The German mainstream is collapsing
Thomas Fazi
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The German mainstream is collapsing
Fazi notes that a new left-right populist spectrum is emerging in Germany, but the phenom is not seen just in Germany, but hroughout the collective West, including, quite possibly, the United States.
The imperialist-aligned establishment is throwing a "quarantine" fence around AfD to keep them from forming coalitions, a phenom also seen in France and possibly other countries in the EU and beyond. The AfD, however, is staunchly pro-capitalist, so this is not a party with an ultimate solution to Germany's long-term problems.
This weekend’s regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia have revealed significant shifts in the German political landscape, reflecting a country grappling with multiple crises. Although these were only regional elections, their outcomes carry national implications, particularly given the participation of nearly three-quarters of the five-million electorate. Here are the main takeaways:
The political mainstream has collapsed
The main opposition party, the centre-right CDU, maintained its dominant position in Saxony by a tiny margin. But the party now faces a choice: change or continue to shed votes to the AfD. The CDU’s involvement in centrist coalitions, driven by the necessity of excluding the AfD, has diluted its political identity. Also quite paradoxically, the rise of the AfD has been fuelled precisely by the migration policies of former CDU chancellor Angela Merkel.
The CDU now finds itself weakened, unable to form coalitions without compromising its traditional stances, and without striking alliances that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, such as with the newly formed left-populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) — an option that is currently being explored by both parties. Incredibly, the BSW is now the third-largest party in both states — an impressive feat for a party that was launched just a few months ago.
For a deep dive into the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, and how her blend of old-school leftist economics, pro-peace and anti-NATO foreign policy, and conservative cultural outlook is redefining populism — and upending German politics — see this recent article of mine. (It is reproduced as an addendum below.—Ed)
The transplantation of the FRG’s economic order into the former GDR was the most brutal neoliberal shock therapy ever implemented in a European country...The first instrument of this shock therapy was monetary integration, which involved the former GDR’s adoption of the West-German mark, which was highly overvalued relative to the fundamentals of the East-German economy.
Migration and war: the central issues
The vote has confirmed that migration remains the “mother of all domestic policy problems”. The inability to manage migration effectively has eroded public trust in traditional parties. The AfD’s success can be attributed largely to its hardline stance on immigration, a position that has gained traction even among former left-wing voters who now support the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. This development suggests that migration will dominate the upcoming federal elections, turning them into a de facto referendum on Germany’s immigration policies. But opposition to war and to the government’s belligerent approach to the Russia-Ukraine crisis clearly also played a role, especially among young people. Sahra Wagenknecht, in particular, has put opposition to NATO and to the deployment US long-range missiles on German territory, and the question of détente with Russia, at the centre of her party’s platform.
A new left-right populist spectrum
The most interesting takeaway from the elections is probably the emergence of a new, and unique in the European panorama, left-right populist spectrum, in the form of the AfD and the BSW, which collectively make up almost 50 percent of the votes. This underscores that dissatisfaction with the established parties is even larger than what right-populists parties alone are able to capture: a lesson for other countries as well. For now the BSW has ruled out forming regional coalition governments with the AfD, which is understandable from a tactical standpoint: many disaffected voters from the centre and the left are turning to the BSW precisely because it is not the AfD. But in the future the mood might shift: if the establishment refuses to respond to popular concerns, the demand for a left-right populist front could grow. Meanwhile, the fact that both ends of the political spectrum are converging on similar migration policies suggests that this issue may hopefully be approached more pragmatically, rather than through the lens of morality.
An increasingly divided country
One cannot understand the populist uprising sweeping eastern Germany without understanding the economic, social and political trauma that reunification — or better, the East’s annexation by the West — was for many eastern Germans, and how this legacy continues to this day. As I recently wrote in Compact:
The transplantation of the FRG’s economic order into the former GDR was the most brutal neoliberal shock therapy ever implemented in a European country.
The first instrument of this shock therapy was monetary integration, which involved the former GDR’s adoption of the West-German mark, which was highly overvalued relative to the fundamentals of the East-German economy. This shattered the profitability of East-German firms, which quickly became insolvent, resulting in the immediate collapse of GDP and a sharp rise in unemployment. Most ominously, it kicked off what one study described as a “dramatic process of de-industrialization”.
The second instrument was the mass privatization of state-owned firms, houses, and land by the infamous Treuhandanstalt, a West-German government-controlled trust agency that took control of almost all the assets of the former GDR with the aim of privatizing them as quickly as possible. By 1992, more than 80 percent of firms had already been privatized or closed. The overwhelming majority of the firms were sold to West German investors and companies—at bargain prices, of course.
In other words, virtually the entire economy of the former socialist state passed into the hands of West-German capitalists.
[This is reflected in] the stark economic disparities that persist between West and East Germany more than three decades after reunification, when the territories of the GDR were incorporated into the FRG in 1990. The states that make up the former East Germany generally have lower GDP per capita and wages, higher unemployment and poverty rates, and poorer infrastructure and public services than those in the West. In 2017, net national income per capita in East Germany was still only 73 percent of what it was in West Germany.
A wake-up call
In conclusion, the recent regional elections serve as a wake-up call for Germany. They highlight the urgent need for political realignment and the dangers of ignoring the concerns of significant portions of the electorate. The implications extend beyond Germany, affecting its role in the European Union and the broader geopolitical landscape.
This is a longer version of an article that appeared in UnHerd.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
Addendum
Who’s afraid of Sahra Wagenknecht? Germany's 'left-conservative' has redefined populism
Sahra Wagenknecht: her inteligent political formula may actually represent salvation for Germany and the continent—if the US-aligned satrap establishment will allow.
Few would have predicted that Germany, long known for having the continent’s most boring politics, would become the epicentre of Europe’s new populist revolt — let alone one coming from both the Right and the Left. And yet, that is exactly what is happening.
In the recent European elections, as amply expected, the Right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party overtook the centre-left SPD for the first time, becoming the country’s second-largest party after the centre-right CDU/CSU alliance. Meanwhile, the two major parties between them gained less than 45% of the votes — down from 70% just 20 years ago. It was the biggest collapse of the German political mainstream since reunification.
More than anything, the elections revealed that post-reunification Germany remains neatly divided along its former border: while western Germans are also signalling growing dissatisfaction with the current SPD-Greens-FDP coalition, but remaining within the bounds of mainstream politics, eastern Germans are revolting against the political establishment itself.
Thus, with state elections taking place in three eastern states over the next month — in Saxony and Thuringia this weekend, and in Brandenburg on September 22 — it’s no wonder the German centre is bracing itself for collapse. But while it’s a foregone conclusion that the AfD will make massive gains, with the party leading the polls in two of the three states, the real surprise may prove to be, once again, Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party, which is currently polling between 11% and 19%.
For now, Wagenknecht has ruled out forming regional coalition governments with the AfD, as well as with any party that supports arms deliveries to Ukraine (which means most mainstream parties). But her mere presence on the ballot will further erode support for the ruling coalition — and make it very hard, if not impossible, for the latter to form centrist coalition governments at the state level.
The Wagenknecht phenomenon is fascinating — and unique — for several reasons. Not only has she managed to establish the BSW as one of the country’s major political forces in a matter of months, but she’s also running on a platform that is unique in the Western political panorama, at least among electorally relevant parties. Though Wagenknecht tends to avoid framing her party in tired Left-Right terms, its platform can best be described as left-conservative.
In short, this means it mixes demands that would once have been associated with the socialist-labour Left — interventionist and redistributive government policies to regulate capitalist market forces, higher pensions and minimum wages, generous welfare and social security policies, taxes on wealth — with positions that today would be characterised as culturally conservative: first and foremost, a recognition of the importance of preserving and fostering traditions, stability, security and a sense of community.
Flailing Germany is the future of Europe
More recently, following a fatal knife attack in Mannheim, Wagenknecht again lashed out at the government’s immigration policies: “We basically financed [the migrant attacker’s] radicalisation as well. He lived off us, off the money of the citizens.” Her focus on benefits here is crucial. For Wagenknecht, the promotion of social cohesion, including by restricting immigration flows, shouldn’t just be seen as a positive end in and of itself, such as for reasons of public safety, but also as a precondition for the pursuit of economically redistributive policies, and even of democracy itself. Only a political community defined by a collective identity — a demos — is capable of committing itself to a democratic discourse and to a related decision-making process, and of generating the affective ties and bonds of solidarity that are needed to legitimise and sustain redistributive policies between classes and/or regions. Simply put, if there is no demos, there can be no effective democracy, let alone a social democracy.
This is also why Wagenknecht places a strong emphasis on the importance of national sovereignty, and is highly critical of the European Union: not only because the EU is fundamentally anti-democratic and prone to oligarchic capture [actually captured ab initio by the globalist oligarchy.—Ed] , but because it cannot be otherwise, given that today the nation-state remains the main source of people’s collective identity and sense of belonging, and therefore the only territorial institution (or at least the largest) through which it is possible to organise democracy and achieve social balance. As she has said: “The call for ‘an end to the nation-state’ is ultimately a call for ‘an end to democracy and the welfare state’”.
In short, Sahra Wagenknecht is anything but your typical Western Leftist. Now, this is partly to do with the fact that she was born on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in former East Germany in 1969. She became interested in philosophy and Marxist economics as a teenager, but the end of the socialist GDR, in 1989, was, according to her biographer Christian Schneider, “the moment in time when the politician Wagenknecht was born”. She experienced it as a “unique horror”: like many East Germans, she believed in a reformed socialism, not in embracing West Germany’s capitalist path.
“In short, Sahra Wagenknecht is anything but your typical Western Leftist.”
That same year she joined the East German communist party, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then, following reunification, became one of the leading figures of the party’s successor, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). Even back then, she stood out as being both more radical and more conservative than her communist peers. “There was now this young woman who desperately wanted to go back to the old days” of the GDR, as one former leader of the PDS put it.
When, in 2007, the PDS merged with a splinter of the SPD to give birth to Die Linke (The Left), Wagenknecht quickly emerged as one of the party’s leading voices — and the face of the German radical Left. Die Linke’s support rocketed to 12% of the vote in 2009’s elections to the Bundestag, and remained close to there for nearly a decade. Wagenknecht also became a key figure in the German parliament, serving as parliamentary co-chairwoman of her party from 2015 to 2019 and as leader of the opposition (against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition) until 2017. It was there that she earned a reputation for her powerful rhetoric and ability to challenge mainstream political narratives.
Her relationship with Die Linke, however, grew increasingly strained over the years: while the party became captured by the kind of “progressive neoliberalism” that has infected, to one degree or another, all Western Left-wing parties, Wagenknecht remained true to her old-school socialist roots. Her views on immigration and other issues — which would once have been completely non-controversial in socialist circles — were quickly becoming anathema on the Left. Eventually, in November 2019, Wagenknecht announced her resignation as parliamentary leader, citing burnout. Two years later, in the federal elections, Die Linkegarnered less than 5% of ballots and lost nearly half its seats — its worst result ever. For Wagenknecht, this was not a surprise.
Will East Germans ever feel at home?
For Wagenknecht, this new movement’s authoritarian shade became clear during the pandemic. Unlike virtually all her colleagues — and most of the German Left — Wagenknecht became a sharp critic of the government’s “endless lockdowns” and coercive mass vaccination programme (she refused to take the vaccine herself). Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Wagenknecht has also emerged as the most vocal critic of Germany’s military support for Ukraine and the sanctions regime. This escalated her rift with Die Linke, which voted in favour of economic sanctions against Russia.
At that point, their break-up became inevitable — and finally, late last year, Wagenknecht announced the launch of her new party. The choice led to the unravelling of Die Linke, which was forced to dissolve its parliamentary faction, and has now virtually disappeared from the political map, receiving only 2.7% of the votes in June’s European elections.
Since the launch of BSW, Wagenknecht has put the question of détente with Russia at the centre of her party’s platform. On several occasions, she has highlighted how Germany’s subordination to the US-Nato proxy war strategy in Ukraine, and refusal to engage in diplomatic talks with Russia, is self-defeating from an economic as well as a geopolitical standpoint. Not only is the oil and gas embargo against Russia the main reason for Germany’s collapsing economy, but the government is, she told the Bundestag, “negligently playing with the security and in the worst case the lives of millions of people in Germany”. More recently, she has strongly condemned the government’s plan to deploy US long-range missiles on German territory and, perhaps most dramatically, challenged the omerta surrounding the Nord Stream attack. Indeed, following recent revelations about the German government’s possible cover-up of Ukrainian involvement, she called for a public inquiry, saying that, “should German authorities have known in advance about the attack plan on Nord Stream 1 and 2, then we would have the scandal of the century in German politics”.
It’s important to note that Wagenknecht views opposition to the proxy war against Russia as part of a much deeper rethinking of Germany’s geopolitical strategy. Its aim, as Wolfgang Streeck has written, is to “free it from the geostrategic grip of the United States, guided by German national survival interests instead of Nibelungentreue, or loyalty, to America’s claim to global political domination”. This necessarily entails re-establishing long-term political and economic relations with Russia, which could potentially lay the groundwork for a new Eurasian security architecture, and even a Eurasian community of states and economies.
Elsewhere, Wagenknecht has criticised the government’s “green” and gender-affirming policies, arguing that “Germany’s energy supply cannot currently be ensured by renewable energies alone”, and voting against a bill passed by the German parliament earlier this year to make it easier to change one’s legal gender. “Your law turns parents and children into guinea pigs for an ideology that only benefits the pharmaceutical lobby,” she said.
Germany's authoritarian turn
If that seems blunt, that’s because it is. But taken together, Wagenknecht’s old-school leftist economics, pro-peace and anti-Nato foreign policy, and conservative cultural outlook is resonating with voters. And as a result, she now finds herself in the crosshairs of both the establishment and her populist competitors. Indeed, on the Right in particular, the common criticism levelled at her is that, by drawing voters away from the AfD, she is weakening and dividing Germany’s populist front.
Yet the evidence for this is somewhat shaky. Rather, opinion polls show that the emergence of the BSW does not seem to have overly affected the AfD, which continues to maintain a 30% vote share in several eastern German states and 20% nationally. In fact, according to a recent study by the Hans Böckler Foundation, the BSW is actually drawing voters mostly from the centre and the Left — Die Linke and the SPD — rather than the AfD. The BSW’s staunchly Left-wing economic agenda, which puts it at odds with the neoliberal economic policy of the AfD, would appear to be key here: the study shows that the BSW draws support mainly from socially marginalised and low-income groups — traditionally, the classic target group of social-democratic parties. It also explains why she enjoys much stronger support in eastern Germany, which has significantly lower GDP per capita and wages, and higher unemployment and poverty rates than western Germany.
This suggests that Wagenknecht’s left-conservative agenda is filling a political space that was previously vacant, hoovering up German voters who are disillusioned with mainstream politics, and even very critical of immigration, but nonetheless feel uncomfortable voting for a party that has undeniably xenophobic or racist traits. The BSW, by contrast, represents a much more palatable “non-extremist” option for these would-be populist voters. This is further confirmed by the fact that, despite its tough stance on immigration, the BSW appears to be winning over an above-average number of voters from migrant backgrounds, a demographic that has traditionally voted for centre-left parties. In short, the evidence suggests that Wagenknecht is actually broadening the populist front rather than simply crowding out the existing populist pool.
It is this, along with the fact that Wagenknecht is among the top three most popular politicians in Germany, that explains why the establishment has decided to go on the attack. In recent weeks, the media there has launched a relentless campaign against Wagenknecht and the BSW, predictably focused on claims that she is a “Russian propagandist” — or “Vladimir Putinova”, as one article called her. Even more desperately, some have attempted to paint Wagenknecht, a literal communist, as a “far-Right extremist”. Only this week, Politico, which is owned by German media titan Axel Springer, unironically asked: “Is Germany’s rising superstar so far-Left she’s far-Right?”
The answer, of course, is a boring nein. And no doubt a far more interesting question will be thrown up by this weekend’s results: with a general election scheduled for next year, has Germany finally found a politician capable of breaking through its ideological wall?
SELECT COMMENT
"Uno spettro si aggira per l'Europa: lo spettro del populismo destro-sinistro. Tutte i leader della vecchia Europa si sono coalizzati in una sacra caccia alle streghe contro questo spettro: da Mario Draghi a Ursula Von der Layen, da Macron a Scholz, liberali francesi e centristi tedeschi"... non si vedeva tanta agitazione nelle nostre elites politico-accademico-mediatiche dai moti del 1848 e la stesura del Manifesto, ahahaha! |
2 hrs ago