The federal election in Germany on Feb. 23 produced no real surprises. With 82.5 percent turnout, the highest since reunification, all four establishment parties which had ruled the Federal Republic in various coalitions over the decades—Social Democrats (SDP), Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU Union), Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens—suffered setbacks, with the FDP failing to pass the five percent census.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD)—hysterically demonized by all other major parties and the media, and systematically harassed by the internal security service (the Orwellian-named Office for the Protection of the Constitution)—doubled its 2021 vote to 20.8 percent. This was a triumph, even if it fell short of the party’s enthusiasts predicting 25 percent.
The treatment of AfD is symbolic of the general malaise of the German public arena and the ongoing refusal of the ruling elite and its media to tolerate “democratic” debate. The word and the world are separated in their paradigm. The peculiar German propensity to trust the Will to trump reality has, strangely enough, become the prerogative of the morbid left.
The Cartel (as the AfD rightly calls the collective of the old mainstream parties) has already declared they will maintain the “firewall” against the Alternative. This means that no major policy changes should be expected from the new ruling coalition. Most likely it will be a black-red, CDU/CSU-SPD duopoly, depressingly reminiscent of Angela Merkel’s decade-plus road to nowhere.
The fruits of Merkel’s long reign are all too plain. As Alan Saborsky noted in The Unz Review last week,
In concert with government leaders across much of Europe, she began the unraveling of Europe and the ruin of Germany and the Germans. Her successors continued what she began, and extended it to other spheres. As one scholar recently concluded, Germany is itself implementing a suicidal policy of depopulation and re-population, de-industrialization and disarmament which was the core of the 1944 “(Henry) Morgenthau Plan for destruction of Germany.”
It is an even bet that under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Germany will continue to pursue effectively open borders, out-of-control immigration (and the resulting ever-rising crime rate), appeasement of jihad terrorism, continuation of various suicidal “green” energy mandates, and the self-defeating Russophobia devoid of any geostrategic or even moral sense.
All legacy political parties (now reduced to the trio of the Union, the Greens, and SPD) support, or at least accept, the above idiocies. The AfD rejects them all, of course, which makes the “firewall” literally impregnable for the time being. The Alternative is demonized as “neo-Nazi” for wanting to close the borders, deport (“remigrate”) unassimilable aliens, stop appeasing immigrant criminals, support the traditional family and German values, and actively work on normalizing relations with Russia. All that is just common sense, practicing politics (domestic and foreign) as the art of the possible, and therefore by no means “extreme.”
The Social Democrats experienced a humiliating debacle. Their 16.4 percent is the worst result of that old party in a general election since the Reichstag elections of 1887, back in the days when Otto von Bismarck was Imperial Chancellor. The SPD is nevertheless certain to be in the next governing coalition. The Union’s Bavarian wing, the CSU, is adamant that a deal with the Greens is out of the question, and the AfD is still on the other side of the firewall, which makes the Social Democrats able to dictate their terms regardless of their demonstrable electoral weakness.
Chancellor-designate Merz will oblige the suicidal left and he will betray his electoral promises in the process. He is a Merkel clone, a man of low morals and no principles. With 28.6 percent, the CDU leader achieved the second-worst result for the Union since 1949. Even Merkel, the architect of the ongoing decline, scored 4 percent above Merz eight years ago. The 69-year-old demonstrates that the desire for power corrupts just as much as possessing it does—even as one nears the end, politically and biologically.
The new Bundestag will be dominated by two declining parties devoid of ideas and energy, reconciled to the country’s continuing decline, and morbidly willing to use whatever political capital they have left to prevent any reversal or recovery. Even Oswald Spengler would be fascinated by this depressing spectacle of world-historic significance.
The center will hold, lest the barbarians breach the firewall. For the next four years, Germany will be ruled by the center-right and center-left duopoly, by two entrenched machines that are but mirror images of each other. This means more Allahu-akbar-inspired mass murders of German citizens, more rapes and other crimes by (mostly Muslim) migrants routinely swept under the rug, more “green” self-mutilating energy mandates, more DEI, more criminalization of free speech and more government censorship, more de-Germanization for the sake of post-postmodernization.
The Social Democrats are certain to water down any initiative leading to a political turnaround on any front of significance, and Merz is certain to oblige them. Indeed, he has indicated (even before the formal negotiations on the future coalition have started) that the unspeakable SPD Interior Minister Nancy Faeser may retain her post in his new cabinet. As I wrote last August, on July 16, 2024, she banned the “right-wing extremist” magazine Compact, accusing it of whipping up “unspeakable” hatred and undermining the country’s “constitutional democracy”:
This was an administrative act… Faeser boasted her ban against a “key mouthpiece for the right-wing extremist scene” was proof that the government was “taking action against the intellectual arsonists who want to incite a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants and defeat our democratic state.” “Our message is very clear,” Faeser added, “we will not allow ethnicity to define who belongs to Germany and who does not.”
This was the language of 20th-century totalitarianism wrapped in a rainbow banner. “We” decide what is “hatred,” and who hates whom, and how intensely/unspeakably, and what is “our” justified action against the enemy thus designated. This shockingly arbitrary decision by Faeser was overturned by courts in the end, yet Merz the “conservative” accepts that this woman should continue in the same post during his tenure.
Predictably for a Merkel clone, Merz is abandoning one election promise after another. Just one day after the election, contrary to the Union’s electoral manifesto, he agreed to use the lame duck Bundestag’s current majority to ease the constitutional debt ceiling—as demanded by the SPD and the Greens—before the new parliament is convened, when the requisite majority would no longer be available. This was a cynical ploy of Clintonian proportions.
The CDU never demanded “closing the borders,” Merz now says with a straight face, ignoring the fact that in January he had presented a resolution in the Bundestag—with the AfD support—that raised hopes among the Union faithful for an asylum turnaround. That was a gimmick to garner votes from the Bavarians, Hessians, Wuerttembergers, Rhinelanders and others in the West, who were hoping that CDU/CSU is still capable of returning to sanity at least on the existential issue of immigration. Now we know that they were naïve: they will get more of Merkel and Scholz instead. “Closing the borders” is canceled, period.
In the long term, all this will favor the AfD. In the years ahead, it could become so strong—some would say it is certain to reach that point—that it would no longer be possible to govern without them. The AfD’s score in the former GDR (East Germany) —in Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt—is so overwhelming that absolute majorities in the East are within reach. The electoral map of Germany looks amazingly like the Cold War map, with the former DDR a sea of blue (the AfD color) and the former West Germany overwhelmingly black (CDU/CSU) with a few islands of red (SPD).
In the years ahead, the AfD will have the opportunity to present itself as capable of governing. In Washington, its leader Alice Weidel can knock on an open door, unlike Merz who has, unnecessarily and unwisely, declared himself an inveterate Trumpophobe. With a Federal Chancellor who is as “conservative” as Mitt Romney, Germany will continue to be an oppressive leftist state on par with Canada and Sweden.
On balance, after the February 2025 election, the AfD is the only hope for Germany’s salvation, as Elon Musk has rightly noted. With the government in current form, however, it will take another four years of the Federal Republic’s decline into economic and moral decrepitude before the Alternative may get an opportunity to turn “hope” into a viable program of renewal and recovery.
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