Christian Democrats are now the third German party to move to the far-right. Scholz wants to be seen as the “Chancellor of peace”
Mathew D. Rose is an Investigative Journalist specialised in Organised Political Crime in Germany and an editor of BRAVE NEW EUROPE
On 22 September the state of Brandenburg in the Eastern part of Germany will elect a new parliament. Facing still another election debacle after those in Thuringia and Saxony a couple of weeks ago, West Germany’s legacy parties are frantically adopting racists policies of the fascist AfD as well as the SPD suddenly calling for negotiations in the Ukraine war.
With a few days to go, it is unclear if the German authoritarian liberal legacy political parties – Social and Christian Democrats, Greens, and Liberals – combined will obtain more votes than the AfD and Sahra Wagenknecht’s social-democratic BSW. This is surprising as the state of Brandenburg surrounds the city state of Berlin, which is dominated by West Germans. Many affluent citizens of Berlin moved to the beautiful capital of Brandenburg, Potsdam, just a few kilometres from Berlin, as well as into the many new suburbs that were built just over the border from Berlin following reunification. Thus there is a sizeable West German population that has colonised these parts of Brandenburg.
As in the 1 September election in the state of Thuringia, the AfD will probably win the most votes. The Social Democrats (SPD), who have dominated politics in Brandenburg since reunification, will according to polls be pushed into second place. The Christian Democrats, despite leading the opposition to the desolate current national coalition government of SPD, Greens, and Liberals (FDP), have made little progress and could even find themselves pushed into fourth place by Wagenknecht’s party that was only recently formed. The Greens appear to be losing over half their votes obtained in the previous state election, in which case they will fail to reach the five percent hurdle and will not be represented in the state parliament as in Thuringia. But then the Greens pivot to a fascist, genocidal, warmongering, Islamophobic party whose selling point is that they ride bicycles was never really a vote winner. The Liberals are worried that they will not receive one percent of the votes cast, in which case they would lose any claim to a campaign cost refund as happened in last week’s election in Saxony.
According to polls, the two main concerns of voters in the recent elections in Thuringia and Saxony were immigration and the war in Ukraine. The Christian Democrat leader, Friedrich Merz, lost no time following his party’s poor performance two weeks ago in demanding Germany introduce controls along its almost four thousand kilometre border to stop the entry of migrants. “Migrants” is a dog-whistle term in Germany for people with dark skin (for example white Ukrainian refugees in Germany are given better treatment and conditions than refugees with a dark pigment). CDU leader Merz claimed that the deteriorating conditions of schools, hospitals, universities, and housing in Germany were “the fault of migrants”. What he does not mention is that these problems are mainly the result of 16 years of CDU corrupt misgovernment from 2005 to 2021.
Of course the government parties, not to outdone by the CDU and lose votes to Merz, jumped onto the bandwagon and adopted these draconian measures of controlling the border and being permitted to detain “immigrants”. That arbitrarily introducing border controls violates the Schengen agreement concerning open borders between EU nations, does not interest the German government that flagrantly ignores EU laws whenever it suits its interests. During Covid it did the same. They pay for the EU, so no one will seriously object beyond making some loud noises. The only people who seem to have recognised the irony of the situation are the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán who wrote on X: “Germany has decided to impose strict border controls to stop illegal migration. Bundeskanzler Scholz, welcome to the club!”;
and the bête noire of the “good” German authoritarian liberals, the Dutch fascist leader Geert Wilders who posted on X: “Good idea, we have to do it too!”
Scholz decided not only to chase after the Islamophobic vote, but to try to woo those against the war in Ukraine, which his coalition government has foisted upon the German people. Both the AfD and BSW oppose the war, which resonates among German voters. At the beginning of last week Scholz announced that due to the urgency of resolving Russia’s war against Ukraine, he and Ukrainian President Zelensky had agreed on the need to include Russia in future peace negotiations. There have been additional reports that Scholz’s plan also foresees the transfer of “part of the Ukrainian territories” to Russia. This must have given Orbán double satisfaction after he was attacked as a Putin agent by German leaders last month for championing negotiations to end the Ukraine war. When others do it they are evil. When Germans do it they are “good”.
For Scholz the election is Brandenburg is important. His leadership and SPD candidacy at the next general election has been called into question due to the election results of two weeks ago and poor polling numbers at the national level. According to these, the SPD has lost 45% of its support. However in the past week an interesting development has occurred with regard to the Brandenburg election. The SPD support has increased markedly, while the support for the Christian Democrats has decreased markedly. In the elections two weeks ago one polling agency claimed most of the voters for the Christian Democrats did not support the party or its programme, but voted for them to prevent the AfD from winning the election. This may be repeated on Sunday, this time the SPD benefiting from such strategic voting. The irony is that Merz, if he loses badly, will be questioned as his party’s leader, while the hapless Scholz will be confirmed in his position.
This should not be a surprise. The legacy parties and their neo-liberal policies have failed their citizens miserably. All these parties have been in government in the recent past. The economy is in tatters as this graph of German industrial production shows. It has fallen more than 15 percent since 2017, in which period all the legacy parties steered Germany’s economy.
While the current coalition is forcing through austerity, Germany is literally deteriorating. One of the main car and tram bridges over the Elbe river in Dresden collapsed because the local government had repeatedly postponed emergency repair measures due to lack of funds. Volkswagen announced that it is planning to close down a factory in Germany for the first time in its history. Now Intel has “paused” the building of a 30 billion euro chip factory in Germany massively subsidised by the German government.
Public investment, despite a current lack of infrastructure investment of 700 billion euros, is according to the European Commission forecast to be the second-lowest public investment ratio of all EU countries in 2025 (probably last following Ireland’s thirteen billion euro windfall tax payment from Apple).
On the other hand, tens of billions of euros are spent by the German government to support the proxy war in Ukraine and the Israeli genocide in Palestine. Germans see this.
Real wages have still not caught up with inflation, which enables Germany to maintain its massive positive balance of trade. As the Austrian economist Philipp Heimberger points out
“Inflation-adjusted wages (under collective agreements) in Germany are today still lower than they were in 2020 before the start of the Covid-19 crisis. Real wage gains this year only make up about half the losses of previous years”
Despite a housing shortage and spiralling rents, the number of building permits for housing (these are only permits, some of which will not be built) has dramatically sunk to a level last seen in 2012, following the Great Financial Crisis. Seventeen thousand flats and houses in July for a population of over 83 million people!
With the next general election just a year away the West German legacy parties have serious problems. The CDU as the traditional opposition party should be well over forty percent, but remains at around thirty, although it has seen an increase since Merz moved it to the far right. The SPD has lost almost half its voters since its victory in 2021 and could receive as little as ten percent (it only won 13.9% in the EU election in June). The Greens are already at ten percent and sinking, having already bled a third of its voters as the youth turns away from the Green’s support of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, warmongering in Ukraine, and now its racist policies regarding immigration.
The German Liberal Party, the FDP, will have a challenge getting back into the Bundestag next year, again due to the five percent hurdle. The FDP is however truly a post-democracy phenomenon. It does not really have a political programme, being instead focussed on corruption through representing the interests of corporations – for a price of course. Wherever it has a minister, that becomes an additional source of cash for favours. Voters eventually tire of this and are sometimes even morally repulsed, as in 2013 when the FDP failed to reach the five percent hurdle due to its egregious corruption and was not represented in the Bundestag for four years. In other elections they simply do poorly, landing at just over five percent. They only need to wait four years for the next general election, in which time many people have forgotten the past, and the FDP is perceived as being a protest party, often even receiving enough votes to be an attractive coalition partner. This was the case in the previous general election when they won 11.5 percent of the vote. This may change in the future as there are now two major protest parties with the AfD and BSW, so no one really needs the FDP any more. Corporations do not care, as they purchase the votes they need in the Bundestag and state parliaments from whatever parties are in government.
What the West German legacy parties have in common is that they have lost contact and even comprehension of what most Germans think. The metropolitan elite they represent are gripped by the same panic pervading their political parties, resorting in the meantime to strategic voting. They have understood: elections are now not about policies but retaining power and wealth.
After the expected setback in Brandenburg next week, there is only one more election before the Bundestag election next year. In March the citizens of the West German metropolis Hamburg elect their state parliament. Hamburg is a bastion of the West German legacy political parties, so they will most likely be able to stabilise the current crisis and introduce a new discourse that voters are turning away from the new protest parties. However with the inexorable decline and isolation of Germany’s authoritarian liberal political class anything is possible, especially as the nation now has three far-right parties dictating the political discourse.
What the German authoritarian liberal political class does not recognise is its loss of credibility, authority, and the rot of the nation they have induced. Their lies, deceit, and hypocrisy, resulting in the erosion of justice and social equality, is threatening Germany’s cohesion, which a majority of Germans have now come to understand.
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