L‘Germany, these days, has a little air of France. Farmers’ blockades, strike movements, political parties shaken by the rise of the far right, government tensions, budgetary crisis… In the space of two years, the legendary stability of the Merkel era has evaporated. The Minister of Finance, the liberal Christian Lindner, rejects the qualifier “of the sick man of Europe” that some want to stick to his country again, in reference to the time of the difficulties of reunification. Germany, he corrected before the Davos Economic Forum, is rather “a tired man who needs caffeine”.
It was the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), the far-right party, which unwittingly provided this salutary dose of stimulus. Revelations from an investigation site, Correctionon a secret meeting of party leaders at which plans for mass deportation of immigrants were discussed that threw hundreds of thousands of demonstrators onto the streets of Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and others cities.
This healthy and vigorous reaction to the neo-Nazi excesses of a party on the rise which today attracts more than 20% of the electorate in voting intentions, even up to 35% in certain Länder in the east of the country, must be welcomed. The weight of history and the radicalization of the AfD undoubtedly explain the massive reaction of the Germans, in comparison with their French neighbors, more passive towards an extreme right which plays the card of normalization and respectability. It is also with the reading grid of German history that we must understand the current debate across the Rhine on a possible ban on the AfD.
The government coalition in difficulty
From left to right, the rise of the far right is shaking the German political system and splitting the landscape of traditional parties. After the creation of a far-left party by the former leader of Die Linke (“the left”) Sahra Wagenknecht, it is an ultraconservative current of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the large center party right, which has just seceded. Its leader, Hans-Georg Maassen, intends to transform his Union of Values association into a political party which, he assures, will be “ready to talk with everyone”, that is to say also with the AfD, a position that the CDU rejects.
At the same time, the tricolor government coalition, which brings together the social democrats of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens and the Liberal Party, continues to struggle with the difficulties of three-way management, under the uneasy leadership of Olaf Scholz, uncommunicative and unpopular chancellor. The shock of the war in Ukraine, whose impact in Germany was particularly brutal due to its past energy ties with Russia, strengthened under the Merkel era, changed the economic situation. The Karlsruhe Constitutional Court added to the government’s difficulties by depriving it of significant resources intended for the ecological transition, bringing to the surface the ideological divisions within the coalition between supporters of budgetary rigor and advocates of relaxation.
Like many European countries, Germany is going through a difficult political and economic moment. Its dominant position within the European Union makes this period more visible – and more worrying too. The vitality of its attachment to democracy, which it has just demonstrated, remains its best asset to overcome this crisis.