Germany is a tense country these days. Conversations with friends and relatives there invariably turn to politics, and, when they do, things can get heated very quickly. Gone is the casual sarcasm and the grumbling that marked political dinner table discourse in years gone by. It has been replaced by anger and intense frustration. The political mainstream and its supporters sense this disaffection, too, and it frightens them. But their panicked efforts to do something about it are backfiring, alienating even more voters.
Many centrists fear a breakdown of the democratic post-war order
Widespread disgruntlement with the status quo isn’t just anecdotal. It can be measured in numbers. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government is only a few months old, yet already a survey suggests that only 22 per cent of people are satisfied with its work. The previous government under Olaf Scholz, which also ended up being deeply unpopular, still had 47 per cent approval after the same time in office.
In search of the drastic change they crave, more and more Germans are driven to the political fringes. The left-wing party Die Linke, which was practically declared dead before the elections in February, has bounced back, polling around 11 per cent, neck-and-neck with the Greens and only marginally behind the centre-left SPD. On the right, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) tops the latest polls with around 26 per cent of the vote share.
The public’s seemingly inexorable loss of confidence in the mainstream parties understandably frightens their representatives and proponents. But they see this as something that is happening to them rather than something caused by them. Accordingly, they feel they have no way to stop it.
Many centrists fear a breakdown of the democratic post-war order. It’s a deep-set angst, much more visceral in Germany than elsewhere due to the country’s Nazi past and the traumatic experience of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first full-scale democracy. The upshot is a paralysing combination of denial and panic. Centrists try and reassure themselves that everything is fine while aggressively ringfencing the status quo, which alienates unhappy voters further rather than winning them back.
Take the local elections earlier this month in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous of Germany’s sixteen states. The AfD tripled its results in this western region that contains many former SPD strongholds due to its industrial heritage. Because that still ‘only’ amounts to 15 per cent of the vote, the federal government responded by saying it saw no need to reconsider its own course. They ignore the boiling tension underneath those results at their peril. The numbers hide the true scale of the disaffection.
In some local councils, election committees decided to exclude AfD candidates on the basis that they deemed them anti-constitutional. This has inflamed pre-existing resentments among their voters that aren’t immediately visible in the results.
This is what happened in Ludwigshafen, an industrial city in the neighbouring state of Rhineland-Palatinate with a high proportion of working-class voters – the demographic from which the AfD draws most of its voters. The AfD candidate for the mayoral election in Ludwigshafen last Sunday, Joachim Paul, was disqualified on grounds that his loyalty to the German constitution and its values appeared uncertain.
Instead voters were left to choose between the four remaining candidates: a conservative from Merz’s ruling CDU, a Social Democrat from their coalition partner of the SPD, a candidate of the tiny new pro-European Volt party and an independent. Members of all those parties had previously voted to disqualify the AfD man based on a report delivered by the domestic intelligence agency that claimed, among other things, that he had links to far-right groups, had used the term ‘remigration’ and quoted from The Lord of the Rings, a book series he’d praised for containing characters who displayed a ‘deep commitment to their people, their culture, and their forefathers.’ Paul challenged the decision with his lawyer arguing that most of the accusations, true or not, were ‘completely irrelevant’ from a legal perspective. The decision to exclude him was upheld by three different courts.
On paper, Ludwigshafen now has a result that appears to be a resounding ‘yes’ to the governing parties. The CDU candidate got 41 per cent and the SPD one 36 per cent. There will be a final round of voting between those two on 12 October. Yet what those results mask is that the turnout was only 29 per cent and that more than 9 per cent of votes cast were spoilt ballot papers. Local press reported that people had written Paul’s name on the voting slips or comments on what they thought of the electoral process. It’s probably fair to assume that the whole saga didn’t fill voters with renewed confidence in the democratic process, nor in the parties that assumed their choice had to be limited.
Protecting democracies from the electorate may seem an absurd thought to many outsiders, but it has become a feature of political life in Germany. The SPD, Germany’s oldest party and a major player in politics since the 19th century, now acts as a junior coalition partner to Merz’s conservatives, languishing at historically bad polling of around 15 per cent. Despite its desperate struggle for existence, the deeply divided party cannot see any way out of its malaise. The only clear thing it could agree on at its party conference in the summer was that it was its ‘historical task’ to beat the AfD. They appear to have given up on doing this by political, democratic means and instead passed a motion to prepare to get the ball rolling on an AfD ban.
Ask German centrists whether they really think banning the largest opposition party is a good idea and you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who’s alarmed. There are many proponents, especially in the SPD. Those cautioning against it rarely do so out of concern for democratic principles but rather because they think the legal process might be ‘very difficult and the result uncertain,’ as CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann put it.
The federal government in Berlin is right to be alarmed by the mood in Germany, but knee-jerk bans and lashing out at opponents won’t endear anyone to voters. Instead, Germany’s political leaders should use the years they have to address issues voters are frustrated and concerned about. According to recent surveys, immigration is first, then economic concerns followed by crime, security and other issues.
Most people haven’t suddenly turned into extremists. They want to live in a country that is safe, fair and prosperous and where they feel they have agency over what happens to it. Those are reasonable demands. Any democratic government should try to meet them rather than telling increasing numbers of voters that they are wrong and must have their choice curtailed. Attempts to protect democracy from the people tend to backfire.
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