Last week the European Parliament passed a resolution that calls for Western countries to strike inside Russia with long range missiles, the confiscation of Russian assets, and ever tougher sanctions against Moscow. It received the support from 425 MEPs — a slight decrease from the parliament’s first document adopted after the June elections, which called for Ukraine support for as long as it takes was supported by 495 MEPs out of 720.
In Germany, the sputtering engine of the EU, voters are making it increasingly difficult to keep up with the chutzpah of the European Parliament. The biggest Russia war cheerleaders like Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock aren’t quite as vocal as they used to be following the beating voters delivered to them in June’s European elections and recent state votes.
Yesterday’s state election in Brandenburg, which encircles Berlin, provided a temporary respite for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s beleaguered Social Democratic Party (SPD), which came in first with 30.7 percent.
The sovereignist, enthno-nationalist Alternative for Germany placed second with 29.5 percent.
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), another sovereignist party that focuses on antiwar and working class issues, came in third at 13.5 percent.
The SPD’s first-place finish isn’t as impressive as it would seem. The party, which has ruled Brandenburg since German reunification, saw its support decline from 31.9 percent in the last election in 2019, and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was likely sacrificed in order to get it there.
The CDU plummeted from 23 in 2019 to 12 percent with many voters throwing their support behind the SPD.
Crucially, the Greens fell below the five percent threshold, which means they will not be have any seats in the state parliament. That rule in Germany, intended to prevent gridlock, now looks more likely to help produce it.
The initial results mean that the SPD will have to form a coalition with either the AfD or BSW. Regardless, the AfD will have 30 out of 88 seats, which due to the “firewall” pact among parties not to work with the AfD, means it will have the ability to block decisions and elections that require a two-thirds majority, such as the election of constitutional judges.
There is just one more state election on the calendar (a March vote in Hamburg, an SPD stronghold) before next fall’s national elections.
While all three September state elections (Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia) took place on fertile ground for the AfD and BSW, the results are still striking in a Germany known for its cherished stability.
The results in Brandenburg mean that the AfD took home two silvers and one gold.The BSW, essentially a one-woman party that formed only nine months ago, came in third in all three races.
The two insurgent parties took everything the establishment could throw at them, and voters still made them serious challengers in the political battle over Germany’s future that is just beginning.
US Colony or Sovereign State?
In an effort to halt the rise of the AfD and BSW, all of the major centrist parties are now supporting much stricter immigration control. One can see why as immigration has consistently topped voters’ list of concerns — unsurprisingly when the record levels of immigrants coincides with a retracting economy, a housing crisis, and social spending cuts.
Despite the endless warnings against the dangers of the AfD’s anti-immigrant positions, all of the center parties were quick to throw the immigrant welcome mat overboard when the AfD and BSW started attracting more voters.
They have not been willing to touch the broader issue of vassalage to the US and a self-defeating Russia policy, however. They might be forced to.
It is going to be impossible for the center parties to govern in the three eastern states without Wagenknecht’s party (or without giving up on the AfD firewall). And what does Wagenknecht want in return?
She’s looking for the CDU to make concessions on support for Project Ukraine and even more importantly when looking to the future, the stationing of US long range missiles in Germany.
And it’s possible that similar coalition math could be in play after next year’s national elections if the AfD and BSW can continue to peel away voters from the Atlanticist center. Here’s the current state of polling:
As of now, this would mean only 5 parties in the Bundestag, and the CDU would be forced to side with its fellow Atlanticists, the SPD and the hated Greens, or forget the firewall and team up with the AfD.
But a year is a long time.
The major problem for the three parties of the ruling traffic light coalition (SPD, Greens and Free Democratic Party) is that all signs point to the economy continuing to tank and their support will likely continue sink along with it.
Border controls to keep out immigrants won’t do anything to keep industry in. Companies that rely on cheap and reliable energy continue to leave the country due to Germany’s Russia policy.
As long as Berlin is working more for Atlanticist interests rather than national ones, it will be almost impossible to turn the economy around, as well.
Germany is now under pressure to get rid of its China dependency the same way it did with Russia. The consequences like loss of access to critical minerals, which China increasingly controls, are rarely considered. And so here’s Germany provocatively sending its Navy ships through the Taiwan Strait. Nobody is too sure what this achieves other than showing Berlin’s commitment to Washington’s goals.
Or maybe the government in Germany is just a glutton for punishment. Aside from Ukraine, no one has been hurt more than Germany by war against Russia.
The loss of Russian natural gas drove the final nail through the coffin of Germany’s economic model, the reverberations of which are still being felt. Here we are 2.5 years later and Berlin is now struggling to phase out coal.
All the economic news out of the country is an endless stream of bad to worse. Intel just canceled a planned microchip manufacturing center. Volkswagen is looking at closing some operations. And many other crown jewels of German industry are doing the same. This would be bad news anywhere, but especially in Germany where manufacturing still accounts for nearly a quarter of the German economy and employs 20 percent of the German workforce.
If the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines (and ensuing damage to the German economy) severed the relationship between Moscow and Berlin, the plan to station US long range missiles in Germany starting in 2026 is an attempt to guarantee it remains severed.
A more sovereign Germany would not be “supporting” Ukraine, the state that was behind the Nord Stream bombings according to Germany’s own investigation. Berlin would be working to get the gas flowing again. And it certainly wouldn’t agree to host US missiles aimed at Moscow.
The centrist Atlanticists of course endorsed that latter move while the AfD and BSW opposed it. From DW:
“Chancellor Scholz is not acting in Germany’s interest,” said Tino Chrupalla, co-leader of the AfD, which continues to oppose German arms deliveries to Ukraine.
“He is allowing Germany’s relationship with Russia to be permanently damaged, and we are falling back into the pattern of the East-West conflict,” Chrupalla said, adding that the US missile deployment would make “Germany a target.”
And that’s the point. It locks Germany into a self-destructive role on the frontlines of the New Cold War.
That’s a position that already requires hundreds of billions to in support for the German economy. The German business association BDI just released a study claiming that 20 percent of industrial value creation in the country is under threat. At the top of the list of causes is high energy prices and it says Germany needs about $1.55 trillion of investment by 2030.
Businesses looking for help covering the self-imposed energy crisis aren’t the only ones looking for more money from Berlin.
As Project Ukraine reaches its inevitable conclusion there is no sign that the hostility towards Russia will abate (see the European Parliament vote above), and Germany is also facing pressure from all sides to pony up for common EU debt that would be used to purchase more expensive and less reliable US liquified natural gas and fund military purchases by the bloc.
The hits are likely to keep coming for Germany as the economy continues to slide, social spending is cut further, military spending increases, and even more pressure is piled on to “derisk” from China.
All that means that the newfound concern about immigration likely ain’t going to cut it with voters, and the Atlanticists are going to have an increasingly difficult time keeping up the hardline Russia positions as the AfD and BSW continue to increase their support.
Looking Forward to 2025
From the German sovereignist side, there was some hope that the CDU might be consumed by infighting ahead of the 2025 national elections the same way they were in 2021, which could open the door to further AfD and BSW gains. CDU chief Friedrich Merz and the head of Bavaria’s conservatives, Markus Soeder, recently buried the hatchet, however, and Merz will be the undisputed CDU candidate for chancellor.
The CDU remains at the top of national polls and is fortunate to be out of power as the economy worsens. Merz, however, is also a former Blackrock executive and is not well-liked. As of now, Merz fully supports Atlanticist positions like continuing to support Project Ukraine and the sationing of the US long range missiles in Germany.
Can Wagenknecht force a change there through government-forming negotiations in East Germany states? We’ll see.
There is ongoing talk of Chancellor Scholz stepping aside ala Biden, but the election results in Brandenburg yesterday likely bought him more time. While the SPD didn’t completely embarrass itself like it did in the June European elections and the two state elections earlier this month, Scholz’s chancellorship is still on life support. He remains historically unpopular, and the party’s win in Brandenburg likely had to do more with the governor’s popularity as well as the strategic shift in support from the center-right CDU to the center-left SPD in order to prevent an AfD win.
It would still be surprising to see Scholz as the SPD candidate next year.
Defense minister Boris Pistorius who has been pounding the table for endless military spending ever since he was plucked from the obscure position as the Lower Saxony State Minister of the Interior and Sports is the man who’s always named as Scholz’s likely replacement. He continues to be the most popular politician in Germany. Why? Well, at least one recent poll shows that a clear majority of Germans support more national defense spending.
It wouldn’t make much sense to promote him to chancellor now as that would mean he’d start to receive the blame for the slow economic collapse. Best to switch out Scholz closer to the 2025 election and present Pistorius as the face of change.
Habeck is already slated to be the Green candidate. The party somewhat inexplicably still polls around 10 percent, but then again the party is also sometimes described as a cult.
National AfD support has leveled off in recent months, but it might still have the chance to become the CDU’s junior partner in the next government. Would that mean the AfD caves on some of anti-NATO and German sovereignty positions or does the CDU continue to move towards the AfD as it has on immigration?
And then there’s Wagenknecht, head of the party that bears her name and one that is still building itself out after launching nine months ago. How much higher of a ceiling does she have? Her broad appeal suggests a decent amount more — if she can continue to connect her antiwar stance to the dire straits of the economy.
The AfD voter is typically younger, male, less well-educated, and working class, and the CDU is more heavily supported by older, wealthier voters. Wagenknecht, on the other hand, draws voters more evenly from across social demographic groups.
Despite all the media efforts to lump Wagenknecht and the AfD together as Kremlin-controlled, anti-democratic far-right threats, the fact is the parties are polar opposites. Just a few examples:
- BSW proposes a fairer tax system that benefits the working class, such as the demand for an excess profits tax in the industrial sector. The AfD wants to slash taxes across the board, including those that are progressive and serve to redistribute wealth, such as the inheritance tax
- BSW believes in global warming and wants to continue to take climate action but work to soften the economic blow to the working class. The AfD rejects climate science. In its EU election manifesto, it says that the “claim of a threat through human-made climate change” is “CO2 hysterics,” and it would do away with climate laws that reduce prosperity and freedoms.
- BSW wants to strengthen the social safety net. The AfD stresses the limits of the state’s role.
Unlike the ruling coalition, Wagenknecht has been careful not to criticize AfD supporters, and unlike other parties, Wagenknecht says she will work with the AfD on issues where there is overlap, i.e., Russia and NATO, since that’s about the only area of common vision.
The simultaneous surge from the AfD and Wagenknecht is putting the CDU between a rock and a hard place. Either uphold the firewall against the AfD and form alliances with BSW after making concessions to Wagenknecht on long range missiles and general Russia policy. Or bring the AfD, which has been dubbed the second coming of Hitler for years now, into power and potentially dent CDU support in the process.
Either way, the post-WWII German “consensus” of stable center coalitions is quickly coming to an end. Considering how much damage the current government has done to Germany, it can’t come soon enough.
The problem is that even if — and it’s a big if — the AfD and/or BSW can succeed it making Berlin work for German interests again, the world isn’t standing still while Berlin tries to sort itself out. Russia’s economy, unlike Germany’s, wasn’t dependent on the Nord Stream pipelines as it is simply redirecting supplies towards China, India, and others as part of its Eurasian integration.
Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin still insist that they’ll turn on the gas in the one Nord Stream pipeline that is still operational. Germany hasn’t taken them up on the offer.
While German industry would likely be facing difficulties these days one way or the other due to its decades-long reliance on the wage suppression model, a lack of investment, and the rise of Chinese manufacturing, the loss of cheap and reliable Russian energy made it so all these problems are now weighing on Germany simultaneously.
The Greens’ insistence that Germany close its remaining nuclear power plants only made the situation more dire.
In the meantime, things could always get worse before they get better. Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck is today hosting representatives from Germany’s once-powerful automobile industry at a “car summit” to determine a way forward. With Habeck’s track record, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the steady flow of industry out of the country turn into a stampede for the exits following the meeting.
