07 ISSUE IV
MARCH 2025
MARCH 2025
The German Firewall
Germany is moving to the right. But while right-wing parties gained the most votes, the left
made surprising gains.
made surprising gains.
By Stefan Liebich
A record number of voters went to the polls in Germany at the end of February: 82.5 percent of eligible voters. This is the highest turnout in 38 years. Many were dissatisfied with their government. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the ruling SPD led a so-called traffic light coalition (red: the social democratic SPD, yellow: the pro-business FDP, and green: the Greens) and had to pay the price. As a result of the elections, he will lose his job. His party, the SPD, got only 16.4 percent, their worst result in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949. His coalition partners did not fare much better. The Greens lost three percent and got a result below their expectations, and the FDP failed to clear the 5 percent hurdle and will no longer be represented in the Bundestag.
Unfortunately, the winners in this election are mainly to be found to the right of center. The center-right CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, won 4.4 percent more than the last time and got 28,5 percent of the vote. They are likely to produce the next chancellor in the person of Friedrich Merz. The result of the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) was shocking. It doubled its score and will enter the Bundestag with more than 20 percent.
But there was a surprise at the other end of the political spectrum. The democratic socialist party The Left (Die Linke), which was thought to be all but dead, won 8.8 percent of the vote and became the strongest party among young voters, and in the capital, Berlin. (As a footnote, it should be noted that a breakaway faction of The Left, which had formed an anti-migrant personality cult project, failed to clear the 5 percent hurdle).
So much for the raw numbers. What does it all mean? In recent years, the media debate in Germany has been dominated by migration and the war in Ukraine, which is a two-hour flight away. At the same time, many people were struggling to make ends meet and pay their rent.
The far-right AfD used every opportunity to declare that people from other countries who came to Germany were the cause of all evil. All the other parties, except The Left, gave in to this pressure and gradually made decisions to close the borders even tighter and make deportations easier.
In German politics, it is still taboo to work with the AfD, a party where one leader has used such extremist language that a judge ruled he could be called a fascist without fear of a defamation suit because such a description was a “value judgment based on facts.” So far, there has been no formal cooperation at the state or federal level, for example in a coalition between the CDU/CSU and the AfD. However, this “firewall” was challenged by the CDU/CSU shortly before the elections, when Friedrich Merz, to take a harder line against migration, sought and found a majority in the Bundestag with the AfD. This was met with horror and outrage by many people in Germany, who have taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands in recent months to protest against the AfD. The leading candidate of The Left, Heidi Reichinnek, found the right words in her response in the Bundestag, which was seen by millions of Germans on social media: “Mr. Merz, despite all our political differences, I would never have imagined that a Christian Democratic party - a Christian Democratic party! - would break this dam and make a pact with the extreme right. This is what you are doing!”
Russia's attack on Ukraine, which violated international law, initially led to a wave of solidarity. Refugees were taken in, and Russia was condemned. But concerns soon arose. What would be the impact on energy prices? A large part of the energy needs of East and West Germany had already been supplied by the Soviet Union during the period of German division; after unification, the share continued to rise. The understandable desire to support Ukraine's defense with arms supplies also met with resistance. Germany's history of waging Hitler’s deadliest war in the East against the Soviet Union created an equally understandable desire to use diplomacy to find a way out. And so Germany is divided on the question of what to do, and this has been exploited in the election campaign. Not surprisingly, the German people are finding it difficult to change course. Ten years ago, 80 percent were against increasing the number of soldiers or defense spending. Russia’s aggressive behavior has clearly changed that. After the Russian invasion, only 40 percent of people in Germany are of this opinion.
Germans do not see the greatest threat from Russia but from rising prices. There is a parallel here with the 2024 U.S. election that brought an openly right-wing government to power. The economic situation,and rising food and rent prices are more important to most people in Germany in March 2025 than the war in Ukraine or migration. Unfortunately, there is hardly any debate about this in the media. It is doubtful that the emerging government, with a weakened SPD and Merz (who was a director at Blackrock, the asset management firm that has interests in arms sales and fossil fuels) at the helm, will tackle the issue of justice. As a result, the AfD will continue to grow. The fear is that the firewall will fall, first at the state level and then at the federal level. Germany, too, would then be threatened by a slide into authoritarianism, as we are currently witnessing in the United States. The center-left parties in Germany, like the Democrats in the United States, have a responsibility to prevent this by pursuing policies that serve the interests of the majority of people rather than the interests of billionaires and corporations. What Die Linke calls, after economist Isabella Weber (of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst), an anti-fascist economic policy.
Stefan Liebich is the executive director of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung's New York office since 2024. He was a member of the German parliament for Die Linke (The Left) from 2009 to 2021.