Germans will go to the polls in less than a month after the collapse of the hapless government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The German economy is in an awful state with no reason for hope on the horizon. There are cases to be made for long structural issues and mismanagement, but the answer to the country’s current malaise lies in the wreckage of the Nord Stream pipelines on the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
Not only did the loss of the cheap and reliable pipeline gas from Russia blow up the German economic model but the omerta among the political-media class over the likely US involvement in the destruction of Nord Stream represents all that has continued to plague Germany ever since.
A brief sampling of the fallout:
A quarter of the 84 million Germans’ income is insufficient to make ends meet. Despite all this, it has not led to a rethink (yet) of Germany’s subservient relationship to the US and the accompanying belligerence towards Russia.
The delusion only grows.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s office is taking a lead role in trying to ramp up militarization of the Baltic Sea and sanctions against tankers transporting Russian oil without Western insurance — although it looks like her and other hawkish Atlanticists are starting to get some pushback from some Blob actors the US. There’s also talk of the EU going hat in hand to Russia and asking to buy pipeline gas again; that could also be part of an effort to keep the Americans in and profiting from energy sales to Europe.
Meanwhile here’s the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a Berlin think tank that advises the Bundestag and federal government, telling us that it’s the Russian economy that is in trouble.
While the German election approaches, there is a heavy focus in the country on the issue of immigration with some parties like the Alternative for Germany, Christian Democratic Union and the Sahra Wagenknecht alliance pledging a tougher stance than others like the Social Democrats and the Greens.
While immigration comes out on top in most polls of voters’ most important issues, we can see that the economic situation, energy, and inflation and wages — all issues directly affected by Berlin’s Russia policy — are a combined 58 percent.
The following article will focus primarily on Germany’s foreign policy and specifically if any of the political parties will take the country (and therefore to a certain extent, Europe) in a different direction?
The AfD Firewall Comes Down
For a long time it looked like the Alternative for Germany party was the one to do so.
The party that started out as an anti-EU and morphed more into an anti-immigrant has long been hated and feared by the German political-media establishment. Yes, it has a small core support from neo Nazis, but the real reason was its anti-NATO stance, brutal honesty about Berlin being a “slave” to the US, and a desire to make nice with Moscow seeing as it is in the national interest of Germany to do so.
Well, last month the AfD adopted a motion in support of Germany and the US building closer relations.
And now lo and behold the “firewall” against the AfD is coming down at the national level. The CDU on January 29th passed — with votes from the AfD — a non-binding motion aimed at turning back illegal and undocumented migrants at the nation’s borders. Chaos ensued. The “center” parties have nothing to run on other than AfD “threat to democracy” and so they are. They vigorously denounced the CDU for destroying democracy by cooperating with the AfD. There were protests around the country, which led to the evacuation of CDU headquarters in Berlin and the occupation of the CDU office in Hanover:
On Friday the Influx Limitation Act, which would limit migration to Germany, failed following the uproar and refusal of the Greens, SPD, and others to negotiate with the CDU. The fallout from Merz’s dance with the AfD remains to be seen. Will it motivate voters for the SPD, Greens and other “center” parties? Will it stop CDU voters from migrating to the AfD? As of now, the AfD is gaining slightly in the polls:
And as German current affairs commentator Eugypius points out, the uproar and refusal of the rest of the “center” to work with the CDU now provides “an excuse to force the Union parties to vote with AfD yet again” — and potentially form a government together.
This continues a trend of the “center” effectively ushering the AfD into power. Let us count the ways Scholz’s government put out the welcome mat: They brought in record levels of immigrants during a housing crisis and while the government is cutting social spending and torpedoing the economy with its Russia energy policies. Oh, and when voters looking for an alternative turn to the AfD they howl about the sanctity of democracy while threatening to ban the party.
Despite the awfulness and ineptitude of the German “center” it is now an open question if the AfD name is a misnomer — at least on its policy towards Germany’s American overlords. Its embrace of Elon Musk and the Trump administration calls into question its nationalist bona fides. For example, will the AfD remain opposed to the stationing of US medium range missiles in Germany if the Trump administration wants them there as part of a maximum pressure campaign against Moscow?
We’re likely seeing the “Melonization” of the AfD. The Italian Prime Minister and her Brothers of Italy party came to power in 2022 amid howls of fascism, but instead of a new march on Rome, Meloni was more a model of how to use faux nationalism to rebrand American vassalage. She’s been one of the empire’s more dutiful subjects with regards to Russia and China, selling off Italian publicly-owned assets, and has made sure capital in Italy maintains its access to exploitable immigrant labor — and she looks set to become even more servile under Trump.
Despite the AfD’s embrace of the US, there’s still talk of the party being a bridge between Washington and Moscow. It’s easy to forget now, but Meloni was once supposed to perform that role as well, picking up the long tradition of Italy of maintaining strong ties with both sides. She was a long opponent of sanctions on Russia due to the need to protect Italian exports and its energy interests, and shortly before the beginning of Russia’s special military operation, she said it was essential it was to remain on good terms with Moscow and accused Biden of “using foreign policy to cover up the problems he has at home.” That all changed once she became prime minister in October of 2022, and Italians are worse off because of it.
With the AfD’s embrace of the US and the CDU reaching across the firewall to pass legislation last week, it looks increasingly possible — if not likely — that the AfD will join a CDU-led government following the upcoming elections.
What will the party represent if they get there?
Where the party has yet to compromise is in its insistence that today’s Germany should rid itself of any remnants of collective guilt for the horrors of the Nazis.
Elon Musk agrees, saying two days before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (Russia was not invited to the commemoration event despite the Red Army liberating the camp) that Germany should ‘move beyond Nazi guilt.’
The way the AfD wants that process to unfold is remarkably similar to what has been going on in the West and former USSR states for years. Rehabilitation of Nazis started in 1945, but really picked up steam over the past few decades.
As we highlighted at the time, Elon Musk and AfD co-chair Alice Weidel’s X history lesson equating communism with Nazism was right in line with the “rules-based international order’s” longtime efforts to rehabilitate fascists, blame the Russians for WWII, and rewrite history in Ukraine, other former Soviet states, and increasingly in the West itself.
Musk and Weidel are propagating a historical view that fits right in with Atlanticists who have been so busy for so long trying to equate WWII-era Nazism and communism. While originally more of a fringe view, it started to go more mainstream in 2008 when the European Parliament adopted a resolution establishing August 23 as the “European Day of Remembrance for the victims of Stalinism and Nazism” — effectively equating the two Also called Black Ribbon Day, the US in 2019 adopted a resolution to observe the date.
The same year, the European Parliament went even further and adopted a resolution “on the importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe.” It proclaims that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was responsible for World War II, and consequently that Soviet Russia is as guilty of the war as Nazi Germany.
As Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, told the Guardian way back in 2009:
“People need to wake up to what is going on. This attempt to create a false symmetry between communism and the Nazi genocide is aimed at covering up these countries’ participation in mass murder.”
I think it does more than that. While the USSR might be long gone, this rewriting of history to turn the liberators of Europe (the Soviets) into villains makes fascists the victims and feeds into modern Russophobia. Case in point:
The EU’s genocide-supporting, anti-free-speech, war-with-russia “center” has been embracing this right kind of “right” for some time — from Armenia to the Baltics and of course Ukraine. They have been nurturing it across the West, and we’re now a step away from open declarations to fulfil Hitler’s quest for lebensraum.
And how does the German center respond? Scholz had this to say about the world’s richest man putting his finger on the scale for the AfD and helping spread the rewriting of German WWII history far and wide: “If you look at the print press in Germany, you will see that there are many billionaires that also intervene in politics. That’s not new. What is new is that he is intervening in favor of right-wing politicians all over Europe. And this is really disgusting.”
Perhaps the AfD deserved some benefit of the doubt before considering how the establishment media comes down like a ton of bricks on any hint of inside threat to the “rules-based order,” and one could argue some of the party’s considerable baggage was worth the cost in order to break the US stranglehold over Europe.
But by aligning itself with the US, what does the party offer other than a rebrand of Germany’s vassalage?
On the bright side, the AfD’s turn likely means less work for the European Commission. Following the December overturning of the election in Romania, European officials were casually talking about Germany being at risk of the same bogus social media “disinformation” as Romania — the implication being that the will of the German voters could be similarly cancelled if too many of them choose the wrong party. While the Commission is still running “stress tests” of social media platforms in Germany ahead of the election, it’s unlikely it concocts a half-baked operation like in Romania against the an AfD in the good graces of the Trump administration.
Sahra Wagenknecht Tries to Crash the Party
While the other parties have differences in economic, immigration, and climate policies, they are all more or less united in their slavishness to the US and antagonism toward Russia.
There is one exception.
Despite only forming at the beginning of last year, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) picked up between 10 and 15 percent in three federal-state elections last year — although they were on formerly East German turf friendlier to the party.
While doing well for a newcomer, BSW is struggling in the polls to get above the five-percent barrier to gain seats in the new parliament and is far from being a player in coalition building. Nonetheless, should it get there Wagenknecht has vowed to do all she can to block militarization spending.
The partiy’s election manifesto “Our Country Deserves More!” correctly diagnoses the war in Ukraine as “a proxy war between Russia and the US”.
Elsewhere the party manifesto calls for EU powers being transferred back to national states and no new countries joining the EU — especially not Ukraine.
And the party calls for restrictions on immigration, at least until Germany gets its house in order and can find a better way to integrate arrivals.
Yet BSW hasn’t gained the traction that the AfD has.
Despite all the media efforts to lump Wagenknecht and the AfD together as Kremlin-controlled, anti-democratic far-right threats, the parties are largely polar opposites. Just a few examples:
- BSW proposes a fairer tax system that benefits the working class, such as the demand for an excess profits tax in the industrial sector. The AfD wants to slash taxes across the board, including those that are progressive and serve to redistribute wealth, such as the inheritance tax
- BSW believes in global warming and wants to continue to take climate action but work to soften the economic blow to the working class. The AfD rejects climate science. In its EU election manifesto, it says that the “claim of a threat through human-made climate change” is “CO2 hysterics,” and it would do away with climate laws that reduce prosperity and freedoms.
- BSW wants a higher national minimum wage and pensions, cheaper and better public transport, more social housing, a national rent cap, more money for education and health, free school meals, stronger consumer protection, the scrapping of VAT on essential foodstuffs. The AfD wants none of this and stresses the limits of the state’s role.
One can only wonder why Musk and Vice President JD Vance spoke out in favor of the upstart AfD and not Wagenknecht.
The Question Bigger than this Election
Where do Germans go if/when the new government makes no progress in turning the ship around?
The reality is much of Germany’s fortunes depend on Washington. Even if the Trump administration finds some agreement with Moscow over Ukraine and wider spheres of influence, will it bring reprieve for Germans?
The US is accelerating extraction efforts from its vassals, which will continue regardless of an agreement with Russia. See Trump’s efforts to force NATO members to up military spending to five percent of GDP, buy more US oil and LNG, an American tech takeover of the EU, using Europe as chess piece in the confrontation with China, and all the while poaching European industry.
Meanwhile there’s increasing talk from all corners about reforming the country’s debt brake — Germany’s constitutional limit on government spending. The brake played a central role in the downfall of the last government when it struck down a workaround attempt. Coalition infighting over spending plans stressed by Ukraine aid, weapons purchases, and energy crisis relief ultimately collapsed the government.
Should Germany say goodbye to the debt brake, where will the borrowed money go? To rebuild the crumbling Deutsche Bahn or more reckless wagers on the collapsing of Russia and into the pockets of American oligarchs?
Merz says military expansion will be a budgetary priority.
After the past three years of social spending cuts in order to pay for more military purchases, Project Ukraine, and self-inflicted energy debacles, Merz says it was redistributive. It was — upwards — but that isn’t what he’s talking about, and he promises his government will right the ship by cutting social spending and attracting more private investment in the economy. Okay, then.
On foreign policy, while he talks tough against Russia his moves will largely be dictated by Washington, although he says his government will be more willing to wade deeper into the conflict. Just as important, he’s eager to take a more active role in the empire’s confrontation with China even if it means more pain for German businesses.
Essentially this means that regardless of the makeup of the next government — whether an AfD-CDU coalition or a grand variety of the CDU-SPD-Greens — the standard of living for the majority of Germans will continue declining.
And that’s probably a best-case scenario.
For a glimpse of a worse version we can turn to Professor Sergey Karaganov, honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and academic supervisor at the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He writes the following:
Sending Ukrainian cannon fodder to slaughter, they are preparing a new one—Eastern Europeans from a number of Balkan states, Romania and Poland. They have begun to deploy mobile bases, where contingents of potential landsknechts are trained. They will try to continue the war not only to the “last Ukrainian”, but soon to the “last Eastern European”…
…the sooner the better it is necessary to announce that our patience, our readiness to sacrifice our men for the sake of victory over this bastard will soon run out and we will announce the price—for every killed Russian soldier, a thousand Europeans will die if they do not stop indulging their rulers who are waging war against Russia. We need to tell the Europeans directly: your elites will make the next portion of cannon fodder out of you, and in the event of the transition of the war to the nuclear level, we will not be able to protect the civilian population of Europe, as we are trying to do in Ukraine. We will warn about strikes, as promised by Vladimir Putin, but nuclear weapons are even less selective than conventional weapons. Of course, at the same time, the European elites must be confronted with the fact: they, their places of residence, will become the first targets for nuclear retaliation strikes. It will not be possible to sit it out.
A grim scenario, although an understandable position when one considers that it is Western aid and arms propping up Kiev and killing Russians. It’s not just Trump who can make threats.
Will anyone in the next German government heed the types of warnings coming from Karaganov?
It would appear not as the likely next chancellor Merz is an Atlanticist to the bone and takes a hard line against Russia. The Greens and SPD remain subservient to Washington, and the AfD is now in the pocket of Musk and Trump.
While it looks increasingly likely that the AfD “firewall” could come down, and it could join the CDU-led government, what happens when the German economy continues to sink? And how much longer will the transatlantic facade hold until the relationship starts to receive more serious pushback?
And can it be done successfully by democratic means?
