by Patrick Lawrence, The Unz Review:
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.
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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.
