HE WAS supposed to be a shoo-in. When Friedrich Merz, Germany’s latest identikit centre-right technocrat, strolled into the Bundestag last Tuesday under the loving gaze of his wife and two children, after weeks of backroom dealing, he was no doubt looking forward to making them proud. Proud to see him duly chosen as the new Chancellor by his parliamentary allies. What a humiliation, then, to see Daddy apparently stabbed in the back by members of his own party and forced to beg once more to be made Deutschland’s most important politician. Until now, no Chancellor in the history of the Federal Republic has failed to be elected by the Bundestag at the first round of voting. It took two goes for Friedrich Merz to be elected Chancellor of Germany. As far as humiliation is concerned, though, it seems the Teutonic ruling class are, collectively, rapidly having to get used to that.
This latest piece of political pantomime follows months of laughable attempts to keep the German ship of state afloat in tempestuous waters. It all started in earnest when the so-called ‘traffic-light coalition’ (red for the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD), yellow for the right-wing Free Democrats and green for the Greens) led by now former Chancellor Olaf Scholz, was kicked out of power by voters in February this year. They suffered humiliating collapses in support and mass electoral defections to the insurgent nationalist and Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschlandor AfD (who doubled their share of the vote but still had no path to power) in the snap election. The coalition had been publicly scrapping for three years about, in particular, increasing spending in an economy wrecked by covid shutdowns and the suicidal sanctions on Russia, followed by the ‘friendly’ firing of the Nordstream pipelines. They pursued their ruinous Net Zero pipe dreams, and steadfastly refused to do anything to restrict the growing population of immigrants swamping the country.
In the interregnum between the elections in February and the new parliament being formed in March, various behind-closed-doors shenanigans saw myriad broken election promises from overall poll victors, Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU), even before the government was officially sworn in. Using a sly tactic, knowing he would need SPD and Green support in the future, and wanting to make the most of the balance of power before the ‘infrequentable’ (who nobody wants anything to do with) AfD took their parliamentary seats, Merz organised for the constitutional ‘debt brake’ to be lifted by the outgoing Bundestag. This ‘brake’ prevented debt rising annually above 0.35 per cent of GDP; lifting it means more money to manage the swelling immigrant population, invest in green new deal technologies, and send munitions to Ukraine. All things AfD voters (and many CDU voters) had explicitly and overwhelmingly rejected in February.
As a result, Merz’s approval ratings had already dropped dramatically before the debacle on Tuesday, and the shot across the bows in the Bundestag was likely a warning from some of his own party who believed, perhaps naively, that he should not sell out his voters. Disgust with the barely breathing new parliament, however, has seen a further boost to the AfD, now polling as the country’s most favoured political party. For the first time it topped a major poll at 25 per cent while the CDU fell 5 points to 24 per cent.
All this humiliation and disrespect shown by the voters can inevitably lead to only one thing: the political class lashing out at its electorate. In the home of Berthold Brecht, whose poem The Solution contains the famous lines ‘would it not be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?’ the powers-that-be have decided that it’s not they who are the problem, but the pesky population who have the temerity to, and still have the option of, voting for an actual opposition party. Thus the long-surveilled AfD, whose critics have been muck-raking for years to find evidence of Nazism in its ranks, has now been officially declared an ‘extreme right party’ and could therefore be legitimately closed down.
The explanation for this is that the birthplace of Nazism still needs the bogeyman of the 1930s to excuse its attacks on anti-state protests and its criminalisation of dissent. A case against covid dissident C J Hopkins was made by German prosecutors because he had made use of a ‘symbol of an unconstitutional organisation’: that is to say, the cover of a book he published showed a surgical mask with a swastika on it. The meaning is obvious – not pro-Nazi but saying compulsory mask wearing is fascist, a criticism of the extreme policy of the government or what he calls ‘The Rise of the New Normal Reich’. It has also been deemed illegal to say the words ‘Everything for Germany’ at a political rally if you are an AfD politician because that’s something Nazi stormtroopers used to say. (Of course the rule about using Nazi symbolism doesn’t need to be enforced if your target is someone like Donald Trump rather than the German authorities).
The right of the authorities to police what you say and what you publish under the guise of fighting ‘extremism’ is bad enough. Now, however, serious discussions are being had around banning the AfD from being allowed to operate as a political party. Using ‘lawfare’ to silence or even try to jail your political opponents is now becoming an acceptable, even celebrated part of our political reality. Closing down a mass membership organisation, in effect criminalising not individual politicians but those who support them, is a level of authoritarianism which some might once have reasonably described as ‘fascism’.
Wohin Deutschland? It would seem that none of the dodgy political horse trading, so detached from, even defiant of, ordinary German concerns, can possibly come to any good, and outlawing the preferred legal vehicle for protest of millions of voters would do little other than throw fuel on to the fire. Pushing ahead with a border crackdown looks like an effort to quench it. Newly appointed Chancellor Merz may have eventually breathed a sigh of relief on Tuesday at not having brought shame on his family. The real test will be whether he is willing and able to avoid bringing shame on his country.
