Opinion | Germany Has Finally Woken Up

The ground was icy as my partner, my son and I made our way to the center of Berlin two Sundays ago. Still, as we joined about 100,000 others who had gathered there to protest right-wing extremism, it felt cozy — both in a literal and in a metaphorical sense. The mass of human bodies created a microclimate that made it bearable to be outside in the frosty Berlin dark for a couple of hours. And it was also warming to see this many people turn out to defend our democracy.

We were there because on Jan. 10, the media platform Correctiv published a remarkable account of a far-right meeting in Potsdam last November. According to the report, participants — drawn from several far-right groups and including several politicians from the far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD — discussed plans for the mass deportation of millions of foreigners and Germans from migrant families. Horrified, over two million people have since taken to the streets. The protests, some of the country’s largest in decades, emerged everywhere: not just in liberal cities like Berlin, Hamburg and Munich but also in many cities in eastern Germany, where the far right is particularly strong.

The strange thing was that the Correctiv report told us nothing we couldn’t have guessed already. The far right, we know, is built on racist fantasies of ethnic homogeneity, and the AfD has long been deemed extreme. Yet for years, many Germans viewed the rise of the far right with something like wary detachment: Even as the AfD climbed to around 20 percent in the polls, there remained some complacency about the threat it posed. Not anymore. Germany, at last, has woken up.

German democracy is not well. The problem is not just the rise of the AfD, which has become strong enough in some regions to aspire to positions of power or at least to seriously disrupt the process of forming stable governments. It’s that in many parts of the country, a general sense of discontent has tipped over into disdain. People now reject not just the current government but the whole political system.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, this feeling has built up in Germany. And it is true that Germans have had to deal with a lot: the war in Ukraine, an energy crisis, inflation and, most recently, the painful fallout from war in Gaza. Even though immigration is rising, we still lack skilled labor — teachers, plumbers, I.T. specialists — and public infrastructure is crumbling. Add in an ambitious government green transition agenda hamstrung by brutal infighting and you get a grim picture. Everything, it seems, is changing — and not for the better.

In recent months, this dissatisfied feeling has thickened to contempt. Anecdotally, it seems like everybody knows someone who has dropped out of the mainstream, vowing to vote for the AfD or talking about emigrating. The collapse of support for all three parties of government — the most popular among them, the Social Democrats, stands at around 15 percent in the polls — is eloquent of widespread antipathy. And that fundamental rejection is beginning to show in public.