Denis MacShane / Feb 2025
Photo: Shutterstock
The German election is being reported by the BBC, FT and other establishment media as a “lurch to the right”. It has never been clear what a lurch means in the lexicon of political clichés but those in Britain or JD Vance and Elon Musk who went out of their way to endorse the AfD surely are disappointed.
More than 4 out of 5 German said “Nein Danke” to the AfD offer. Indeed the combined vote of the German progressive left – SPD, die Linke, Greens – was at 36.8 per cent not only nearly twice that of the AfD but significantly higher than the winning Christian Democratic Union and their Bavarian Christian Social Union allies at 28.5 per cent.
Compared to Italy where the far-right Mussolini heritage Georgia Meloni is prime minister the AfD is as far from power today as last week. Under Boris Pistorius, Germany’s effective Defence Minister, the Social Democratic Party, sister party of Britain’s Labour Party, will be an effective coalition partner.
There will be no lurch to the right as happened under Boris Johnson when Putin oligarchs showered money on the Tory party to obtain the hardest possible Brexit, a long standing goal of Putin’s European policy aimed at weakening the EU to create a Balkanised Europe of small, bickering nation states he can pick off one by one.
As British ministers go out of their way to appease Donald Trump, waffling about the fabled “special relationship”, a term never used or heard in Washington, the new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, denounced the Trump-Vance-Musk attacks on Europe as no different from Putin’s hostility to the EU.
The AfD remains cantoned in East Germany where resentment lies close to the surface that after the end of communist rule the united German nation-state made no special effort to raise the standard of living and inward investment into east Germany to bring investment, wages and public provision up to to west German levels.
German firms preferred to invest in the low-wage, obedient, non-unionised workforces of Slovakia, Poland, Hungary as a kind of third world labour market on west Germany’s doorstep.
Angela Merkel’s disastrous sequence of errors in the second half of her chancellorship including kow-towing to Putin, ending non-fossil fuel energy sources like nuclear power which pushed German electricity prices to the highest in Europe and above all her decision to open East Germany to 2 million Muslim Arab and North African immigrants from Syria provided the perfect petri dish in which racist and anti-Berlin sentiment grew.
In Britain, France, Nordic Countries, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland all the citizens without university degrees who felt ignored and treated with disdain by the elites of Davos liberal capitalism in power since the fall of the Berlin Wall turned away from classic ruling centre-right or centre-left parties and vented their anger by voting for demagogues like Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Matteo Salvini, or Geert Wilders who said all the problems the left-behind native white citizens faced would be solved if only governments stopped all immigration and even began a politics of “remigration”.
In British terms this is the old Enoch Powell politics of “repatriation”. When Powell first raised the racist flag half a century ago the Conservative Party repudiated him and went on to keep winning elections.
Now a top Tory journalist can write an article under the heading “Is Rishi Sunak English?” rather like American rightists disputing whether Barack Obama is American and all over Europe social media outlets and influencers which has replaced published newspaper as the main source of news and discussion amongst the non-university degree population pump out divisive hate stories about immigrants raping white girls or getting special treatment from the state and police.
The AfD is part of the European, including British turn to ethno-nationalist politics which is emotional and based on a genuine sense that modern governments are indifferent to the plight of so many people who cannot earn a living sufficient to buy a house or have a family or even pay electricity and water bills or shop for good food for children.
The new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, likes to jet around German in his private plane as a fabulously wealthy corporate lawyer. He is 69 so may be in a hurry to show he has the policies to turn Germany round. But France remains under a weakened President Macron who cannot impose his will on the law-making decisions of France. Britain is no longer a European player save as a member of Nato and Britain’s defence capacity has been reduced to a pitiful level after 14 years of Tory-LibDem cuts so the British Army is at its smallest level for more than two centuries.
But the hopes of Vance, Musk, Farage, Le Pen or Orban that the pro-Putin AfD would win big in Germany have not been realised.
The BBC’s Nick Robinson has begun reminding British listeners of the AfD Nazi heritage and its excuses couched in terms of “It’s time to turn the page” on German ethno-nationalist rightist politics of the 1930s.
After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine Olaf Scholz, the defeated social democratic Chancellor, spoke of a “Zeitenwende”– an historic turning point. He was in coalition with the Free Democratic Party who had got written into the German constitution a right-wing economic concept of a “debt brake” basically stopping Germany from borrowing money to invest in its future defence or Germany or infrastructure development.
German voters booted out the Free Democrats on Sunday by giving the party fewer than 5 per cent of total votes so they did not get over the threshold to enter the Bundestag.
A Black-Red CDU-SPD coalition allows Merz to spend on German defence and face down Putin. He will soon be seen as the leader of Europe. Meanwhile Britain sits on the sidelines of history many politicians still dreaming that being disconnected from European partners and allies is the best future for the UK.
