From my observation point three miles from Germany’s southern border, I am pleased to report that the Federal Republic (at long last) is becoming a worthy subject of interest for political afficionados and analysts. For Americans, these developments suggest interesting parallels in their own politics and, more broadly, may reflect important trends in the West.

Berlin’s police chief Barbara Slowik has broken a taboo of long standing by saying that violence in the German capital, including knife attacks, is “generally” perpetrated by foreign young males. In an interview with the N-TV network on June 21 Slowik said that non-Germans are over-represented in crime statistics: “To put it bluntly: According to our figures, the violence in Berlin is young, male, and has a non-German background. This also applies to knife violence.” Attacks with stabbing weapons are on the rise, Slowik added, particularly among children (those under-14, in German nomenclature), juveniles (ages 14-18), and young adults.

Everyone between the rivers Rhine and Oder has known that much for years, of course, and Slowik’s verdict may apply to all of Germany, not just Berlin; but saying so in public was long verboten. For some decades now, Germany’s politicians, law enforcement agencies, and their media cohorts have gone out of their way, systematically and fanatically, to conceal two facts:

1. That immigrants (mostly Muslim, many of them welfare beneficiaries and illegals) and their German-born offspring, commit a stunningly disproportionate percentage of all serious crime cases in Germany in the 21^st century, and account for close to one-half of all prosecutable crimes; and
   
   
2. That an overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks in Germany, ever since the Baader-Meinhoff era, have been carried out by Muslims—by Muslims as such, and not by some mentally unstable, marginalized, generally misunderstood victims of racism and prejudice, as invariably claimed in the media-packaged elite postmortem narrative.   

Slowik’s matter-of-fact statement discredits sustained attempts by the open-borders lobby in Germany to claim, mendaciously, that there is no significant link between immigration and crime rates. This is all the more interesting since she is a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD)—once a decent center-left party led by rational men (Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt,  and Gerhard Schröder). It has long given up on advancing the interests of the regular native-born working people, however. Like its blue counterpart in the United States, it has become the party of Germany’s civil servants, teachers, and other strains of the publicly funded salariat. It is one of the two parties (the Greens being the other) of ultrasensitive urbanites and bourgeois bohemians who disdain blue collar deplorables, especially those in the former East Germany (DDR).

Like its American counterpart, the SPD—for close to two decades now—has been a deranged sect, operationally in the hands of posthuman fanatics. It strains to be on par with its Green coalition partners when it comes to condemning “racism,” “stereotyping,” “hate speech,” “xenophobia,” and the countless other mortal sins of wokedom.

Slowik’s seemingly heretical admission of the obvious does not herald the onset of immigration realism on the German center-left. It has the purpose comparable to Team Biden’s belated ploy to create the illusion of some sort of border control ahead of the November election. The SPD is in deep trouble, having scored worse than ever in its post-Word War II history at the European election earlier this month. In the former DDR, the party is down into single digits. But its attempt to reinvent itself á la Ms. Slowik is unlikely to work.

An increasing percentage of Germans in all socio-economic categories—and especially the young and the Osties (Easterners)—no longer have any qualms about voting for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the only real opposition to the establishmentarian quadropoly (SDP, Greens, CDU/CSU, Liberals). They know that trusting the SPD to deal rationally with immigration and crime-related issues is the equivalent of trusting Count Dracula to run a blood bank.

So far the well-heeled and otherwise protected enemies of AfD are running scared. Over a hundred leftist associations and foundations have called on Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) to reform Germany’s non-profit laws and let them engage in political activism while retaining their nonprofit credentials. This action was spurred by the AfD announcement that it will initiate a review of nonprofit status whenever groups enjoying such privileges agitate and organize rallies and demonstrations against it.

The activists’ appeal is not based on sustainable legal grounds but on ideology: that those who fight for the preservation of German democracy, as they define it, deserve special privileges by the red-green government. This time it may no longer work, however: not because the ruling coalition has suddenly become respectful of the rule of law, but because its senior partner—the SPD—is scared stiff of suffering further erosion of its already badly reduced support.

Germany has witnessed the work of many well-funded street initiatives by tax-exempt groups with a political agenda in recent months, such as Munich is colorful!, Greenpeace, and the Bavarian Refugee Council. Such groups have finally come under scrutiny for compromising their not-for-profit status by engaging in open political activism. It is noteworthy that their conflicts of interest have been evident for years, but no action had been taken—not until now.

The legal privilege of Germany’s nonprofit status entails hefty tax benefits. Associations that promote science or protect monuments or animal welfare, for example, are considered “non-profit,” and—just like the 501(c)(3)s in the United States—are tax exempt. The ability of politically obsessed outfits devoted entirely to the destruction of the AfD to carry on without tax consequences was a scandal, but after many years that scandal is finally receiving some long-overdue scrutiny.  

For example, virulently anti-AfD, far-left news site Volksverpetzer  (“The People’s Snitcher”) was able to call itself nonprofit for a long time, and to reap rich financial benefits in so doing. It lost that status in May, however, shortly before the game-changing European election. The website was subsequently obliged to pay tens of thousands of euros in back taxes. Over the years Volksverpetzer has repeatedly campaigned for the AfD to be banned.

Even in Germany, with one regime and four ruling parties, in and out of government for decades, there are stirrings, there is movement, and therefore there is hope that the regime in Berlin is not unassailable after all.