Patrick Lawrence: Germany in Crisis Part 1 —The Lost Man of Europe
This is the first of four reports on the crises that now beset Germany — what they are, the history that produced them, and how Germans think about finding their way forward once again.
I thank Eva–Maria Föllmer–Müller and Karl–Jürgen Müller of Bazenheid, Switzerland, for their unsparing assistance as I reported and wrote this series.
Of the many things said — insightful things, wise things, some foolish things — as the results of Germany’s national elections arrived on Sunday evening, Feb. 23, the most remarkable to me was the exclamation of the Federal Republic’s new chancellor-to-be: “We have won it,” Friedrich Merz declared before his supporters in Berlin as the exit polls, which proved accurate, gave the conservative Christian Democratic Union the largest share of the vote.
Merz is one of those political figures given to speaking before he thinks, and nobody seems to have taken this outburst as anything more than the election-night utterance of an exuberant victor. I heard it differently. To me, Merz’s four words betrayed a nation in crisis: its politics and economy in disarray, its visionless leadership, its pervasive malaise, the deepening fractures among Germany’s 83 million people — Germany’s inability, let’s say, to talk to itself or understand, even, what it means to say, “We have won it.”
The low-minded Merz’s “we” means the CDU, which he leads, and its longtime partner, the Christian Social Union. But how narrow a notion of winning is this for someone who purports to be not merely a national leader but a leader of Europe? The CDU/CSU won not quite 29% of the vote, just enough to form a new governing coalition. That leaves 71% of German voters who didn’t win anything.
The next chancellor’s “we,” to go straight to the larger significance of the German elections, should alarm all of us across the West, not only in Germany, given where Merz and his coalition partners intend to lead the Federal Republic. They have made their radical intent clear even before Merz formally assumes office. It is to dismantle the most advanced social democracy in Europe in favor of a swift, radical rearmament — shocking all by itself given Germany’s history — and a return to the Cold War’s ever-perilous hostilities. The speed of this turn appears to be taking everyone by surprise: On Monday, April 1, the Bundeswehr began stationing an armored brigade in Lithuania, the first long-term deployment of German troops abroad since World War II.
History, which I invoke throughout this series, haunts this transformative moment like a ghost. Many are they who saw in the postwar republic a promise that the trans–Atlantic world could take a new direction, that the West might cultivate — I’ll go to shorthand here — a more humanist, or humanized, form of democracy. In the 1960s, Ludwig Erhard, economics minister under Konrad Adenauer, fashioned the soziale Marktwirtschaft, the social market economy, a model considerably at variance with the free-market fundamentalism the United States was by then imposing upon the world. It made unions powerful and gave workers seats on corporate boards, among much else, and in so doing prompted the thought that Europe’s social-democratic tradition might at last tame capitalism’s excesses.
In the late 1960s, Willy Brandt, the Social Democratic foreign minister and subsequently chancellor, developed his long-celebrated Ostpolitik, a policy that opened the Federal Republic to its East Bloc neighbors and the Soviet Union. This was a rejection not only of Washington’s Cold War binary; more than this, it was a decisive reply to the anti–Russian animus that has scarred German history for a century.
To know this history now is to recognize the February elections as a defeat of considerable magnitude that extends, again, well beyond what was so recently Europe’s most powerful nation. Friedrich Merz and his coalition partners — who will include a Social Democratic Party that has cravenly repudiated the very tradition it once championed — has abandoned more, much more than the Federal Republic’s past. Anyone who entertained hope that the Continent might serve as a guide to a more orderly world is in some way bereft now, left with one less reason to hope the wandering West will find its way beyond the cycle of decline into which it has fallen.
Merz is a man of contradictions, which admittedly does not distinguish him among centrist politicians in Germany or anywhere else in the West. He will be distinguished now as the German people’s hopelessly contradictory leader. His most pressing domestic responsibility is to revive an economy the coalition of neoliberals led by his hapless predecessor, Olaf Scholz, has driven very nearly into the ground. Take your seats as this disaster in the making unfolds.
Merz is a virulent Russophobe — he is as vigorous in this as any postwar political figure, I am told — and he is strongly committed to escalating Germany’s support for the war in Ukraine. But bringing the German economy back to life simply cannot be done unless Germany determines to restore its dense, altogether natural interdependence with Russia, notably but not only on the energy side. The resort to building a trillion-euro war machine is a beyond-words act of political desperation: The extent to which it succeeds as economic stimulus will be the extent to which it destroys German social democracy while — not to be missed — burdening the government with enormous debt. As to the folly of the U.S.–inspired proxy war in Ukraine, each commitment the new government makes to continued support of the corrupt, Nazified regime in Kiev — financial support, military support, political support, diplomatic support — will alienate a greater proportion of the German citizenry.
Germany’s predicament is the West’s, cast merely in higher relief: It must change, it must find a new direction — its voters demand these things — but Germany as its leadership is currently constituted cannot change. Germany is arguably singular among the Western powers in that treading water — the ceaseless see-saw of the centrists, if I may mix metaphors — is no longer a workable dodge. The nation simply does not have time for that if it is to avoid an ever-increasing rate of decline.
A remarkable number of German voters switched in February from one party to another — voter migration, this phenomenon is called — in what looks to the naked eye like a perverse game of hopscotch. Most of the voters who abandoned the Social Democrats — and there were very many, as a collapse in the SPD’s support indicates — went to either the CDU/ CSU (the latter rooted in conservative and Catholic Bavaria) or — believe it or not — to the Alternativ für Deutschland, the populist, right-wing nemesis of the long-reigning Social Democrats.
It gets yet more odd, according to an analysis cited by an election-night commentator named Florian Rötzer. “Many from the CDU/CSU did indeed switch to the AfD,” Rötzer remarked as the results tallied, “but strangely enough also to The Left [Die Linke] and the BSW [the left-populist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht]. The Left gained massively, but former [Die Linke] voters switched to the AfD to a lesser extent and to the BSW to a greater extent.” As to Die Grünen, the now-ridiculous Greens — along with the Social Democrats the big losers Feb. 23 — they surrendered voters to Die Linke, a predictable-enough move, but also to the AfD.
I do not see that this impossible-to-read pattern can be marked down as anything other than a shared desperation. And now look. The coalition Merz is about to form with the Social Democrats betrays what appears to be a preposterous indifference to what German voters have just spoken. But in my read, it is better understood as a measure of fear among Germany’s governing elites. The SPD fell to third place in the German political constellation, with 30 fewer seats in the Bundestag than the AfD. But the latter, now Germany’s No. 2 party, will be blocked from the government by means of the antidemocratic “firewall” Germany’s neoliberal centrists show no sign of removing.
In net terms: The government that collapsed last autumn, a nominally left-of-center coalition of neoliberal parties led by Social Democrats, will now be succeeded by a coalition of neoliberal parties led by the right-of-center Christian Democrats almost certain to include the Social Democrats. This will be a straight reproduction of the hugely unpopular alliance that governed until 2021. The European version of Tweedle–Dee and Tweedle–Dum has never looked neater.
Long before the February elections, when it was already clear inept neoliberal leadership had recklessly damaged the economy out of sheer ideological fervor, commentators of various stripes took to calling the Federal Republic the sick man of Europe. We can do better than that tired cliché now: Germany is more usefully considered the lost man of Europe.
Here is Patrik Baab, a prominent German journalist and author — and a man of demonstrated integrity in his judgments, I will add — on election night:
The Germans did not choose stagnation this evening, but decline. A people is leading itself to its own downfall. We will now get more of the same. The war policy of the European elites is to be continued. The economic decline will continue because cheap energy and therefore a good relationship with Russia are needed to revive the economy. There will be no change in that at the moment….
I would add to Patrik’s succinct take only that, however much Germans are marching toward their downfall, I see the nation’s immovable neoliberal centrists at the head of the column.
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Postwar Germany was arguably, and I would make this argument without hesitation, the very epitome of Europe’s profound commitment to a social-democratic ethos, inflected with Christian social doctrine in the German case, that has its roots in the ferment of 19th century Continental politics. France and Germany stood, each differently, as the clearest expressions of the distance the Europeans kept from Anglo–American liberalism, neoliberalism as we call its descendant. The place of the individual was different one side or the other of the English Channel. Liberty was achieved by way of the polity, not by way of freedom from it. Limits were imposed on the operations of capital. The Europeans’ political economy was, altogether, of a more humane order.
Now Germany demonstrates the Continent’s abandonment of its honorable social-democratic traditions and its embrace, with the zealotry of the convert, of the neoliberalism with which the Anglosphere has burdened the Western world. When, why, and how did neoliberal ideology cross the Channel — or, more likely, the Atlantic? I am not an economic historian, but I recall detecting this ideological migration during the first post–Cold War decade, when America’s triumphalism was running wild. The financial crises of our century, needless to say, have consolidated the place of the Continent’s neoliberal elites — those we call austerians when their ideology is transposed into policy.
Courtesy of close friends and colleagues, I spent time in Germany in the months leading up to the February elections. I posed a thousand questions to people from whose insights I benefited greatly. And the question that pressed itself upon me so insistently was: How was it that Germany has come so far from what it once was?
I will turn this insistent question this way and that in the reports that follow.
