest Generation” to invoke. No parades celebrating national pride. War memory is dominated by images of gas chambers and collective shame, not the societal effort that’s remembered in Britain.

That means when Merz says, “Germany is back,” he doesn’t mean it’s ready to fight. At best, he means it’s ready to spend, and he seems to be slowly coming to terms with the risks. “We are aware of people’s many concerns,” the conservative leader said recently as he battles to retain support. “A lot is at stake these days. It is about the future of Germany and Europe.”

Merz is right. There is a lot at stake. But without a drastic shift in the country’s culture and debate, Germany will simply be blowing hot air.

For many, the notion of a foreign coach is anathema: isn’t international football supposed to be the best of ours against the best of theirs? At the very least, for England to turn abroad feels like an admission of failure, an acknowledgment that the English system is not producing high-level coaches and managers. And Tuchel is not just foreign: he is German, and for the past century nothing has seemed quite so obviously inimical to England as Germany.

The wars color everything. Even when Germany aren’t involved, it’s common enough to hear England fans singing “Ten German Bombers”, gleefully emphasizing the countdown after “the RAF from England shot them down”, or humming the theme to The Great Escape or The Dam Busters. It’s hard to imagine that changing just because England now have a German manager.

Yet this feels a significant step. When England faced Germany in the semi-final of Euro 96, The Mirror mocked up Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne in military helmets and with the headline, “Achtung, Surrender! For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over”. It’s hard to imagine England could even have contemplated a German manager then; even the appointment of a Swede, when Sven-Göran Eriksson got the job in 2001, provoked apoplexy in the Mail, which screamed, “We’ve sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness”. And yet there is Tuchel, broadly accepted, leading England into a World Cup qualifying campaign.

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Tuchel actually seems rather more popular in England than in Germany, where his neo-vegetarian nerdery sat uncomfortably at Bayern Munich. But when things go wrong for him in the England job, he will be accused of not understanding “our” game. Even his interim predecessor Lee Carsley, who was born in Birmingham but played for Ireland, faced howls of protest in some quarters for his refusal to sing the anthem — not a political act, he explained, but because he felt singing would disrupt his focus. Tuchel has said he needs to “earn the right” to sing the anthem, a politically adroit policy, but whether he does so or not, an awareness of his nationality will in part shape reactions. The entire recent history of Anglo-German relations, in fact, can be traced through football.

There were the tentative early meetings in the Thirties, when England was broadly disdainful of German football and its high-minded decision to remain amateur. This was an ethos that was quickly adopted by the Nazis and repackaged into sensuous propaganda by Leni Riefenstahl. Professional sport, it was decreed after the Anschluss, was a Jewish perversion. As a result, the highly successful Austrian league was forced to return to amateurism and a great footballing culture was destroyed. A month before that announcement, in June 1938, England had already, in the spirit of appeasement, given the Nazi salute before a 6-3 win in Berlin.

There may be a level of irony to the chant of “Two World Wars and One World Cup” — not least because Germany have won four World Cups — but when England won their only World Cup in 1966, beating West Germany in the final, the Second World War was very much on people’s minds, a point made by Duncan Hamilton in Answered Prayers. The evidence of bombing was still evident in many cities, while every adult knew somebody who had been killed in the fighting. The maths is obvious, but the point is worth stressing: that final came just 21 years after VE Day, and the events of the war were less distant than today is from 9/11.

Certainly there was an awareness on the German side of the need for sensitivity. Their coach was Helmut Schön, who had fled the Soviet zone for the West in May 1950. He had been an air-raid warden in Dresden and seen terrible things. “Women lay in the streets”, he wrote in his autobiography, “charred black or dried out like Egyptian mummies. They had children in their arms, bundles of ashes.” When the fires were extinguished, 30,000 charred corpses were stacked up by the Kreuzkirche and the job the firestorm had begun was finished off with flamethrowers. “We were used to gigantic numbers, including the victims of our own country”, Schön said. “That was abstract. Now we could see the reality: 30,000 individual people who had died terrible deaths.”

Yet Schön, who spent five days hunting through the smoking rubble for his father, seems to have harbored no sense of bitterness against Britain. His family was liberal, and had rented out an apartment to a Jewish publisher until as late as 1939. Schön had no doubt who was to blame for the war and told his players before they came to England in 1966 that what mattered was less whether they won than whether they “behaved like gentlemen”. Their job was to rehabilitate the international image of Germany.

Although England beat West Germany in the final, that meeting at Wembley turned out to be the first part of a five-act sequence that would overturn their respective footballing statuses. West Germany achieved a first-ever win over England in a friendly in 1968, a game whose significance was widely ignored in England but gave West Germany great self-confidence. West Germany then came from 2-0 down to beat England in the World Cup quarter-final in Mexico in 1970, before outplaying England in beating them 3-1 at Wembley in the first leg of the European Championship quarter-final in 1972. L’Équipe described the German performance as “football from the year 2000”. In the second leg in Berlin, England, apparently giving up any hope of turning the tie around, played out an aggressive and negative 0-0 draw. In less than a decade, West German football had accelerated past England: it was the future; England some moribund relic. After West Germany’s economic miracle, anybody looking at the relative economies of the two countries might have drawn a similar conclusion.

Although Schön was still manager as West Germany won the World Cup on home soil in 1974, when England didn’t even qualify, he had become an oddly distant figure. The players had threatened strike action over bonuses before the tournament, something Schön, who came from a generation with a clear sense of patriotic duty, couldn’t comprehend. When West Germany then lost to East Germany in the first group stage, he had some sort of breakdown with the result that the captain Franz Beckenbauer effectively took over: the generation of self-assertive boomers were led by one of their own.

But whatever reservations there were, at home and abroad, about the behavior of certain German players, they kept beating England, most notably in the semi-final of both the 1990 World Cup, their last tournament before reunification, and Euro 96, their first tournament as a united nation. Players such as Jürgen Klinsmann, who had family in the East and regarded football as a symbol, perhaps even a tool, of rapprochement, were baffled by the English obsession with a war half a century in the past.

In the flush of victory in 1990, Beckenbauer, by then the manager, had said that he felt sorry for other nations because a united Germany would be unbeatable. It has not turned out like that, although Germany did win the 2014 World Cup. In competitive games since 2000, England actually have the edge, with three wins to two (including their famous 5-1 World Cup qualifying win in Munich).

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Yet German coaching is far more influential than English coaching. There is a discernible German School, born out of Swabia, that prioritizes winning the ball back as soon as possible by the high-risk deployment of players high up the pitch — Gegenpressing. The likes of Jürgen Klopp, Jogi Löw, Ralf Rangnick, Hansi Flick, Julian Nagelsmann and, yes, Tuchel, led the resistance to the hegemonic possession-heavy style favored by Pep Guardiola.

There is no English School. The Premier League might be the best league in the world. It’s certainly the richest. But what that means is that it imports talent, coaches in particular. There are only two English managers in the Premier League. And that perhaps is why there has been so little outcry about Tuchel. It’s less that England has suddenly become a mature and cosmopolitan nation than that the Premier League is essentially a global league that happens to be played in England.

Just as you can wander through parts of London and barely see a building that isn’t owned by Saudis or Russians or Japanese, so our football clubs are owned by oligarchs, sheikhs and hedge funds. These potentates then appoint the best coaches — or at least the coaches they believe to be the best — with no parochial interest in developing local talent. So everybody gets used to the idea that the best coaches are foreign. And now that English academies have, after their overhaul following the failure to qualify for Euro 2008, begun to turn out high-level playing talent, it seems logical that the best coach to lead them into the World Cup should be foreign, even if he is German.

For a nation that can’t help selling off its assets and institutions, this is a decision rooted in pragmatism. And so we end up with a situation where the man appointed to make it two World Cups would have been on the other side in the two World Wars.

Perhaps that’s just what reconciliation looks like. Perhaps it’s just modern England.

The article in question is an introduction to a much longer piece of work, a 393-page chronology of Bismarck’s career up to 1867. This chronology is a most impressive feat of scholarship, 20 years in the making. It occurred to me, while reading it — with Otto Pflanze’s three-volume biography of Bismarck to hand, as per the author’s instructions — that Cummings might have a stronger grasp over all things Bismarck than any professional historian currently active in Britain. There might yet be a handful of German eggheads who could give him a run for his money.

Cummings’s obsession with Germany’s first chancellor began as a teenager, and shaped his thinking while he was attempting to pilot our own ship of state through the stormy weather of Brexit and Covid. “I’ve recently read some of the media commentary about 2019 that I ignored at the time and it’s amazing how many hacks thought I was trying to use [von Neumann’s] game theory”, he complains. “I was not. I did pinch ideas from how Bismarck dealt with the Prussian constitutional crisis.” With the parliamentarians in 1862 refusing to comply with the government’s wish to increase military spending, and the Kaiser supposedly on the brink of resignation, Bismarck stared them down, brushed them aside, and ultimately got his way. There were indeed traces of “Blood and Iron” in Cummings’s and Boris Johnson’s resolve over parliamentary prorogation in his first days in Downing Street.

That the media is wrong about everything is an axiom of Cummings Thought. He felt it necessary to sketch his Bismarck-chronology partly because the 19th-century media was no better, and has deceived many historians. His inside knowledge of political life thoroughly disabused him of the reliability of “official stories”. He learned to recognize that the things people say about politics are seldom actually the case; and so it follows that the things people say about political history are seldom actually the case, either. The Bismarck chronology thus isolates those few things about Bismarck’s career which we can know more or less for certain, and around which we can then attempt to construct more robust narratives and theories.

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That, in itself, is a lesson worth learning: the stark disconnect between “official stories” and what really happened. Nowhere was this clearer than in the spectacle of conspiracy theories (Russian misinformation, Cambridge Analytica) solidifying into “official stories” in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum: “the media is incapable of analyzing the intersection of politics and technology” and actively “disinforms the public”. The “official story”, moreover, tends to flatter decision-makers, giving them agency and control; and one thing Bismarck can teach us, as Cummings is keen to stress, is the importance of dumb luck. Bismarck, he notes, was only appointed in the first place because of a “meltdown in royal circles” over which he had no real control. And if the aim of one would-be assassin, Ferdinand Cohen-Blind, had been only slightly different in May 1866, “the German states would certainly have evolved in a different way” — no First World War, no Hitler.

But if Bismarck had been entirely at the mercy of fortune, what would be the point of encouraging aspiring leaders, as Cummings did in his “Essay on an ‘Odyssean’ Education”, to take heed of his example? One aspect of Bismarck’s genius — Cummings does not shy away from that word — is that he harnessed the randomness of the world to his advantage. He was a brilliant practitioner of what Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (another Cummings favorite) called “Cheng/Ch’i” operations, feigned unpredictability to throw off the enemy. One hears much about “grand strategy” in international affairs, but Bismarck’s example suggests that the best way for countries to ruthlessly pursue their interests is by not “picking a strategy” at all. It may be no coincidence that Cummings had these thoughts during the early phases of the first Trump administration, nor that he senses amid the chaos of Trump’s present term some opportunities for wholesale reform.

Cummings is ever eager to emphasize that his admiration for Bismarck is not of a moral kind; indeed, he often says that the world would be better off today had Bismarck never existed. Still, given the extent of his enthusiasm — and of his vanity — it is natural to wonder whether he sees something of himself in Bismarck. The historian Katja Hoyer thinks so, and even traces some vague points of parallel between Bismarck’s career in government and Cummings’s — although even in a rather hostile article, she is too polite to point out that it is difficult to imagine the Iron Chancellor getting outfoxed in the halls of power by Carrie Symonds (Bismarck excelled at freezing the Kaiser’s wife, Victoria, out of the Prussian court). Hoyer claims, meanwhile, that Bismarck would never have written an “itemized response to every rumor that his enemies spread about him in the press”, but this I don’t find too difficult to imagine. Robert Lucius von Ballhausen said in 1875 that Bismarck “nurses thoughts of revenge and retaliation for real or imagined slights that he has suffered”; and who knows how these might have manifested had Bismarck been acquainted with Substack.

Some of Cummings’s political behavior has a Bismarckian flavor. He is proudly cynical and non-partisan, and, like Bismarck, partial to the “secret meeting”: Bismarck with the flamboyant socialist leader, Ferdinand Lassalle; Cummings with everyone from Jeremy Corbyn’s communications team in 2019 to, it recently transpired, Nigel Farage. Notwithstanding his occasional social media rantings, Cummings strikes me as less of a mess of a man than Bismarck, who was constantly in tears and threatening to kill himself; tantrums and high emotions are not to be underrated as blunt instruments in his “diabolical” toolkit.

Beyond all this, I am not so sure that Cummings does fancy himself as a latter-day Bismarck. The subtitle to his chronology is “A Case Study of the Unrecognized Simplicities of High Performance”, and Cummings, who hawks books such as Superforecasting and The Scout Mindset to anyone who will listen, strives to be an expert “recognizer” of things “unrecognized”. Cummings’s Bismarck, at least when seen from the outside, is more a phenomenon than a human of flesh and blood; he is, in fact, a “super-intelligence”.

Cummings has used this metaphor on multiple occasions, and he means it seriously. Watching Bismarck “play politics” is akin to watching the best computers play chess; they’re not just playing it better than the rest of us, but “so differently that it’s really a different game”. Elsewhere, Cummings writes that the question Bismarck forces us to ponder — a question “relevant” to debates over AI today — is “how much was the effectiveness bound up with the dangerousness”. Cummings’s chronology lingers on the bourgeois teetering that met Bismarck on his elevation to the chancellorship in 1862 by those who recognized neither his effectiveness nor his dangerousness; he draws for us an intellectually hollow world order utterly unprepared for what was about to hit it, incapable even of seeing it for what it was. And those few who did recognize Bismarck’s brilliance — Albrecht von Roon, for example, who summoned him to be chancellor with his famous telegram, Periculum in mora — made the other fatal error, of assuming that he would “align” with their interests rather than pursuing his own; they recognized his effectiveness but not his dangerousness. Bismarck was not predicted or understood by “professors” and “pundits”; “the odd ‘maverick’ warns ‘you’re making a fatal error, I beg you to reconsider’ but is dismissed by the experts”. Cummings clearly isn’t Bismarck in this story: he’s the “maverick”.

Sir Christopher Clark, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, wrote that Cummings “resembles those Germans who, as Max Weber observed in 1917, admired [Bismarck] not for the ‘grandeur of his subtle, sovereign mind, but exclusively for the element of violence and cunning in his statesmanship, the real or imagined brutality in his methods’”. Perhaps there is some blind power-worship afoot; some of Cummings’s ramblings certainly give that impression. Yet Bismarck, for Cummings, isn’t just a character plucked from the past for shrewd leaders to emulate, but a phenomenon which shrewd leaders will have to learn to recognize: something that transcends the usual rules and orders, something that threatens to upend everything, something — like, perhaps, Artificial Intelligence — that leaders will have to see even when elite opinion or the “official story” does not. On that recognition, the future of humanity might well depend; yet, with enough Bismarckian initiative, those threats might even present opportunities. Some of Cummings’s earliest published thoughts on AI, composed back when he was a little-known minion to Michael Gove in the Department for Education, closed, much in this vein, with one of Bismarck’s most celebrated bons mots. “Technical changes such as genetic engineering and machine intelligence are bringing revolution. It would be better to undertake it than undergo it.”

The building’s scope and ambition echo the Victorian grandeur that can be found in Liverpool and London, and the epic public buildings of Paris, Antwerp and Amsterdam. It’s a building that marks a golden age. Its foundation stone was laid in 2007, when Germany was still Exportweltmeister (world’s top exporter) and before the convulsions of Brexit, Donald Trump’s trade wars, and Vladimir Putin’s efforts to carve up and control Ukraine. The opulent venue was finally finished in 2017, the same year Angela Merkel secured her final term as chancellor and the far-Right AfD showed signs of its political potential. Less than a decade later, it looks like a totem to a bygone era.

Few countries profited from the postwar order as much as Germany. It was well protected from the tumult of power politics thanks to America’s protective shield which allowed the country’s leaders to pursue a mercantilist agenda. But the world has turned more volatile. The re-election of Donald Trump effectively killed off the post-Cold War vision of ever greater global integration. That’s a particularly acute problem for the world’s most trade-dependent major economy and creates a dilemma about where and how Germany will sell its goods.

Just how unprepared Germany is for the crumbling world order emerged in spring 2022, when a diplomatic scandal unfolded. It involved Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the President of Germany — a ceremonial role, which is supposed to be apolitical, even though it is often filled by a former politician. So it’s unusual for a German president to get embroiled in an international spat. But that’s what happened.

A few weeks after the war in Ukraine broke out, Steinmeier was getting ready for a journey to Kyiv in a show of support that was a tantalizing opportunity for him. But the ensuing fiasco served as a prime example of why Europe’s largest economy struggles to take a leading role in global affairs.

Just days before Steinmeier’s planned departure, a train station in the hard-fought Donetsk Oblast was hit by a Russian rocket, killing dozens of people who were trying to flee. In the midst of that carnage, Steinmeier was still hoping to make an appearance, but Ukraine balked. It was a shock given Germany’s critical role in the country’s support network.

A brief note arrived via diplomatic channels stating that Steinmeier’s visit would be “more substantial and more acceptable” if he traveled independently. That’s diplomatic language for “stay away”. It was a clear affront, and Steinmeier’s ego was bruised. For weeks he stewed. Chancellor Olaf Scholz rallied to his side, vowing not to travel to Kyiv until the issue was sorted out. So while Ukraine was fighting for its survival and clamoring for artillery, air-defense systems and ammunition, it had to deal with the vanities of a man who played a key role in emboldening Russia’s aggression.

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Before being appointed as president in 2017, Steinmeier helped deepen Germany’s dependence on the Kremlin. He was foreign minister under Angela Merkel and before that the chief of staff for Gerhard Schröder. After leaving power, the former chancellor was quickly and controversially hired as a well-paid adviser to Russian firms.

Under Steinmeier’s watch, Germany started mainlining Russian gas via the first Nord Stream pipeline in 2005. Steinmeier extended those ties while serving as Germany’s top diplomat twice. In his first stint (2005–9) he refused to let the murders of opposition figures Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko or the invasion of Georgia get in the way of good vibes between the countries. During his second term as foreign minister (2013–17), Russia illegally annexed Crimea, which Steinmeier and many other leading German figures quickly normalized.

Shortly before the land grab in early 2014, Steinmeier was in Moscow and set an accommodating tone, urging a new “positive agenda” in relations with Russia. He underscored that message, which was the mainstream view in Berlin, in an interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant during the visit: “It is important to me to offer a trusting and constructive cooperation with Moscow.” He even suggested that the Kremlin had a role to play in resolving political tensions in Ukraine — a dangerous signal for pro-democracy demonstrators at a time when the Maidan uprising was in full swing. The message from Berlin was that Germany’s relations with Russia were a higher priority than whatever else was going on in the region.

That approach didn’t change following Crimea’s annexation or after Russia-backed forces took control of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. Instead, Steinmeier sought to continue negotiations with Moscow and lobbied for reining in sanctions, citing concerns that Russia could be destabilized. He then went a step further and proposed a formula as part of the Minsk talks to freeze the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

It was clear what the priority was: Germany needed its fix of cheap Russian energy. And like any addict, it wanted more. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was supposed to be another direct injection from Russian gas fields to Germany’s industrial infrastructure. The project was given the green light in 2015, just one year after the annexation of Crimea — so much for punishing the aggressor and standing strong for liberal values.

For years, Steinmeier and the rest of the German establishment continued to back Nord Stream despite warnings by the United States and other European allies that it posed a security risk for Germany and in turn NATO. Merkel defended Nord Stream, as did Olaf Scholz, as did the entire political mainstream in Berlin, collectively dodging political culpability by disingenuously labeling the pipeline as a mere commercial project. The attitudes towards Nord Stream and Russian gas stand out, but aren’t unique. German politics is largely an extension of the country’s business interests. Commerce regularly outweighs broader concerns of politics, security, or much less moral values, because of the central role that economics and affluence plays in the identity of postwar Germany. So when Germany’s elite saw how much money could be made in tapping Russia’s vast resources, the political establishment fell into line by not poking the bear in Moscow, regardless of its actions. It didn’t end there.

The head of Siemens went to meet with Putin less than two weeks after Crimea’s annexation, facilitating Moscow’s plans to decouple the peninsula from Ukraine’s power grid Siemens also got deeply involved with the Russian rail network. A veritable conga line of executives gave their seal of approval to the Kremlin’s aggression. BASF, Uniper, Volkswagen and Daimler were active as well. So while the postwar order was under attack in Germany’s own backyard, the country was actively profiteering.

Ahead of the planned trip to Kyiv, Steinmeier did offer a mea culpa after being accused of having a “spider’s web” of contacts in Russia, connecting his stance with a broad-based shift towards detente starting with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. But given his efforts to engage with the Kremlin, it’s hardly surprising that Kyiv wasn’t thrilled about serving as a backdrop for his rehabilitation.

A thaw only started with a telephone call between Steinmeier and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in May 2022. Finally in October (more than seven months after the war started), the German president visited Ukraine. “My message to the people in Ukraine is: You can rely on Germany!” he said during the visit. The boast rang hollow then and the emptiness echoed long after.

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To be fair, there are historical reasons why Germany has a soft spot for Russia. Berlin is dotted with a dozen Soviet monuments, including an imposing memorial and a cemetery with the remains of more than 13,000 Red Army soldiers. Unlike in former Eastern European countries, no cranes or bulldozers have come to topple them. That’s part of Germany’s post-Nazi memory culture: Soviet troops were the first to enter Berlin. In addition to that historical debt, the people in former communist East Germany have a certain affinity towards Moscow that was nurtured during years of hardship following reunification. Having said that, standing up to Russia doesn’t come as naturally to Germany as it does to America and Great Britain. And it’s especially hard to do when cheap Russian energy is fueling the economy.

Germany’s policy of appeasement with Russia dates back at least to Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the Seventies when the fate of the East Germans was at stake and reaching out to the Kremlin opened up the prospect of creating holes in the Iron Curtain. After reunification, Germany didn’t have the same noble aims. Instead, the focus was on money.

On top of the Russia question, Germany struggled to get its mind around a military conflict. For Berlin’s mercantilist mindset, the economic risks of an invasion of Ukraine were too high even for Putin. That stems from a post-military perspective. After spending decades under America’s shield, the country’s leadership had embraced Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” idea after the Berlin Wall fell. The great ideological battles were over and liberal democracy had won. Rather than brinkmanship and bloodshed, conflicts could be resolved through diplomacy and international institutions. That made a robust military unnecessary. It was an appealing (and indeed self-serving) approach for Germany in its reconstituted form, straddling the former Iron Curtain and striving for affluence above all else.

There was also solid public support for leaving militarism behind. For most Germans, military spending was a waste of money and an uncomfortable reminder of the country’s Nazi past. Every mission was hotly contested by the public, and hardly any politician was going to stick their neck out and demand more money for weapons and soldiers. Before the invasion of Ukraine, German news coverage underscored doubts about the military, focusing on the Bundeswehr’s scandals and dysfunction. The outcome was feeble spending, with Germany regularly missing NATO’s guidelines to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense. You would have to go back to 1991 to find that level of investment.

In that context, Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech a few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was indeed historic. He took advantage of the moment by announcing a special €100 billion fund to upgrade the military and broke with postwar tradition by promising to deliver lethal weapons to a conflict zone. Germany did become one of Kyiv’s chief suppliers of military equipment, behind only the United States. But the momentum was choppy and every new step was accompanied by hand-wringing over fears of escalation.

The slow walk of support, with Scholz hemming and hawing over weapons, gave the impression that Germany doubted that a Ukraine victory was possible and preferred normalization sooner rather than later.

At the end of the day, Germany’s motivations are rather straightforward. Although the country moralizes about freedom, democracy and human rights, its chief aim is protecting German affluence. Even after the invasion, the country continued filling up Russian coffers. In 2022 it transferred €97 million every single day for energy and other imports, a 6.5% increase. The following year, trade with Russia still totalled nearly €12.6 billion despite sanctions and the end of most energy purchases, making the country more important to the German economy than EU partners Greece, Bulgaria and Lithuania — and of course more important than Ukraine. Also, exports suddenly shot up to Central Asian countries like Kyrgyzstan, indicating former Soviet republics were serving as a way station for goods heading to Russia.

Aside from the blow to Germany’s credibility, Scholzing hampered progress towards a military capable of deterring or containing conflicts in the future. “Decades of counting pennies” left the country’s defense forces with a stockpile of ammunition that would only last days in the event of an attack. Radio equipment, armored vehicles, ships and planes were all dated. The total price tag for modernizing the German military has been pegged at some €300 billion, or three times the Zeitenwende budget, and that’s looking optimistic given the proliferation of crises.

In the wake of February’s federal election, the incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz has moved to secure more funding for Germany’s military. After a fiery speech from US Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference just before the vote, it has become increasingly clear even in Berlin that action is needed. Taking advantage of the still-serving parliament, which is friendlier to military outlays than the one just voted in, Merz plans to amend Germany’s constitution to exempt defense spending from fiscal limits and pledged to do “whatever it takes” to protect the country.

But Germany’s military impotence isn’t just about money and hardware. There are also severe structural issues that are very common across the economy. Navigating the labyrinth of approvals and procedures means upgrading the Bundeswehr’s infrastructure alone would take half a century and getting approval for a commercially available flight helmet took 10 years — a negative highlight of German inefficiency. And on top of hard-power failings, Germany’s intelligence network has displayed alarming gaps throughout the years, downplaying threats and being unable to keep Russian and Chinese espionage in check.

February’s election also exposed how fragile support for strengthening the Bundeswehr could be. The far-Left Linke and far-Right AfD — both opposed to increased military spending and supportive of closer ties with Russia — surged in the polls. Young Germans, who would be called on to fight in the event of a conflict, disproportionately backed these fringes, raising the spectre of deep societal fractures if Germany is forced to reinstate some form of conscription to rebuild its armed forces. Cuts to welfare to free up defense spending could further inflame divisions.

Immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, General Alfons Mais, head of the German Army, lamented that the Bundeswehr was “more or less bare”. It was a collective failing. The political establishment had turned a blind eye to dangers, even if they were clear and present. That points to an issue of mentality, a more vexing problem than money or structure. Does Germany really want to lead? “We all saw it coming” after the annexation of Crimea but failed to act, General Mais said. “That doesn’t feel good! I am angry!”

Germany has a tendency to drift back to a reassuring status quo and avoid change. The uncomfortable reality is that it doesn’t have that luxury anymore. Business is no longer just business, and security is no longer a spectator sport, especially after the first Trump administration raised doubts about American commitment to its pampered European allies. The German Council on Foreign Relations warned in 2023 that it’s a question of when and not if the country has to fight in a war, predicting a window of less than a decade.

Despite the shock over its missteps, the country has struggled to shift gears. It took two years following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine for Rheinmetall (the maker of Leopard tanks) to break ground on a new munitions factory. Despite all of its lauded manufacturing prowess, Germany hasn’t come close to gearing up for the security challenges it faces, raising questions over the political will.

The war in Ukraine has exposed the country’s naiveté, even to Germans. Tanks rolling towards Kyiv showed how foolhardy it was to tie Germany’s energy system to a former KGB agent nostalgic for the dark days of the Soviet Union. The war also ended Germany’s soothing illusion that hard power is passé. There’s at least one positive thing to come out of Germany’s foreign-policy reality check: the country’s diplomats will almost certainly never justify deals with autocrats with the smug Wandel durch Handel (Change through trade) policy. Post-Ukraine pacts with Qatar and Saudi Arabia will instead be sealed in the name of energy security. But at least that requires a more active, case-by-case justification. The risk is that the interest in a fundamental reorientation of defense and foreign policy fades as soon as pressure eases. That’s often been the case in Germany, which is good at mobilizing in a crisis, but equally adept at reverting to regular routines as soon as the heat is off. Germany’s leaders need a long-term strategy. Simply repeating the word Zeitenwende isn’t enough.

***

A version of this essay appears in Broken Republik: The Inside Story of Germany’s Descent into Crisis by Chris Reiter & Will Wilkes, out now with Bloomsbury.

The result came as no surprise. Olaf Scholz is now out of the picture, his SPD suffering its worst ever electoral defeat, with only 16.4% of the votes. The CDU, and its Bavarian sister, the CSU, did a little better. But their combined 28.5% — they had hoped for more than 30% — makes it hard for them to claim a mandate. Meanwhile, the AfD, the hard-Right party supported by Elon Musk, came in at 20.8%, which makes them the main opposition party.

The CDU/CSU, given its firewall against the AfD, is left with no alternative but to form a coalition with the SPD. Angela Merkel governed with this political constellation — the grand coalition — three times. But there was nothing grand about it; it was a coalition of failure. It failed to address the causes of de-industrialization and it failed to meet NATO defense spending targets. Instead, it cozied up to Vladimir Putin and approved the Baltic Sea gas pipelines from Russia. It failed to resolve the eurozone’s economic crisis and supported the immigration policies which ultimately gave rise to the AfD. This same coalition is now back in the driving seat, albeit under new leadership.

The single most significant — and surprising — result from the weekend was the strong performance of the Left Party. Though largely written off after its most famous politician, Sahra Wagenknecht, split off in 2023 to form BSW, it surged to win 8.8% of the vote (compared with Wagenknecht’s paltry 4.97% — not even enough to win a seat). This now means that together the AfD and the Left Party have more than one third of the votes of the Bundestag — a blocking minority for many important votes, especially for constitutional changes. This, crucially, is why the performances of the small parties mattered far more than whether or not the Greens would be needed to form a coalition. And these parties are going to be a real problem for Merz.

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For one thing, the new Chancellor had wanted to travel to the NATO summit this June with a strong commitment to higher defense spending. And even though the Left Party and the AfD hate each other in every other respect, they agree that they won’t give Merz the money to strengthen the Bundeswehr. More important, though, is the fact that they won’t support a reform to the constitutional fiscal rules that Merz and the SPD are desperate for.

Germany’s constitutional debt brake was introduced in 2009 during the fair-weather environment of industrial globalization, now long gone. The rules, which strictly limit government borrowing, dictate that if Germany wanted to spend more money on defense and aid to Ukraine, it had to be saved from elsewhere. But politically, saving on social spending to pay for Ukraine didn’t play. It’s one of the reasons why the last coalition collapsed. And the new coalition is about to find itself in a similar predicament since, even with the Greens, they are still short of the two-thirds majority necessary to make any constitutional changes.

As a result, the Left Party, which supports reforms to the debt brake in principle, now finds itself wielding pivotal power in the German parliament. If we want to know whether Germany is going to address its most urgent problems — defense spending, infrastructure investment, digitalization, economic reform — we can’t do so without talking about the Left Party. The successor of the old East German SED and a fixture on the German political scene since unification, the party looked finished in 2023. Even in October last year, it was still only polling at 2.5%, way below the 5% threshold necessary to qualify for entry in the German parliament.

But then, as the Scholz government collapsed in early November, the Left Party managed to hold its first conference without acrimony in many years. With the departure of Wagenknecht, who opposed migration and refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the big ideological debates also disappeared. And at the newly harmonious meeting, the party elected a vibrant new leadership duo, including the previously unknown Heidi Reichinnek. Earlier this year, the young politician delivered a speech in the Bundestag against Merz’s migration policies which immediately went viral. And in an extraordinary reversal of fortunes, the Left Party has become the biggest party for young people — the exact opposite of what happened in 2021, when its core support was made up mostly of east German pensioners.

The party’s success came mainly at the expense of the Greens, following their decision to be open to a coalition with Merz. The Greens have forever been torn between fundis and realos, fundamentalists versus realists. The main attraction of the realists used to be that they were electorally more successful. But that is no longer the case. Robert Habeck, the economics minister, wanted to be a coalition partner to Merz. And, in an age in which voters reward parties that stick to their principles, Reichinnek was able to swoop in to scoop up all those alienated Left-wing voters.

And so, Germany is splitting between Left and Right, with the center squeezed in between. For this, those centrist parties must take much of the blame: ironically, the firewall that they erected to protect themselves from the far-Right, has only served to strengthen it — along with the far-Left. Indeed, Alice Weidel, the AfD leader, predicts that her party will overtake the CDU/CSU in the next four years. I think this is realistic. At that point, the centrist parties would have no choice but to enter into a coalition with each other to be able to govern. The two-thirds majority is lost.

In the meantime, the center simply doesn’t have the fiscal space to make any significant economic difference. Merz’s election program contained €100 billion of unfunded promises. This is in addition to the €600 billion shortfall in those spending promises committed by previous governments. Without the debt brake, its fiscal position would be the same as France.

How could Germany take the fiscal brake off? There are three possibilities. Merz could declare a state of emergency. Only a simple majority of votes is needed for this to pass. But there are strict conditions for its application and it’s hard to imagine a government enacting a state of fiscal emergency to justify higher defense spending. Another option would be the creation of an off-budget vehicle designed for a specific purpose. This has happened in the past: it was activated for the €150 billion climate and transition fund to pay for the Net Zero investments and would require a two-thirds majority to pass. The final option is the constitutional reform of the debt brake — a lengthy procedure that would require the votes of the Left Party.

There are no obvious solutions to Germany’s current predicament. I wouldn’t totally rule out debt-brake reform, but it will be small and limited to ringfencing infrastructure investment. Meanwhile, the Left Party will make things difficult, especially on defense. The government could, of course, spend less on welfare, but they would struggle to find political agreement on that. What they cannot do, however, is repurpose the climate and transition fund for defense. That, too, would require a two-thirds majority.

Here, then, is the problem with modern Germany.  It’s the same issue that dogs the EU. To get anything done, you need a majority. This is supposed to protect the status quo and prevent unnecessary change. But when change is needed, it produces devastating gridlock.

Can another coalition of short-sighted centrists arrest the decline of the economy, fix the failure of leadership and free the nation from its pernicious political trap? I think we know the answer.

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.

At the root of Germany’s industrial woes is electricity, which is now nearly twice as expensive as it is for their American counterparts, and three times more expensive than in China. Prices have been rising since the early 2000s, but a policy embraced by the German government in 2011, following the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, sealed the nation’s fate. The proponents of the Energiewende (“energy revolution”) policy made the astonishing argument that Germany could rapidly abandon both fossil fuels and nuclear energy without losing its industrial edge. This was, as one Oxford study put it, a “gamble”. Or a game of Russian roulette, a cynic might have added.

The gamble hasn’t paid off. Even Germany’s gas-related dealings with Russia — a source of Russo-American tension since the Sixties — couldn’t stop prices rising throughout the 2010s. They were significant enough, however, to make the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 nearly lethal for German industry. Today, electricity prices are at their highest since 2000, with total production hitting its lowest point since then.

This makes it incredibly tough for Germany to compete with China. Not only does Russian gas continue to flow to China in ever greater quantities, but the Chinese are also receiving sanctioned Iranian oil; installing more than 90% of the world’s new coal power capacity; putting the finishing touches on a hydroelectric infrastructure that already generates more power than Japan; and building ever more nuclear power plants. All this has ensured a fundamental manufacturing advantage over Germany.

But there’s more to the tale of German decline than cheap electricity. The past two decades have also witnessed an industrial revolution of sorts: at the turn of the millennium, China churned out cheap junk and not much else. Now, though, it is shaping up to be a formidable and sophisticated rival.

The car industry is a prime example. Today, Chinese electric vehicles are among the best and cheapest in the world, posing a menace to domestic production in Germany and the rest of Europe. But this was not always the case. As one post on r/CarTalkUK, a Reddit group with half-a-million users, puts it: “I remember only a few years ago when Top Gear went to China and showed us all those horrific knock-off death trap shit-boxes that looked like mutilated Minis… now those things are seemingly a thing of the past.” The EU is well aware of this development, having just slapped tariffs on Chinese cars that would make Trump blush. And it’s not just cars — China dominates many key markets, including drones, shipbuilding, solar panels, and wind turbine components to name just a few, and is making strides in other areas too.

Consider its acceleration. The nation started out by hawking junk, leveraging cheap labour to build up healthy export surpluses. This provided Chinese companies with the cash to invest in moving up the supply chain and, critically, to go shopping abroad. In 2004 and 2005, Chinese state-owned enterprises bought up F Zimmerman and Kelch, two of the world’s leading machine tool companies whose highly specialised equipment is vital for thousands of manufacturing processes. Of course, buying companies doesn’t necessarily hand its new owners the keys to the kingdom: transferring high-end R&D and manufacturing processes to China and training up loyal Chinese engineers and scientists who won’t emigrate can still be scuppered by export control laws, union action, political intervention and so on. But it’s a pretty useful strategy that sooner or later creates opportunities.

Another tool at China’s disposal has been the joint venture system, whereby German manufacturers who wish to set up shop in China are expected to share their critical knowledge and technology with their Chinese competitors. This kind of pact may seem utterly Faustian, but dozens upon dozens of high-profile companies have signed up. This includes Volkswagen, which now finds itself shutting down its German factories for the first time in history, in the face of ever more daunting competition from Chinese rivals.

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China’s twin strategies — joint ventures and purchases — were both turbocharged by the financial crisis. And still Germany did nothing. A series of new laws that might have enabled better government screening and intervention were passed in 2013, but not used for years.

By 2016, the threat could no longer be ignored. That year, Chinese interests took control of a hugely important German company, the robotics giant KUKA. Their products are used in a whole range of industries: from carmakers and battery manufacturers to medical device companies and aerospace companies such as Airbus. Along with another big deal that year, the purchase of the plastics processing machine company KraussMaffei, the alarm was sounded.

Yet Germany kept on hitting snooze. It wasn’t until 2018 that the government first cited security concerns to block a major takeover, this time of the metal forming specialist Leifeld Metal Spinning. The same year, then economic minister Peter Altmaier proposed a special government fund to buy German firms facing a foreign takeover. The idea came to nothing.

Slowly, however, the Germans have been wising up to the competition. A series of legislative changes have updated the 2013 foreign takeover screening tools, enabling more intervention in recent years. There have been around a dozen or so measures taken against acquisitions every year since 2019, with hundreds more scrutinised but left to proceed.

Arguably, this is all too little, too late. Thanks to decades of investment in tech acquisition through takeovers, industrial espionage and joint ventures, as well as complementary investments in human capital, China now has its own high-tech innovation ecosystem. The days of Chinese copying are not over per se, it’s just that copying is now accompanied by homegrown invention.

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Last year, China accounted for more than half of the world’s industrial robot installations and surpassed Germany and Japan in industrial robot density, a key measure of automation. This will potentially enable China to avoid old trade-offs associated with the transition from low- to high-end industry. In a contrast with the historical experience of some developed nations, China may not need to offshore low-end industry to wherever labour is cheaper, instead leaning on automation and cheap energy to keep supply chains national — a strategic boon in an era of growing tensions.

The US cottoned on to China’s industrial coup in 2016 and began responding. Donald Trump’s China policy, his “trade war”, was adopted and further developed by Joe Biden after 2020. The focus on technology, industry and China is now a central pillar of US foreign policy, and historians will surely view 2016 as a historical turning point in China-US relations.

By contrast, it has taken the EU eight years of damage to start a serious conversation about China — despite being a prime victim of high-tech industrialisation. And it only began in September, when former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi published a report on European competitiveness for the European Commission. This has since been promoted by the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen in the context of the escalating dispute about European protectionism against Chinese electric vehicles.

And still it seems that the EU’s response to China’s innovation boom will once again be late and ineffective. One only needs to look at the battery sector to see why. In an attempt to turn the tables, the EU has hinted that it will block Chinese companies from accessing its electric battery grants when investing in Europe: unless they hand over their superior battery technology. This is the very same trick that China played on Europe for years, but the EU’s hand is undermined by the weakness of European battery initiatives. Just last month, “Europe’s Tesla”, the “battery champion” Northvolt, declared bankruptcy.

Add to this EU infighting. The troublemaker in chief is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which argues against an “economic cold war” with China, having received nearly half of all Chinese investment into Europe in 2023, including funding for a major automotive plant that is now subject to retaliatory probes from the EU Commission. Germany must balance its own interests with those of an increasingly fragmented trading bloc.

With German industry collapsing, nationalism is on the rise once again. Since July 2023, the anti-EU, anti-immigration AfD has consistently been rated the second most popular party in national polls. And in June’s European Parliament elections, the AfD came second, winning most support in the old East. In September, it won a plurality in the eastern state of Thuringia, but has yet to form a governing coalition.

The region is also home to another radical political force: Sahra Wagenknecht, whose nascent Left-wing populist party is named after her. A half-Iranian former Stalinist and self-described “Left conservative”, Wagenknecht has attempted to unite anti-immigration, anti-Nato and pro-Russian politics, arguing that “Nato must be dissolved and replaced by a collective security system including Russia”.

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Both Wagenknecht and the AfD have been investigated by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) — Germany’s equivalent to MI5. In particular, the BfV has embroiled itself in legal disputes with the AfD, which it has successfully argued in court should be subject to surveillance on the basis it is a suspected anti-constitutional organisation. This is due to its supposed anti-Muslim, anti-refugee and anti-democratic rhetoric. The AfD has also endured espionage investigations involving Russian and Chinese financial and personnel infiltration.

For such a popular party to be treated as if it is a terrorist organisation raises questions about the strength of Germany’s post-Cold War regime. Does it risk shedding legitimacy by stigmatising widely held concerns? Or can it accommodate and temper the emerging political forces that have been nurtured by years of mass immigration and are now best set to capitalise on looming de-industrialisation? There is already evidence that voters in Western industrial areas may be the vanguard of possible AfD gains outside the old East — AfD politicians continually attack Net Zero, responding to fears about industrial jobs. Then there’s Wagenknecht, who warned ominously in 2022 that Germany risks experiencing “incredible deindustrialisation” without major reform. Her solution is peace with Russia and renewed gas imports. This autumn’s state elections in Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony suggest these messages are hitting home.

Despite the swell of popular discontent, there is little sign that Germany’s February election will change enough to reverse the energy crisis. At this rate, Germany’s industrial woes are set to continue, multiplying opportunities for China to steal a lead in key areas. Meanwhile, Russia will dangle the promise of unlimited gas before the eyes of the growing AfD and Wagenknecht movements. These insurgents may yet experience breakthroughs outside of the former Soviet East, prompting a constitutional crisis at worst, or otherwise forcing the established parties into major policy adjustments. Already, Scholz has announced unilateral steps effectively to suspend Schengen, Europe’s free movement system, after coming under pressure over immigration.

This is without doubt the most severe crisis Germany has faced since its rebirth 34 years ago, when the former president Richard von Weizsäcker promised that the fledgling republic would “serve peace in the world in a united Europe”. How, though, can Germany do so when both peace and a united Europe have proven so elusive? Uncomfortable as it is to admit it, history is far from over for Germany. The nation may yet decide that it is better simply to serve itself.

The reality is that, in many respects, Merkel paved the way to today’s crisis. Her advocacy for stringent austerity measures, implemented both across Europe and within Germany after the 2008 financial crisis, ushered in over a decade of stagnation and underinvestment. Her policies left Germany’s infrastructure — bridges, roads and railways — to crumble; her doubling down on Germany’s neo-mercantilist, export-driven economic model, especially during the euro crisis, stifled internal demand by compressing wages and encouraging precarious employment, while leaving the economy overly dependent on exports.

By pursuing an industrial policy that emphasised traditional manufacturing sectors — automobiles, heavy industry and mechanical parts — she left Germany lagging in the high-tech revolution. By phasing out nuclear energy, she deprived the country of a clean and cost-effective energy source. By opening the door to over a million asylum seekers, she created serious challenges in social cohesion and public safety. By embracing a paternalistic and TINA-driven approach to politics, exemplified in her concept of “market-conforming democracy”, she starved the German democratic discourse.

Yet, despite these shortcomings, Merkel remained one of the world’s most popular politicians upon her retirement in 2021 — both at home and abroad. Following Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Merkel was often hailed by the Western liberal establishment as the torchbearer of the global liberal order and even as the “leader of the free world”.

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Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then, Merkel’s legacy has come under increased scrutiny. She has been heavily criticised for maintaining good relations with Russia and allegedly fostering “an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas”. “No German is more responsible for the crisis in Ukraine than Merkel”, Politico bluntly declared.

Her mammoth memoir, Freedom, is an attempt to salvage that reputation, the title encapsulating her opinion of herself as a defender of the liberal world order. Merkel uses its 720 pages to staunchly defend her record across issues such as austerity, nuclear energy, migration and Russia. On most topics, however, she deploys moral and psychological arguments, leaving the reader wanting for a deeper analysis of the broader economic and structural dynamics at play. Hence her management of the euro crisis was purely aimed at saving the blessed European project, with no mention of the way in which it benefited German banks. Similarly, her open-door immigration policy is justified on humanitarian grounds, with no acknowledgment of how it expanded Germany’s pool of low-wage labour to the benefit of domestic capital.

Merkel’s account of the Ukraine crisis, however, is the exception — probably because Merkel herself admits that, on this issue, her approach had little to do with morality and idealism, but was rather guided by hard-nosed realism, or realpolitik, as she puts it.

More than a decade ago, it was already clear to Merkel that the global balance of power was shifting away from the West towards the then-emerging Brics bloc, and that the “the United States struggled with relinquishing power”, blocking demands for the reform of international institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. Merkel favoured a more pragmatic approach, advocating for cooperation based on mutual interests, even as she acknowledged the profound ideological differences between Germany and non-Western countries like China.

The same logic applied to Russia. Merkel recalls how many Central and Eastern Europeans “seemed to wish that their gigantic neighbor would disappear from the map, simply cease to exist”. While she understood this sentiment, she also recognised a fundamental geopolitical reality: “Russia did exist and it was armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. There was no wishing it away geopolitically, and there still isn’t.” One might not have liked Putin, but “that didn’t make Russia disappear from the map”.

Merkel recalls delivering an opening speech, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, less than two years into her tenure as chancellor in which she highlighted the need to “seek dialogue with Russia despite our many differences of opinion”. Following her remarks, Putin delivered his now-famous speech, in which he vehemently criticised the inequities of the US-led unipolar order. Alluding to the Iraq War, he spoke of “an almost uncontained, hyper use of power”; he also vehemently condemned the missile defence system that the US planned to install in Europe. Unsurprisingly, he also criticised Nato’s eastward expansion.

While acknowledging that Putin’s speech was self-serving, Merkel admits that there were points that weren’t “completely absurd”: America’s invasion of Iraq, for example, and the failure to reach an agreement on updating the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Her grasp of the risks involved in ignoring Russia’s security concerns became a defining factor in her decision to block George W. Bush’s proposal to offer Ukraine and Georgia a formal pathway to Nato during the 2008 Bucharest summit. She understood that Russia viewed Nato membership for Ukraine, in particular, as an absolute red line — also due to the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea — and that Putin would have responded aggressively to such a move. Indeed, she argues in the book that, if Nato membership had been offered to Ukraine, war would have broken out even earlier at a greater military disadvantage for Ukraine. In light of subsequent events, this is hard to dispute.

But Merkel also makes another important point, noting that Nato should also be concerned about its own security risks when drawing countries into the alliance — whether formally or de facto. On this point, the risk of nuclear war that looms over the continent today has also proved Merkel right. In the end, she blocked the official pathway, but found herself with little alternative but to agree to the final communiqué, which declared that “these countries will become members of Nato”. Viewing this as a necessary compromise, she also recognised that the damage had already been done. By merely opening the door to the possibility, the alliance had fundamentally altered Russia’s military-strategic calculus. This effectively invited Putin to take pre-emptive measures to prevent what he now perceived as an inevitable outcome. As he warned Merkel: “You won’t be chancellor forever, and then [Ukraine and Georgia] will become NATO members. And I’m going to prevent that.”

A few months after the summit, Russian forces invaded Georgian territory. This followed an assault by the Georgian military — funded, armed and trained by the United States — on South Ossetia, which borders Russia. Although relations between the West and Russia grew increasingly strained from this point onward, Germany continued to deepen its economic ties with Moscow. In 2011, the 1,200-kilometre Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline was inaugurated, linking the Russian coast near Saint Petersburg to northeastern Germany. The agreement had been signed in 2005 by Putin and then-German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, just before the elections that brought Merkel to power.

Merkel defends the deal on straightforward economics: gas transported via pipelines was significantly cheaper than liquefied natural gas (LNG). Furthermore, the route eliminated additional transit fees associated with pipelines running through countries such as Ukraine and Poland. She also highlights that, as early as 2006, both the European Commission and the European Parliament had officially designated the project as “a project of European interest”, emphasising its role in promoting the sustainability and security of Europe’s energy supply.

From Merkel’s perspective, strengthening economic ties with Russia was not just an economic necessity but also a geopolitical imperative, as Europe had a vested interest in minimising the risk of conflict. In this context, economic interdependence was seen as a form of peace diplomacy. However, such an approach required other European countries — and, most crucially, the United States — to address Russia’s legitimate security concerns as well. As events in Ukraine would later demonstrate, however, the US had other plans.

Interestingly, Merkel offers little commentary on the critical period between the 2008 Bucharest summit and the 2014 Western-backed coup in Ukraine — or even on the coup itself. Germany, she insists, alongside other countries, had been working on a plan to defuse the increasingly violent protests. However, the protesters rejected the proposed agreement, ultimately forcing the democratically elected president to flee the country. Reflecting on the turn of events, Merkel admits: “I had trouble understanding what had happened in the previous eighteen months”.

This is surely disingenuous. While it is plausible that she was not directly involved in the regime change, she openly acknowledges her role in bringing Ukraine closer to the European Union. This, however, proved equally destabilising for Ukraine, as it compelled the country to make a zero-sum geopolitical — and even “civilisational” — choice between the West and Russia. This heightened the political divisions in the country, which ultimately resulted in the Euromaidan events following president Yanukovich’s decision to reject the proposed EU-Ukraine agreement and instead choose Russia as his country’s most important partner.

The eight years between the 2014 regime change in Kyiv and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 remain a subject of intense speculation. It is widely known that Germany and France played pivotal roles in brokering the Minsk agreements in 2014-2015, which were intended to bring an end to the civil war in eastern Ukraine. Among other things, they proposed constitutional reforms in Ukraine, including provisions for greater self-government in certain areas of the Donbas region.

However, the Minsk agreements were never fully implemented, and this failure ultimately contributed to the escalation of tensions that culminated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Throughout the conflict, each side has blamed the other for the collapse of the negotiations. Russia has consistently argued that Ukraine was never genuinely committed to implementing the terms of the agreements. But what about the Western powers, particularly France and Germany, who acted as the brokers?

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In 2022, Merkel gave an interview that seemed to lend some credence to Russia’s interpretation of events. Speaking to Die Zeit, she stated that the Minsk agreements were “an attempt to give Ukraine time” and that Ukraine “used this time to get stronger, as you can see today”. Many interpreted this as an admission that the Western parties involved in the negotiations — including Merkel herself — were never genuinely invested in securing a peaceful resolution. Instead, they saw the agreements as a ploy to buy Ukraine time to prepare for a military solution to the conflict. I am not convinced.

I have always read Merkel’s comments as an attempt to retroactively justify what critics perceive as her irresponsible appeasement of Russia. The US might have had a vested interest in escalating the situation in Ukraine — in part precisely as a means of driving a wedge between Germany and Russia, a longstanding US geostrategic imperative. But what conceivable interest would Merkel have had in passively enabling a full-scale conflict between Ukraine and Russia, especially when such an outcome would inevitably dismantle the German-Russian economic ties that she had spent over a decade cultivating?

It was no surprise, then, to find that in her book Merkel strongly defends her efforts to secure peace — or at the very least a ceasefire — in Ukraine. Her approach was grounded in the belief that “a military solution to the conflict, that is to say a Ukrainian military victory over the Russian troops, was an illusion”. She advised Ukraine’s new government that a resolution would not be possible without dialogue and diplomacy. This, she emphasised, did not mean “that Ukraine must not defend itself when its territory is invaded, but ultimately — and incidentally, this is not the only part of the world where this is true — diplomatic solutions must be found… I could even go so far as to say: there will be no military solution.”

However, it quickly became evident that the US had a different agenda. When President Obama informed her of plans to supply Ukraine with at least defensive weapons, Merkel voiced her “concern that any delivery of weapons would strengthen the forces within the Ukrainian government who hoped only for a military solution, even if that offered no prospect of success”. In her view, such actions risked emboldening extremist and ultranationalist factions within Ukraine — a development that, arguably, aligned with US strategic interests.

Her account also reveals that Putin was resolute in his desire to reach a diplomatic solution. However, it became increasingly clear that “the Minsk agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was written on”. Powerful forces — within Ukraine, the US and even Europe, particularly hawkish nations like Poland — were advocating for a military resolution to the conflict. Over time, these voices only grew louder.

Merkel, however, continued to go against the grain by further deepening Germany’s ties with Russia through the construction of a second gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Despite repeated efforts by the Trump administration to halt the project, Merkel remained steadfast. Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she has faced relentless criticism for allegedly creating “an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas”. Yet, in her book, she contends that US opposition to Nord Stream 2 was not driven by concerns for Germany’s security interests but rather by American economic ambitions.

“In truth, I felt that the United States was mobilizing its formidable economic and financial resources to prevent the business ventures of other countries, even their allies”, she writes. “The United States was chiefly interested in its own economic interests, as it wanted to export to Europe LNG obtained through fracking.” This sheds further light on what the Americans’ motivations may have been in escalating tensions in Ukraine: did they view it as a way of bringing the pipeline project to an end?

In 2019, Zelensky was elected on a platform promising to bring peace to Ukraine, largely by implementing the Minsk agreements. And it’s clear from Merkel’s account that she believes Zelensky took his mandate seriously, at first at least. However, he soon came under intense pressure from ultranationalists in Ukraine not to implement what was deemed a “capitulation”. At the Paris summit, later that year, Macron, Zelensky Putin and Merkel collectively committed in writing to the full implementation of the Minsk agreements — but in the end Zelensky refused to accept the agreed text.

The pandemic, she writes, was “the last nail in the coffin of the Minsk agreement”. The absence of in-person meetings made it virtually impossible to resolve the lingering differences. And, by 2021, the agreements were dead. Nevertheless, shortly before leaving office, Merkel made one final attempt to broker peace by proposing a summit between the European Council and Putin. While Macron supported the initiative, Poland, Estonia and Lithuania opposed it, and the meeting never materialised. Merkel paid one last farewell visit to Moscow in August 2021, just months before the conclusion of her tenure.

Two decades of mutual encounters lay behind them — “an era during which Putin and, with him, Russia, had changed from a position of initial openness to the West to one of alienation from us”. And though Merkel does not state it explicitly, she evidently attributes at least part of the responsibility for how events unfolded to the attitude of Nato countries, particularly the United States. Her account makes it equally clear that she was steadfast in her commitment to avoiding war — and, frankly, there is little reason to doubt her sincerity.

This stance aligns not only with Germany’s economic and strategic interests, evident in her efforts to advance Nord Stream 2, but also with her understanding of the catastrophic consequences of a military conflict between Nato and Russia — “one of the world’s two leading nuclear powers along with the United States, and a geographical neighbor of the European Union”. This is a scenario that should be avoided at all costs, she writes. For her, along with that older generation of European politicians, this was not merely a matter of strategic calculation but basic common sense — two things that appear to be largely absent in the post-Merkel era.

A striking example of this shift can be seen in her successor. After the Ukraine invasion, Olaf Scholz drastically reversed Merkel’s Russia policy, announcing plans to wean Germany off Russian gas entirely. Scholz not only immediately halted the launch of Nord Stream 2; his government was also allegedly informed about a Ukrainian plot to blow up the pipeline and chose to remain silent. The dramatic economic consequences of this decoupling are currently playing out painfully. This approach would have been more logical if it had at least been accompanied by diplomatic efforts to de-escalate tensions in Ukraine. But this was not the case; indeed, Scholz waited over a year — several months after the outbreak of the war — before initiating any direct communication with Putin.

Would events have unfolded differently if Merkel had remained in power? Probably not; the forces she was up against were formidable and entrenched. But it’s difficult to imagine that she would have allowed Germany’s interests to be trampled over so blatantly, especially by its supposed American ally. Indeed, her entire tenure appears to have been guided by a persistent effort to balance Germany’s strategic interests with its transatlantic ties. If anything, her greatest shortcoming was failing to recognise that these goals had become fundamentally incompatible. Yet, it is emblematic of the paradoxical times we live in that, despite the many questionable decisions Merkel made during her chancellorship, the one aspect of her legacy that is most criticised in official Western discourse is the one thing she was unquestionably right about: trying to avoid war with Russia.

In Warsaw, however, politicians struck a rather less sycophantic tone. “The wind of history is blowing even stronger,” proclaimed Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, soon after Trump’s victory. “Poland’s leadership will rise to the occasion.” And why not? Poland already leads Europe on defence spending as a percentage of GDP, and boasts the third-largest army in Nato. And, especially if Trump makes good on his threat to abandon his transatlantic allies to their fate, the country might yet have an opportunity to become a military powerhouse right across the continent — one that could yet evoke the country’s bygone days of geopolitical dominance. 

Trump’s election is already transforming Polish politics. With the country’s 2025 presidential election looming, Sikorski, who threw his hat into the ring to become the nominee for the ruling Civic Platform party shortly before the US election, has now recalibrated his campaign around Trump’s victory. Among other things, Sikorski argues that what Poland needs now is someone with the diplomatic experience to weather the vagaries of a Trump presidency. Just as important, the foreign minister points out that he has a good working relationship with Trump, distinguishing himself from Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw and Sikorski’s rival for the job.

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In reality, though, Trump’s victory is about far more than day-to-day political bickering. For while capitals across Eastern Europe are unsurprisingly worried by the security implications of America First, they equally know that whatever happens, they’re going to have to take care of themselves. And if that means filling a US-shaped void in terms of national security, not least when it comes to Russia, the disappearance of American power may also bolster the presence of the Poles or Romanians on the wider Europe stage. 

That’s clear enough West of the Oder. The recent collapse of Olaf Scholz’s government in Germany was partly triggered by arguments over support for Ukraine and the prospect that US assistance might end, even as the chancellor has been criticised by other Nato members for speaking to Vladimir Putin for the first time in years. Not that the chaos in Berlin should surprise the generals in Tallinn or Sofia. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Nato’s centre of gravity has gradually shifted eastwards. It’s no coincidence that ministerial talks on the future of European defence were lately held in Warsaw. And though Emmanuel Macron has lately started making bold statements about deploying Nato forces to Ukraine, he was only following Poland’s lead.

To put it differently, then, only the Eastern Europeans have concrete incentives to take Trump’s security threats seriously: and only Poland has the wealth and expertise to actually drag its neighbours towards an independent defence policy. And, in a sense, that’s wholly appropriate. For while Western observers are more familiar with Poland’s years of subjugation — first by Prussia and the Tsar, later by Hitler and the Soviets — there was once a time that the country dominated the continent. In 1683, it was chiefly through the intervention of King Jan III Sobieski that Catholic armies defeated the invading Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna. Pope Innocent XI swiftly proclaimed Sobieski the “saviour of Western civilisation” for the timely arrival of the famed winged hussars. Around the same time, Polish kings, ruling over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, flanked the Baltic and Black Seas, and dominated Central and Eastern European affairs all while maintaining an inventive (if imperfect) system of elective monarchy. 

Over subsequent centuries, Polish leaders like Marshal Józef Piłsudski have occasionally tried to reclaim this illustrious mantle, seeing Poland not as a European hegemon, but rather as a power counterweight to both Russian and German expansionism. It goes without saying, of course, that the sober liberals of the Civic Platform don’t see themselves as Sobieskis reborn. Yet with Trump taking a hammer to the foundations of the European security order, the pendulum of history does seem to be swinging back towards a Polish military renaissance. 

It surely helps that since the end of the Cold War, Poland has worked hard to build up its forces. Quite aside from the headline GDP numbers, that’s clear enough elsewhere too. The country has emerged as the largest tank power in Europe, and boasts the third-largest fleet of F-16 jets on the continent. That’s shadowed by a recent shipment of F-35s from the US, with Poland receiving a custom model of the plane from Lockheed Martin. The new batch, for its part, is aptly named “Husarz” — a nod to the winged hussars of old. At the same time, Poland’s military leadership recently announced plans to develop an AI centre to support decision-making. Not to be outdone, Warsaw also said it was acquiring 486 HIMARS launchers: a ridiculous number, if undoubtedly a statement of intent. 

No less important, Poland has geographical reasons to take defence seriously. The only Nato member to share borders with both Ukraine and Russia, Poles have learnt by hard experience that their location on the North European Plain is painfully exposed. Since Trump’s election, though, officials in Warsaw have eagerly underlined that, whatever the political priorities in Washington, they remain unconcerned about America’s commitment to Poland in particular or Nato in general. 

We shouldn’t imagine that Poland can become entirely self-sufficient here, at least not for the moment anyway. It surely speaks volumes that Poland’s president recently felt the need to remind the world, and presumably Trump himself, of the importance of the American alliance. The fact he did so on Poland’s independence day is even more revealing. 

But nor should Andrzej Duda worry too much: despite his tough talk, Trump will find it almost impossible to escape Europe entirely. With the landmark opening of the first permanent US base in Poland last week, as part of a broader pan-European missile defence shield, America will necessarily continue to play some role in the region. Ever the businessman, Trump is also likely to see Eastern Europe as an enticing customer for America’s military-industrial complex. Earlier this year, the US granted loans to Poland and Romania, totalling $2 billion and $920 million respectively, all to buy American weapons. Except similar deals over the years ahead — especially if Trump is confident Nebraska farm boys won’t need to be deployed to help use them. 

Indeed, the President-elect’s essential self-interest could yet prove a boon to Eastern Europe. That’s doubtless true if Trump reduces the American troop presence enough to satisfy his domestic base — but nonetheless retains the country’s existing military infrastructure. That, in turn, could offer countries like Poland the best of both worlds: the Americans would provide essential support, in line with their own interests, even as Warsaw develops a more independent defence policy, one that ultimately goes beyond the strictures imposed by Washington. 

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In practice, this means Warsaw could finally execute major defence initiatives previously held in check by the Biden administration. One good example here is shooting down incoming Russian missiles and drones over Ukrainian airspace. As I wrote back in September, Russian projectiles have crossed into Polish, Romanian, and Latvian airspace several times since 2022, occasionally landing hundreds of kilometres inside Nato territory. Not only does this pose a threat to civilians, it also raises the risk of an Article V declaration against Russia. Certainly Mark Rutte, Nato’s new secretary general, seems to understand that where Poland goes, he’ll eventually need to travel too.

Nor is a decline in American interest merely a chance for Warsaw to flex its military muscles. On the contrary, Poland has also shown striking independence on migration policy as well. Warsaw has long viewed the influx of migrants along its border with Belarus — arguably history’s first man-made migration crisis — as indistinguishable from the security threats it faces from Russian hybrid operations in its territory and the errant Russian missiles lobbed from Ukraine. Much to the chagrin of NGOs, and despite some initial pushback, Europe has now mostly accepted the Polish narrative. 

Combined with Eastern Europe’s rising military might, and the region is clearly moving away from its traditional role as a pale imitator of Paris or Berlin. On the contrary, Warsaw and Bucharest could yet become the cities where the continent’s policy is devised and executed. Once that Pandora’s Box is opened, moreover, it’ll be impossible to close — even after 2028. Whatever happens in four years, whoever enters the White House after Trump may yet find a Europe transformed, one where the future is decided less in stagnant Brussels, and more in a fearless and prosperous Warsaw.

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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By Gregor Baszak

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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By Gregor Baszak

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.

But it will take more than a few blasts of brass, bratwurst and pilsner to lift the storm clouds over Wolfsburg. For this prosperous place, about two hours’ drive west of Berlin, is a company town like few others, built from Nazi roots off the back of Volkswagen — “The People’s Car Company” which overcame its fascist birth to become the world’s highest-earning motor manufacturer. Now, however, it is in serious trouble as persistently sluggish management considers closing plants in their homeland for the first time in their history.

Such is the scale of this crisis — labelled an “earthquake” by the local paper — there are even mutterings this mighty car giant might emulate the high-speed crash of Nokia, the Finnish behemoth dismantled and sold within a few years of being the largest maker of mobile phones. Tensions are rising as the powerful IG Metall union, which just began another round of negotiations with managers, insists all German sites must remain open, even as there have been furious clashes with bosses at internal meetings. ’The situation is not good,” said one worker. “I am 54 so my working life is nearly over and I hope to get my pension in three years time but this is very, very worrying for Wolfsburg. I hope this plant will not shut.”

That kind of statement seems unimaginable in this city made by Volkswagen. Step out of the station and you see the world’s biggest car plant, three times the size of Monaco and where 70,000 employees churned out almost half a million vehicles last year. In front of you squats a futuristic science centre designed by Zaha Hadid, which serves as a sculptural reminder that this otherwise rather dour place has some of the highest average incomes in Europe thanks to cars. Even that bustling main shopping street is named after Ferdinand Porsche, creator of the iconic Beetle car and founder of a globally famous marque.

Almost half the workforce in Wolfsburg helps make cars, the highest proportion of any city in a country with 47 other places heavily dependent on this core industrial sector. “Volkswagen not only stands for economic prosperity, but also has a strong emotional component,” said the city’s mayor Dennis Weilmann. “Many families have relatives or acquaintances at VW and the majority of Wolfsburg residents have been driving a Volkswagen since their first car. Volkswagen also invests in many different areas of society, from art and culture to voluntary work and leisure events. It is therefore completely understandable that the current news is causing uncertainty among citizens.”

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The city and car company have grown up together. Wolfsburg — twinned with Luton — was created in 1938 for one of Adolf Hitler’s pet projects: the mass production of cars for the people. It was originally named after the Kraft durch Freude Wagen (Strength Through Joy Car), and seen as a model Nazi town, only to be devastated by Allied bombs during the Second World War, after slave labourers were forced to manufacture rockets and military vehicles. Then, a British army major kickstarted production of the quirky and eventual global best-selling Beetle. Three generations later, the city is home to about 125,000 people with a university and football team — sponsored by VW, of course — that once won the Bundesliga.

Cars have come to symbolise nations ever since Henry Ford invented mass production. Think of the United States brimming with confidence in its post-war heyday — and you picture those huge Cadillacs with space-age tail wings. Italy has its gorgeous supercars and unreliable mass-produced motors. And the rollercoaster ride of Britain’s manufacturers reflected the economic and political zeitgeist in our own country. But in Germany the sector is a source of national pride, the key to an economy that showcases their consensual corporate model. As one top economist put it: “VW is the alpha male.”

So VW’s troubles after bungling the transition to electric vehicles are not just woeful for Wolfsburg. The sector powering Germany’s economic success for decades is struggling, exposing a national inertia at time of intense disruption and rapid technological change. As cars turn into computers on wheels, analysts fear the German giants are being left in the dust of faster-moving rivals from China and the United States. So there is sudden angst that all those beautifully-engineered marques, with their purring combustion engines, might soon look like expensive relics from another age — and fears that if the sector collapses, it will leave a large hole in the heart of the economy that props up the European Union.

And the consequences might not only be economic. Factory closures and job losses could easily push more voters into the arms of the populist parties thriving on both political extremes. Already, Alternative for Germany (AfD) is fighting against what it calls the “erroneous path to electro-mobility”, making opposition to EU plans to ban sales of petrol and diesel-powered cars a central part of its platform. Analysts suggest VW sites in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, and Dresden, Saxony, are potential targets for closure — both regions where the AfD is building support.

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The car industry accounts for about 1.8 million German jobs in total, 8% of annual economic output and 16% of exports. These are impressive figures. But Professor Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, says that simply looking at the data underplays its significance, since it has been a key driver over the decades of innovation, which spills over to benefit other parts of the economy. “The big concern is China, electric cars and automated vehicles.” he says. “[Volkswagen] were leaders but now they are lagging behind in electric vehicles. They have lost the technological leadership.”

Last year, China exported more cars than Germany for the first time. Germany is still the biggest car exporter to Britain, but Chinese imports such as cheap BYD eco-vehicles have risen tenfold in two years, while Elon Musk’s Tesla dominates the upper echelons of the electric market. Beijing’s latest data shows their production of new energy vehicles has soared by almost half over the past year. Meanwhile German makers also face a reversal of fortunes in the lucrative Chinese market that provided almost a third of their revenues last year — and this hit VW’s premium brands such as Porsche and Audi especially hard. The firm’s share in this market has fallen from 19% to 14% since 2020, as buyers shift from petrol and diesel-powered vehicles, while BMW last month blamed “ongoing muted demand” in China for cutting their profit forecasts.

Fratzscher is confident German manufacturers can reinvent themselves as they have in the past. “I am by and large optimistic because the skills that made German industry strong over the last 70 years — and especially the last 20 years — are still there,” he says. “Now they need to shift this innovation to new technologies — not just batteries but software, where VW is struggling badly. But they still have strong brands and distribution networks.”  According to Fratzscher, then, “pessimism is over-done — although it depends, of course, how economic policy and geopolitics plays out. But taking a snapshot today of German industry, I would say it is pretty strong.”

But other experts disagree. In his forthcoming book Kaput: The End of the German Miracle, Wolfgang Münchau looks at how the nation slipped from technological innovators to sluggards due to blinkered attitudes, lack of investment and bad decision-making. He highlights the media prominence of an academic who argues schools should not use any digital content to underline their anachronistic attitudes. Then he tells the anecdote of a photographer who found it slower to send pictures on the internet to a printer 10 kilometres away than to travel there by horse. Such stories are familiar for anyone who spends time in Germany, as many football fans discovered to their surprise at the Euros this summer. Münchau polemically concludes that German car makers are like typewriter manufacturers, whose market was killed off swiftly by the arrival of desktop computers and cheap printers.

Reminding readers that VW sacked their chief executive, who tried to modernise the firm by focusing on electric cars, Münchau fears the problems may be existential for these car makers. “I am not predicting the German industry will disappear, but it will decline and no longer play the central role it does in the world and as a hub for German industry,” he tells me. He blames “oligopolistic groupthink and arrogance” along with a “lack of entrepreneurial dynamics” as the Germans fumble the problems confronting all legacy car producers, before going on to argue that the EU response of protective trade barriers against imported Chinese electric cars “is the playbook of how industries decline”.

VW must also navigate the nation’s consensual approach to labour relations that is currently also testing Tesla, which chose Germany over post-Brexit Britain as the location for its first European factory. Musk typically moaned about the red tape that delayed the opening of his plant near Berlin, while his employees created a works council against the wishes of their bosses. And the firm is reportedly warning staff that work practices and absenteeism levels must change if they are to continue in the country, attracting some criticism after managers were sent to the homes of workers on long-term sick leave.

Ultimately, the German car industry grew complacent, resisting the trend towards electric cars for too long. And once again, this sector symbolises wider issues in a society that became a corpulent victim of its own success — despite a reputation for taking the long-term approach. Its arrogance was shown by the emissions scandal, which led to huge fines and criminal charges, after VW’s cheating emerged in 2015. Then executives were slow to understand that electric cars are different products to traditional vehicles, ones that rely on powerful batteries and smart software rather than slick engines and smooth gear boxes. One economist in Berlin laughed as he told me how Tesla and Chinese firms update software constantly “but in Germany everyone thinks it is unbelievable that you can change cars through the air”.

Professor Andreas Knie, a specialist on transport and technology, believes the problem lies deep in Germany’s psyche, arguing that his country needs to transform its governance and corporate structures to embrace flexibility, failure and innovation. “We still believe we are the best footballers, the best soldiers, the best car makers — we don’t understand that the world is changing. Now in Germany we build the wrong cars. We are masters of hardware but not of software. We are losing market share dramatically. We will have 50% fewer jobs in the car industry in a decade.”

These are shattering predictions. And the problems are not unique to Germany: one in three European car factories is under-utilised. But Germany looks like an analogue country in a digital world. Knie fears that the cities dependent on the traditional car giants face a tough future. “Wolfsburg will be like Detroit — it will shrink very much. But so will other German car cities — even Stuttgart, the capital of the German car industry, will probably shrink,” he tells me. “It’s time to say goodbye to the car industry in Germany.” It seems ironic, but VW and Germany both seem to have forgotten Vorsprung durch Technik — that progress comes through technology.

In Brandenburg, the SPD won largely because its leader Dietmar Woidke, who is also the state’s governor, has very high favourability ratings. Woidke also bet everything on one hand: he announced ahead of the vote his intention to resign from office if the AfD won more votes than the SPD. He succeeded in turning the election into a binary choice, with most supporters of the CDU, Greens and others casting their lot with the SPD to defeat the AfD. But even so, the SPD only won decisively among the elderly, according to exit polls. All other demographics, most notably the youngest voters and those from a working-class background, broke clearly for the AfD.

Today, with the AfD out of the question as a coalition partner, Woidke’s SPD will now have to choose between securing a majority with the help of the CDU or the BSW. And immediately after the polls closed on Sunday, Woidke stated his preference for the CDU. The problem, however, is that the combined seats of the SPD and CDU are short of an absolute majority. In the end, it might be the BSW that will govern with Woidke — just as it may have to do in Thuringia following its election earlier this month, where secretive talks are being held between the CDU, SPD and BSW. Thus, Wagenknecht’s BSW might find itself in power in two of Germany’s 16 states less than a year after its official founding.

To many, this is a stunning result; after all, in its first year, the AfD didn’t even cross the 5% threshold in the Bundestag elections. But the BSW has something unique: the media-savvy Wagenknecht, who is the party’s main draw and regularly polls among Germany’s most popular politicians. The BSW’s co-chair Amira Mohamed Ali said on Sunday that the party would eventually get “a more neutral name” — but not until after next year’s federal elections which will determine the national government. Indeed, why rush it?

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Exit polls in Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony showed that more than half of BSW voters cast their ballot for the party because of Wagenknecht personally. And her appeal is far from superficial. She shares with many Western populists a compelling rejection of the dying neoliberal order and all that it represents today: Nato expansion, censorship, open borders, transgenderism, and public health authoritarianism. And crucially, she has managed to maintain this platform while continuing to win voters from the Left.

Yet even so, the expectation when it launched last year was that the BSW’s ranks would swell far more than it has for now. Some polls suggested that enough voters found a Wagenknecht party appealing enough to catapult it into second place; instead, it now polls nationally in the low double digits. Has it reached its ceiling?

Interestingly, the BSW has not drawn as many voters away from the AfD as was once expected. Indeed, in the most recent state exit polls, only around a quarter to a third of BSW voters stated that the AfD may have been their alternative choice. This raises a question: could it be that populist voters, especially the deeply independent-minded ones of the former GDR, see through the move and just opt to vote for the original? After all, on immigration, Ukraine and identity politics, the AfD had taken similar stances — and years before the BSW came into existence. What, in the eyes of voters, does the BSW add there that’s new?

That BSW and AfD voters for the most part do not overlap is to some extent easily explained: Voting for the BSW permits that section of the German left, especially its urban intelligentsia, to publicly take anti-woke, anti-war, and anti-immigration stances without losing what the Germans call Salonfähigkeit, the ability to continue to move in socially acceptable circles.

Of course, it isn’t as if the BSW and AfD are identical in all matters. They are radically opposed on the question of welfare-spending, where the AfD represents a more classically free-market radicalism compared to the BSW’s old-school social-democratic stance. But the question of how to keep social insurance systems liquid has taken a backseat in recent years, as Covid lockdowns and the Ukraine war came to the fore.

Add to this the fact that the BSW explicitly rejects any collaboration with the AfD, at least for as long as it includes the likes of Right-wing firebrand Björn Höcke in its ranks, and voters might wonder whether the BSW really means what it says. Why not form a Left-Right coalition with the AfD if you are so aligned on the key issues of the day? Especially if the alternative is that the BSW could now find itself in the role of organising majorities for mainstream parties it has sworn to oppose. This is not to prematurely brand Wagenknecht’s alliance as “sell-outs”. It is yet to sign a single coalition agreement, and its defenders might argue it is successfully changing the parameters of Germany’s national debate on both Ukraine and immigration.

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After all, there are certainly signs that the German establishment is becoming more receptive. Chancellor Scholz recently indicated that he was open towards finding a peaceful resolution in Ukraine, while agreeing at the same time with the moves by the Christian Democrats to halt the vast influx of migrants into Germany. And as the former SPD chair Franz Müntefering famously said in 2004: “Opposition is bullshit. Let others do that — we want to govern.” The adage has since become received wisdom in Germany: it’s better to shape the world from the seat of power than stand on principle and be outside of the room. But historically, this has also meant that the coalition partners usually give up on a whole lot of their key campaign demands during the secretive talks in which an agreement is brokered.

In a sign that the BSW really does aim to stand firm on principle, the Wagenknecht alliance hopes to force the SPD’s hand. Its Brandenburg party chief Robert Crumbach is now demanding that the Social Democrats come out in no unclear terms against the stationing of US long-range missiles on German soil if they want the BSW as partners. Is it a mere bargaining chip or truly a red line for the Left-populist upstarts? The answer must be the latter if it wants to remain credible with its voters and become more than just a vehicle for Wagenknecht’s personal brand.