Berlin
Angela Merkel’s time as “leader of the West,” to use the honorific the New York Times and CNN bestowed on her, lasted about eight months—roughly from the swearing-in of Donald J. Trump in January until people began throwing tomatoes at her during a September campaign rally in Heidelberg. “Traitor to the people!” the signs said. “Hau ab!” the attendees shouted, an instruction too obscene to translate. By election day, so loud was the whistling that outdoor rallies were moved indoors.
Merkel was campaigning for a fourth term as Germany’s chancellor, something only Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl had won since the war. On September 24, she got it, too, but at a steep price for her and for Germany. It was the worst performance for her Christian Democrats (CDU) since 1949. They got less than a third of the vote and lost ground in all 16 of the country’s states—this for a party that used to dominate the right of German politics and was capable of winning absolute majorities. The old party of the left, the Social Democrats (SPD), did worse, barely scraping 20 percent. Coming in third with 13 percent of the vote was the brand-new Alternative for Germany (AfD), an anti-immigration party that will send 93 members to the 709-seat Bundestag, the parliament in Berlin. The AfD brings a shudder to those who think of Merkel as the leader of the West. In a way, it is her creation.
France’s National Front, the UK Independence party, the Republican party in the Trump era . . . Germany used not to have groups like those. The rawness of the country’s memory of Nazism gave it an aversion to the style of politics now called populist. But something has destroyed the German party system. Possibly it is globalization or the mere passage of time. More likely it is Merkel’s invitation in the late summer of 2015 to refugees fleeing the war in Syria—an invitation she saw fit to extend without consulting parliament. Germany got over a million immigrants in the months that followed, virtually all of them Muslims, the vast majority young men, and most of them from places other than Syria. At the time Merkel appealed to the common decency of Germans: “If we have to apologize for showing a friendly face,” she said, “then this is not my country.”
Perhaps it is not. “Nazis,” said Merkel’s foreign minister, the Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel, “are going to speak in the Reichstag for the first time in 70 years.” That is an oversimplification. The AfD was founded in 2013 by a group of policymakers and economists concerned Germany would need to bail out Greece and other failing European economies in the wake of the financial crisis. It was a single-issue party, and that year it fell just short of the 5 percent required to get seats. In 2015, as the first reports emerged of migrants moving north across the Mediterranean, the party spokeswoman Frauke Petry had a brainstorm. Her backers, much more worried about Islamization than inflation, helped her oust the nerdy leader Bernd Lucke. The party now had a different profile. Petry was ebullient, eloquent, Anglophone, and East German, and beloved by the rank and file. Her party added to its core of concerned businessmen new groups of cultural conservatives and nationalists, not to mention extremists of all varieties.
Refugees began pouring into the country months later. On New Year’s Eve 2015-16, groups of North African immigrants isolated, surrounded, and groped hundreds of women on the square in front of Cologne’s cathedral. The details were not known to the public until weeks later, thanks to the obstinacy of local police in covering it up and of politicians in minimizing it. Soon the AfD was racking up seats in state parliaments, and lots of them—getting a quarter of the vote in the eastern region of Sachsen-Anhalt and even 15 percent in yuppie Baden-Württemberg. (In this fall’s national election, the AfD was the number-one party in Saxony, taking a third of the vote in Petry’s Saxon stronghold.)
Much of the media discussion faulted Merkel for one policy misstep or another. The migrants ought to have been better vetted. More should have been done to make the passage across the Mediterranean less hazardous for migrants, to create job opportunities in the Middle East, to explain the chancellor’s position. That is nonsense. The fears motivating Germans are matters of demography. Africa is going to add 493 million people between 2015 and 2030, according to U.N. statistics. Add, not have. There are few jobs for them. Many will head north.
The economist Thilo Sarrazin, an old-school Social Democrat, published a book in 2010 called The Abolition of Germany that became the country’s biggest nonfiction success since World War II. One of his bolder claims was that within three generations, Germany would have an ethnically non-German majority. Last year he published a sequel, Wishful Thinking, in which he admitted that the process was moving much faster than that. The migrants Merkel accepted in 2015 include about a million young men. That may not sound like a lot, but it is about 15 percent of the German men of their age. And the bureaucratic process of bringing their families from Syria and Afghanistan is already under way. Certain neighborhoods in Berlin—Wedding, stretches of the old East Berlin avenue Sonnenallee—have lately become heavily Middle Eastern.
It is common to snicker that voters for the AfD must not know what they are doing, since the party had its best scores in the parts of the former East Germany where immigration is lowest. Only 27 of the AfD’s 93 members come from the East. But a lot of the economically stagnant rural zones there will indeed be changed by migrants, because they have become spontaneously generated assisted-living communities. Houses are empty and kids are gone. They are tempting places to lodge the newcomers, and Germany lacks the demographic resources—the young volunteers—to teach them German and otherwise assimilate them.
The AfD is like the Republican party in the Trump era: It would be wrong to dismiss it as just a radical party, but there are radicals in it. A lot of the AfD’s voters are among the “losers of globalization”—22 percent are unemployed. But where Trump does best among seniors, older Germans still get the generous retirement benefits conferred in the 20th-century heyday of the welfare state. They give their votes to the SPD and CDU, and AfD support skews younger than Trump’s, with its core in the 35-44 age bracket. (It is striking how unflattered AfD members are by the suggestion their movement might have something in common with Trump. One intellectual close to the party described Trump as having a Pegidagesicht, a face that reminded him of angry, anti-immigrant marchers in eastern Germany.)
The AfD’s leaders have found it as difficult as Republicans to appeal to a party that is both radical and not-radical. The best account of the new AfD Bundestag delegation comes from Markus Wehner, a journalist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. They are overwhelmingly men, with an unusually high number of engineers and scientists among them. Some are aides to older members. There is the Berlin traditionalist Beatrix von Storch, who is not only a duchess but related by marriage to Karl Marx; the gun-rights advocate Enrico Komning; the Italian-born philosopher Marc Jongen, a onetime student of Peter Sloterdijk; the talk-show host Leif-Erik Holm; the prosecutor and former CDU Bundestag member Martin Hohmann, excluded from that party a decade ago for remarks deemed anti-Semitic. The variety is striking.
Last winter, Frauke Petry, hoping to become her party’s lead candidate in this fall’s elections, had a second brainstorm. She thought the AfD was ready to form coalitions with other parties, and to govern. To that end, she called for expelling Björn Höcke, head of the AfD in Thuringia, for a speech in which he had called the Holocaust Memorial in the middle of Berlin a “monument of shame.” She argued, probably rightly, that Höcke was making a sinister double entendre. But Petry’s resolution failed, for two reasons. First, most in the party do not yet want to make deals with the establishment parties, and such deals would not be offered even if they did. Second, while Höcke is at the AfD’s most mischievous rhetorical extreme, almost all the party’s members are vulnerable in one way or another to being shamed out of politics—including Petry herself, who has argued that Germans should once again be able to use the adjective völkisch, tainted by its use by the Nazis.
Once Petry lost her bid to be the top candidate, her days were numbered. (She announced after the election that she would sit independently of the party once the Bundestag convened.) Without her, the party had lost its most obvious chance at a candidate who could make it look like something other than a party of grumpy old men. But it was not at a loss for long. In April it picked two lead candidates, a common practice in Germany. One was Alice Weidel, a 38-year-old international business consultant living in Switzerland in a romantic relationship with a woman. The beautiful Weidel was given to storming out of interviews, setting off on right-wing tirades (complaining in a 2013 email leaked just before the elections that Germany is being “flooded with Arabs, Sinti-Roma and other people of foreign culture”), and wearing outfits that would let her blend in at a Catholic boys’ school of the 1970s (blue blazers, khakis, blue Oxford shirts, and horn-rimmed glasses). In the days after the election, Weidel said at a press conference that the questions she was most often asked by journalists were variants on the theme of: What’s a nice lesbian like you doing with people like this?
The other lead candidate was 76-year-old Alexander Gauland, a founder of the AfD, long a familiar figure in German politics. Gauland was a CDU intellectual who so often said outrageous-sounding things to convey that his party was going to hell in a handbasket that he finally fell out of it. The great novelist Martin Walser even wrote a roman à clef (Finks Krieg, 1996) in which Gauland played a starring role. Gauland warned his fellow AfD members after the election to be careful of “sound bites that could be used to paint the party as right-wing.” But like Petry, like all of them, he had already done a good deal of that himself. He told reporters that most Germans would not want to have the African-descended, Berlin-raised soccer star Jérôme Boateng as a neighbor—a misunderstanding, Gauland says, that arose from assuming his interviewers meant “Boateng” as a hypothetical foreign-sounding name. He also suggested that Merkel’s top immigration adviser, Aydan Özoguz, be “disposed of” in Turkey, after she made the multiculturalist assertion that there was, “aside from the German language, simply no such thing as German culture.” Picking on Özoguz showed the same inspiration as Donald Trump’s picking on Colin Kaepernick. Like Trump, Gauland has a gift for sensing when some media favorite has gone out on a limb where 90 percent of the country disagree with him.
Perhaps you could call Gauland a German Pat Buchanan. In conversation in his office in Potsdam, he sounds less like a radical than like a conservative in a country that has forgotten what conservatism is. He wrote a book on the history of the word “conservative.” His preoccupation is a specifically German puzzle: how to cultivate a Burkean conservatism in a country where the institutions through which Burke understood conservatism had been destroyed by Hitler.
This is a puzzle that Merkel has badly complicated. There was an extraordinary stability to the West German party system for a half-century after the Nazis. It was based in part on a superstition that there is a readily identifiable “left” and “right” in politics and that, in the wake of the Second World War, parties to the “right” of the Christian Democrats are extremist and taboo. What Merkel did was therefore logical. She transformed her party to make it indistinguishable from its left-wing rivals, the Social Democrats and the Greens. She could compete for their voters, confident no one would challenge her from the right. In 2010 she ended military conscription. In the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011, she announced an end to atomic energy. In 2014 she backed a minimum wage. In 2015 she opened the borders to migrants. Last spring she brought gay marriage to a vote and secured its passage, while professing, like Barack Obama until 2012, to disapprove of it. In the 2017 campaign’s one televised debate, which lasted an hour and a half, Social Democrat Martin Schulz could find nothing of importance to disagree with her on. He ran his campaign under the slogan “More Social Justice.” But after 12 years of Merkel, there wasn’t much social justice left unprovided.
Merkel’s strategy wound up discrediting the entirety of the political system. It weakened the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian Catholic “sister party” to Merkel’s own. Now it appeared to be little more than a wing of Merkel’s operation, dedicated to misleading people whose interests Merkel disregarded. The CSU got drubbed in this election. Almost a quarter of its voters fled. The Left party, which called itself an alternative to capitalism, had only a so-so election. It appeared to stand for nothing more than busing young toughs to harass the few hundred old ladies who gather in Berlin for the annual March for Life. All these parties together constituted what the AfD called a “political cartel.”
The migration crisis turned Merkel’s behavior into something more than a political-science question. As Berthold Kohler of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it, “The fundamental trust of many middle-class Germans was shaken.”
Some Americans will recognize in the uprising against Merkel an element of their boiling fury towards Barack Obama at the end of his presidency. The AfD’s advertising campaign capitalized on that. It was the brainchild of Thor Kunkel, a Petry friend and madcap author educated in San Francisco. Kunkel enlisted Austin, Texas-based Harris Media, which has run ad campaigns for Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, and Likud. Kunkel’s own literary taste runs to Thomas Pynchon, and his Endstufe, or Final Stage, is a historical novel about a little-known pornographic film studio that operated under the Nazis.
In 2013 Merkel had campaigned under the slogan “Ihr kennt mich” (“You know me”), and now she was traveling around the country saying the invitation to migrants “must not be repeated,” as if someone else had done it. Some in the AfD went so far as to call her criminal. Her invitation to immigrants required ignoring the EU’s Dublin agreements on refugees. Weidel announced after the elections that she hoped to investigate Merkel for “all the breaches of the law that lady has committed.” For better or for worse, Merkel was not the person the press presented her as. She was not “steady.” She was not a mother figure. She was impulsive, unpredictable, dangerous. “The Oath-Breaker” was the headline on one of Kunkel’s online ads.
The AfD’s distrust of the press is absolute. Today, the party’s activists complain, the press does little more than collude in Merkel’s project of shaming those who disagree with her. Merkel’s justice minister, the Social Democrat Heiko Maas, worked assiduously to limit negative comments about the wave of migrants, both on newspaper comment pages and on social media. So worried was the government about his unpopularity that 250 policemen accompanied him when he went to Dresden to give a talk in July.
Trust in all institutions in Germany has plummeted—and with it trust in the “European values” that Merkel invoked two summers ago. Earlier this year, two posthumous books by the historian Rolf Peter Sieferle were published by small presses, and one—a collection of notes called Finis Germania—made it to the top of the bestseller list. Many of its entries questioned Germany’s culture of Holocaust memory. Now, Germans have broken the taboo against voting for conservative parties. But one should hesitate before assuming that Germany is traveling back down the road to fascism. The sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn points out that, even if it wished to, Germany would not have the demographic resources for it. At the point in the 20th century when Western countries began wreaking havoc, the United States, Canada, and Europe accounted worldwide for 44 percent of fighting-age men (15-29 years old). Today they account for 11 percent. Heinsohn is not saying fascism cannot arise. But he makes a convincing case that Germany will not be the place where it happens.
Keeping the AfD marginalized nonetheless remains important to the other parties. Merkel is negotiating to set up a coalition between her Christian Democrats and two mutually hostile parties, the Greens and the capitalistic Free Democrats. The Social Democrats, with whom she has governed in two of her three terms, would be a much more logical pairing with her CDU, as there are literally no major issues on which they disagree with Merkel. But there is a problem. The largest opposition party in the Bundestag gets certain perks: chairmanship of the budget committee, for one thing. A lead role in speaking against the government’s legislative projects, which guarantees it daily television time, for another. Over the summer, the Bundestag preemptively passed a law to keep the 77-year-old AfD legislator Wilhelm von Gottberg from becoming the “Alterspräsident”—a title given to the oldest member of the Bundestag, entitling him to certain gestures of intergenerational respect. Under the new rules the honor will henceforth go to the member who has been longest in politics.
The people who are most uneasy about the AfD would have done well to focus their minds in 2015. When they applauded Merkel for a grand unilateral gesture that would change the country forever, did it not occur to them that someone might arise to defend the country as it was? Merkel and her party saddled Germany with problems to which it had long been immune. Its citizens have now begun administering remedies to which it had long been immune, too.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
