Berlin continues to double down on Ukraine, earmarking nearly more than $8 billion for the war in its just-passed budget. While the domestic situation implodes, and the government and media smear anyone – political parties, farmers, strikers – who opposes the direction Berlin is taking the country. And that list is growing.
It’s difficult to overstate how unpopular the ruling coalition is that just got its war-austerity budget passed. Nearly two-thirds of voters want to pull the plug on the current government – a rare step in Germany. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has some of the lowest approval ratings for a German chancellor ever. If elections were held today, the three ruling parties (the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats) would struggle to reach a combined 33 percent. The public’s dissatisfaction has been steadily growing for two years, and yet the ruling coalition refuses to change course.
The complete unwillingness of the government to listen to voter concerns is unsurprisingly leading to the increased popularity of parties that go against the group think on foreign policy that is having direct repercussions on domestic policy. In a nutshell, the government policy is more money for war and less social spending at home.
The ethno-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which calls for a rethink on Russia policy, has been the biggest benefactor of the government trainwreck, but the newly formed working class party on the left led by Sahra Wagenknecht is similar, minus the ethno-nationalism, and is also gaining in the polls.
Right now, all the focus is on the AfD and what to do about it.
The “Center” Cannot Hold
A recent POLITICO piece sums up the German elite line of thinking, declaring “the country’s domestic politics are becoming dysfunctional” and that there’s a need to “keep the country together in the middle” in the face of the “shrinking political center.”
It’s hard to know what exactly is “centrist” about pursuing war with Russia or destroying German industry, but that is what the “middle” translates as these days: keeping the Project Ukraine train on the tracks.
POLITICO frames it as though the voters have become dysfunctional by refusing to support parties that are making their lives worse and instead choosing to support the AfD – a party despised by the elite. One could also argue that this means democracy is working as it should. The parties enacting unpopular policies are losing support (except the Greens whose voters are quite satisfied with how things are going), and voters are going with an alternative – in some part to give an upraised middle finger to the establishment.
But that’s not the officialdom view, as expressed by POLITICO. No, it is that something is broken, and it ain’t the elites so it must be the voters. Something must be done about this, but what?
Protests, Strikes, and more Protests
What’s happening in Germany is that anyone who questions the logic of the war against Russia or complains about the economic fallout in Germany is immediately labeled, far right, racist, fascist.
That includes workers as labor actions have jumped in Germany and look set to continue. Train workers just went on one of their longest strikes ever, which was of course playing right into the hands of the far right.
Farmers, too, are now members of the far right.
Farmers blocked Green economics minister Robert Habeck from disembarking a ferry on his return from vacation on the island of Hallig Hooge.
Landwirte blockierten heute den Fährhafen #Schlüttsiel
Samt Zufahrtstraßen um #Habeck auf dem Rückweg aus dem Urlaub von #HalligHooge abzufangen u zur Rede zu stellen .Die Fähre musste wieder samt #Habeck ablegen, als die Landwirte das Schiff zu stürmen drohen .#Habeck sitzt… pic.twitter.com/YFKZeZq5A7
— Carmen (@Carmen62100722) January 4, 2024
The German political class was aghast.
Scholz’s spokesperson, Steffen Hebestreit, said it “is shameful and violates the rules” of democratic society. The governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state and a member of Germany’s main conservative opposition bloc said “this transgression is absolutely unacceptable.”
The government and media then began an effort to discredit the farmers based on the fact the AfD supports the protests and the following:
According to German media outlet Spiegel, members of several right-wing extremist groups, including The Homeland and Third Way, were at a rally in Berlin, as were AfD members. In Dresden, a video on social media showed people carrying flags from the Free Saxony right-wing extremist party clashing with police.
Habeck himself said this: ”Calls are circulating with coup fantasies, extremist groups are forming and ethnic-nationalist symbols are being openly displayed.”
This decision to focus on the presence of some right-wing elements ignores the farmers’ complaint that money is being taken out of their pockets to help fund the war against Russia. As one protestor said, “For a farm like mine, I would lose about 10,000 euros. For our businesses, it’s a catastrophe.”
The government in Berlin is scrambling to save or reallocate around $66 billion over the next several years, and one thing it elected to cut was subsidies on diesel fuel purchased for agricultural purposes.
Germany’s budget crunch is largely a result of its economic war against Russia and support of the destruction of Ukraine in a bid to weaken Russia. Forced to replace cheap Russian energy with expensive Russian energy, laundered through middle countries, the government has thrown billions at energy subsidies to try to soften the blow. At the same time, Berlin is increasing the defense budget due to its perceived threat from Russia.
The diesel fuel is also affected by…Russia. For example, Germany’s Schwedt oil refinery, which supplies 90 percent of the gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and fuel oil used in Berlin, has been running at around 50 percent capacity due to the loss of Russian fuel.
Farmers and others are making the connection. From the POLITICO piece:
…one of the men, Martin Zühlke, who said he heads an association of biogas plant owners from the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. “When we look at the government’s policies, we see a lot of arrogance, ignorance and stupidity packed with ideology and still more stupidity.”
His companion, Thomas Strahl, who said he worked in a municipal office, delivered a far more extreme assessment — and one that went well beyond diesel — saying he’d been disturbed by the government’s arms shipments to Ukraine and by what he called its “Russophobia.”
“What they are doing today,” he said of the German government’s robust line against Russian aggression “it’s similar to what the Nazis did back then.”
POLITICO uses these men as examples of “radical, anti-government malcontents.”
These strikes and protests were quickly overshadowed by the ongoing uproar over an alleged far-right plot involving the AfD to start rounding up immigrants and deporting them.
The Jan. 15 report, titled “Secret Plan Against Germany” was from Correctiv. Here’s the deck, which provides the gist:
It was the meeting that nobody was ever meant to find out about. Back in November, high-ranking politicians from Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, neo-Nazis, and sympathetic businesspeople gathered in a hotel near Potsdam. Their agenda? Nothing less than the fine tuning of a plan for the forced deportations of millions of people currently living in Germany.
“The report galvanized German society like little else since reunification,” politicians from all major parties denounced it, 250,000 protestors reportedly hit the streets two weeks ago, thousand were out again yesterday denouncing “hate,” and there is wall-to-wall media coverage of the “plot” and protests. Even sports figures got in on the action with Christian Streich, SC Freiburg’s 58-year-old coach calling for people to “rise up” as “as advertiser brand names flickered from a screen behind him.”
There was just one problem: how much of the report was true?
The deputy editor of Correctiv Anette Dowideit began to walk back the bombshell report on a January 28 television appearance, saying that there wasn’t actually any talk of deportations at the meeting and that all the connections to the Nazi Wannsee Conference in 1942, where it was decided to embark on the mass killing of Jews.
For its part, the AfD calls the Potsdam gathering nothing more than a “small, private debate club,” but not a “secret meeting dangerous to the public.” Four individuals with ties to the AfD were reportedly at the meeting.
Dowideit claimed that the German press “misinterpreted” Correctiv’s report (despite the piece including direct references to mass deportations and the Wannasee Conference) and ran with it, which led to the mass protests and even louder calls to ban the party.
As far as I can tell, Correctiv’s climb down hasn’t received nearly the same amount of attention that the original story received. Correctiv, a non-profit, lists Google, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Deutsche Telekom, and Pierre Omidyar’s Luminate as some of its largest donors. Correctiv also coordinated the CumEx corruption stories, which involved then-mayor of the Hamburg city-state Olaf Scholz and have kept his feet to the fire as chancellor.
At the same time that Germany was in a meltdown over the AfD, the Bundesstag quietly passed a law clearing the way for easier deportations of asylum seekers, and criminalizing certain activities by aid workers who assist them, punishable with up to ten years in prison. There was no uproar over this action (maybe I missed it?). Here’s Deutsche Welle with the details:
Among some of the measures of the legislation — dubbed the Repatriation Improvement Act — is the provision for longer periods of pre-deportation custody, in a bid to give authorities more time to complete the process before having to release an individual.
The legal maximum duration of detention ahead of deportation will be extended from 10 days to 28 days.
Authorities will have more powers when it comes to conducting searches, for instance now being allowed to enter rooms of shared accommodation and not just the room of an individual being deported.
Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser noted that the number of repatriations increased by 27 percent to 16,430 in 2023 as a result of previous measures, and that this new legislation will help boost those numbers this year.
The same Faeser is calling the small AfD involvement in the Potsdam discussion on immigration policy “an active effort to shift borders and to spread contempt for democracy and misanthropy into the heart of society.”
Often lost in the media furor over the AfD is that the party gets a decent amount of support from immigrants. NC reader Tom67 reports from Germany:
About the AFD: there is something very interesting going on. Second and third generation Turkish voters are turning to the AFD. Their parents arrived in Germany, worked hard and became modestly wealthy. Now they see millions of people from the 3d world entering Germany and entering the welfare state almost immediately. The SPD and the greens don´t know, what will hit them. Sure there are Fascist elements in the AFD. But there is also a black member of the Bundestag and some prominent Muslims in regional parliaments. They are all united in demanding the closure of the border. And that is tremendously popular exactly among previous immigrants. Just the other day I talked to a Turkish shopkeeper who supports the AFD and I hear the same things from a big factory (1200 employees) in my area.
The Correctiv report could have also been an attempt to peel away some of this support. So in the end a questionable report about a meeting with loose ties to the AfD:
- Helped take the wind out of the sails of worker actions across the country by linking them to a right wing allegedly engaged in a nefarious Nazi-esque plot.
- Overshadowed actual government action on immigrants – the very stuff that protestors were so up in arms about when the AfD was alleged to be involved in a hypothetical plot.
- And helped build support for a potential AfD ban.
That’s impressive.
In light of the Bundestag’s recent actions on asylum seekers (which is very similar to the AfD position), it’s worth wondering if all the government’s righteous outrage against the AfD is really about immigrants or some of the party’s other ideas, like detente with Russia and its anti-Eu stance. Here’s AfD leader Alice Weidel talking to the Financial Times in a January 21 profile:
Weidel, party leader since 2022, said an AfD government would seek to reform the EU and remove its “democratic deficit”, including by curbing the powers of the European Commission, an “unelected executive”.
“But if a reform isn’t possible, if we fail to rebuild the sovereignty of the EU member states, we should let the people decide, just as Britain did,” she said. “And we could have a referendum on ‘Dexit’ — a German exit from the EU.”
As far as the European Commission and its president Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen are concerned, that’s basically a declaration of war. As von der Leyen says, she has the “tools,” and she’s not afraid to use them.
Support Someone Else or Else
In the aftermath of the deportation controversy, an AfD candidate lost an election he was expected to win.
In a second-round runoff in the district of Saale-Orla in the south-eastern state of Thuringia, the AfD candidate, Uwe Thrum, lost to (CDU) candidate Christian Herrgott by 4.6 percentage points. Thrum got 47.7 percent of the vote, against Herrgott’s 52.3 percent. Earlier in January, the AfD candidate had 45.7 percent of the vote to Herrgott’s 33 percent.
The vote has been hailed as a sign that the backlash over the alleged deportation plan is beginning to dent the AfD’s support. Maybe. Or maybe more of those who voted for the SPD candidate and the left-wing candidate in the original election simply switched to the CDU candidate in the runoff.
The German media and respectable center has been labeling the AfD dangerous Nazis for years now, and the party’s support has only grown, so we’ll see if this makes a difference.
National polls are showing a small decline in AfD support:
On the topic AfD supporters, it’s important to remember that there is a fascist element to the party, but its recent growth is largely due to disenchantment with mainstream parties unresponsive to voter concerns as Adam Tooze summarized:
Amongst who count as AfD supporters, people with neo-Nazi attitudes make up roughly 13 percent. Those with far-right authoritarian attitudes account for another 43, which means that 44 percent of those expressing support for the party do so without a general identification with far-right politics.
For about half the AfD’s potential electorate, their vote is a matter of conviction. But on top of that for a large part of the AfD’s electorate their preference is a way of signaling – presumably to what they take to be the mainstream – that they are dissatisfied with the status quo and do not believe that their voices will otherwise be heard. When asked why they might consider voting for the AfD at the next election – as 22 percent of those in survey said they would do – 78 percent said that it would be a sign that they were unhappy with “current policies” with 71 mentioning migration policy, in particular…
Overall, the conclusion of the surveys seems quite clear. There has not been a general shift to the right. In addition to a base of far-right wing support, which makes up 15 percent of the population, the AfD is attracting a protest vote that takes it to slightly more than 20 percent support. This is driven by dissatisfaction with migration policy and a general fear of societal crisis.
This polling supports the conclusions of Manès Weisskircher who researches social movements, political parties, democracy, and the far right at the Institute of Political Science, TU Dresden. He argues that AfD’s support, which is strongest in East Germany, can be primarily traced to three factors:
- The neoliberal ‘great transformation,’ which has massively changed the eastern German economy and continues to lead to emigration and anxiety over personal economic prospects.
- An ongoing sense of marginalization among East Germans who feel they have never been fully integrated since reunification and resent liberal immigration policies in this context.
- Deep dissatisfaction with the functioning of the political system and doubt in political participation.
Will the deportation report have enough staying power to change the AfD’s long term trajectory – especially if the ruling coalition continues to run the country into the ground and other major parties don’t show major divergence on issues like the war against Russia? While the AfD does have a base of right wing voters, it and Wagenknecht’s party on the left, are the only ones drawing the connection between Germany’s foreign policy and its woes on the home front.
The government still has a few tools at its disposal before escalating to an outright ban. The Bundestag is already debating how to deal with the AfD, holding the hearings “Resilient Democracy in a Diverse Country — a Clear Stand Against the Enemies of Democracy and Their Plans of Forced Displacement.”
The next likely step is that the party will lose state funding due to its “anti-democratic behavior.” But if that and more bad press doesn’t do the trick, a ban, which would be the equivalent to disenfranchising more than one fifth of the electorate, is looking increasingly probable.
The talk of banning the AfD picked up again around the protests. MInister of the Interior Faeser called a ban the “last resort,” an option that is directly correlated to the AfD’s popularity. Christian Pestalozza, a constitutional law expert in Berlin, tells Deutsche Welle that one prerequisite for a ban is that there must be probability that the AfD “will at some point have enough weight to achieve its goals.”
So that’s it. Voters either need to realize the error of their ways or the “center” will make that decision for them in order to preserve “democracy.”
Amid all this song dance, it’s easy to forget that there’s an easy way for the German establishment to return to what POLITICO describes as the safe and responsible center. Stop destroying Ukraine in an attempt to weaken Russia and stop making German citizens’ lives worse through a disastrous economic war against Moscow.
Unfortunately, for the German elite, a ban appears to be the more palatable option, but just as they failed to foresee (or refused to care about) the fallout from their latest war on Russia, they’re certain to underestimate the repercussions that would come with a ban of the AfD.
