Tracking the Threats to German Democracy

In December, the German government—a coalition led by Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats—lost a no-confidence vote. Elections will be held next month. Scholz came to power after the sixteen-year reign of Angela Merkel, but has become unpopular amid a stagnant economy—one that was once the pride, if not exactly the envy, of the continent. The favorite in the election is the center-right Christian Democratic Union (C.D.U.)—which Merkel once led—although support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been growing in the country’s east. (Elon Musk recently made news, and attracted Scholz’s scorn, for saying that he hoped the populist AfD, which is defined above all else by its extreme hostility to immigrants, would win the election.) The most likely result is another coalition government, this one led by the C.D.U. and including the Social Democrats.

To better understand the state of German politics, I recently spoke by phone with Hans Kundnani, the author of multiple books about the country, and the former head of the Europe Programme at Chatham House, a British think tank. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Merkel’s once vaunted legacy set her successor up to fail, how the German far right is distinct from its European counterparts, and whether the lack of disagreement among Germany’s major political parties is a threat to its democracy.

What do you see as Germany’s central political problems? And do you view these as sui generis, compared to other countries experiencing political instability?

What you have in German politics is a permanent grand coalition. When Angela Merkel became chancellor, in 2005, there had only ever been one grand coalition in the history of the Federal Republic. Since then, grand coalitions have become the norm. She led a grand coalition for three of her four terms in office. Under Scholz, we had this so-called “traffic light” coalition, which is not technically a grand coalition because it doesn’t include the Christian Democrats, but it’s functionally a grand coalition. And that’s partly to do with the way that it includes parties from across the political spectrum. You have the Social Democrats on the center left, you have the Greens, who at least on some issues are a left-wing party, but then you have the Free Democrats, which is very much a right-wing party.

But there is such a consensus in the center ground of German politics that basically all the parties that might be in government agree on nearly everything. The differences are really very minor, which is very different from the United States. So I think of the Scholz government as a continuation of the Merkel consensus. And in the last election, three years ago, the two leading candidates—Scholz, who was the Social Democrat candidate for chancellor, and Armin Laschet, who was the Christian Democrat candidate—were essentially competing with each other to persuade the German people that they were more like Merkel than their opponent. Since Scholz became chancellor, the outbreak of the war in Ukraine has forced him to shift on certain things, especially about the need to spend more on defense and to look for alternate sources of energy.

Even if Germany is quite distinct in the manner of how much consensus there is, it’s also true that voters elsewhere in Europe and in the United States are unhappy with incumbent governments.

I think the anti-incumbency mood that you are talking about is a response to the failure of centrist governments to offer citizens solutions to their problems. France is a good example, where the far right, in particular, is getting stronger and stronger, and that then forces the centrist parties to close ranks and join forces against the extreme. This is very much how Emmanuel Macron presented himself when he first ran for the French Presidency. But that then means that they don’t really have a program that offers citizens very much and then the far right gets stronger. I think there is a version of that happening in Germany.

Do you think that the failures of Merkel’s sixteen years are responsible for the failure of this current government, in the sense of the decisions she made and their impact? I’m thinking of the initiative to get closer to Russia, of rejecting nuclear power, and of immigration, whatever you think of the moral weight of her decision on accepting refugees?

I think Merkel has been an absolute disaster for Germany in every possible way, and you’ve mentioned some of the ways in which she’s been disastrous for Germany. There’s another dimension to this, less often discussed, which is that there was something quite anti-democratic about Merkel. The AfD is explicitly a response to her “no alternative” politics. Even their name was a response to Merkel’s assertion that there was no alternative to her approach to the Euro crisis.

It’s important to emphasize that it was a consensus, so, in a way, it’s a little unfair to just blame Merkel. Merkel was just the expression of that consensus, and this brings me back to the point about grand coalitions. On all of these decisions, whether it’s economic-policy decisions—so, for example, we could talk about the debt brake—or whether it’s foreign-policy decisions like the German approach to China and Russia, this wasn’t just Merkel pushing this through; this was a consensus in German politics that included the Social Democrats.

Can you talk about the debt brake?

The debt brake was this limit on government debt and deficits that was introduced in the first Merkel grand coalition, in 2009. This was Germany’s response to the global financial crisis, which was to write into the German constitution a limit on the deficit and on debt.

Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democrat finance minister, was the key figure in that. Merkel got most of the remaining E.U. member states to agree to a similar debt brake. This has been absolutely disastrous, both for Germany and for the rest of Europe, because it’s limited much-needed investment in everything from infrastructure to education to defense.

I mention all that, because the one good thing that might come out of the grand coalition that we are likely to have after the election at the end of February is to get rid of the debt brake.

And how, specifically, do you see the decisions she made about closeness to Russia?

There was a consensus in the West—which was particularly strong in Germany, but it was also shared around the rest of Europe and even in the United States—that the more economic interdependence you had with China and Russia, the more they would become “civilized.” I think Europeans believed it more than Americans, and I think within Europe Germans believed it even more. And so the German version of this, which was particularly extreme, was called “change through trade.” It would make China and Russia responsible stakeholders in international systems, but it would also push them toward democratization. After the Russian annexation of Crimea, in 2014, and even going further back, to Putin’s speeches in 2007, you could see this wasn’t happening, but the Germans really dug in on this.

After Crimea, though, Merkel was widely praised for having coördinated E.U. sanctions against Russia in response to the Russian annexation. In fact, I remember people talking about how Germany, after 2014, had had a geopolitical awakening and had all of its illusions about Russia shattered, and it was now adopting a much more hardheaded approach embodied by these economic sanctions, which were actually quite limited. At the same time, Merkel was shutting down discussion about any kind of military response to Russian actions in Ukraine. Obama was President, and he was trying to start a debate about whether we should arm the Ukrainians, and Merkel immediately shut that down.

Perhaps even more important, what then happens is that Merkel pushes ahead with the creation of Nord Stream 2 [a natural-gas pipeline running between Russia and Germany]. In fact, part of her response to the Russian annexation of Crimea is to double down on this energy interdependence with Russia. She was still, I think, very much in thrall to this idea that that was a way of reducing conflict with Russia. There was also a certain amount of cynicism, I think, because this meant cheap gas for German corporations, and Merkel was very much in the pocket of big German corporations.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, there was discussion that the Scholz government would start reorienting toward alternative sources of energy, and that there was some need to spend more on defense. To what degree have these things actually happened in the last almost three years?

Germany did wean itself off Russian gas very quickly. It didn’t have much choice. I think that change never comes from within Germany; it’s always in response to outside pressures, because Germany is so attached to the status quo, in contrast to the United States, which is a very dynamic kind of society.

What I think hasn’t yet happened is much of a shift on German policy toward China. After the war in Ukraine breaks out in 2022, the immediate question is: What about German policy toward China? In some ways, that’s even more difficult, because Russia was a source of energy, but it wasn’t that significant as an export market. China is such an important export market for Germany. This is a challenge on a whole different scale.

This is a bigger issue, which is both central to the E.U.’s problems internally and to the relationship of Germany and the E.U. to the rest of the world, and that is the dependence of the German economy on exports. This brings us to the long trajectory that goes back at least to Merkel. Domestic demand is very low, and this is a problem for the rest of Europe. In the last couple years, there’s a sense that the German economy has become too dependent on China, specifically. The German response to that is: Well, we need to diversify our export markets, rather than questioning the over-all dependence of the German economy on exports, which is the real problem.

You said you thought there’s likely going to be a new coalition that comes to power in February. What do you think that coalition is going to be?

It looks as if it’ll be a C.D.U.-led coalition, but it’s almost certainly going to be a grand coalition. In other words, the coalition of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. But now it’s not even clear that between them the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats will have enough seats in Parliament to form a grand coalition. You might need a third coalition partner, like the Greens. So it would be a super grand coalition, which has now become the norm in German politics. And the traffic-light coalition three years ago was an attempt to not have yet another grand coalition, because there are all kinds of problems with having a permanent grand coalition, which everybody recognizes is disastrous from a democratic perspective, but there isn’t really an alternative to it.

We have seen established center-right parties disappear, but we also see some of them essentially just taken over by the far right, such as the G.O.P. in America. And we’ve seen some adopt more far-right ideas on things like immigration and so on. What is the C.D.U. doing?

The center right’s response to what it would call the rise of populism is to accept that the far right is speaking to legitimate concerns around excessive immigration, so therefore the center right needs to become tougher on immigration. But its response to the rise of populism has not been to say, broadly speaking, “Well, we think that they have some legitimate concerns around economic policy”—basically neoliberalism. They’re focussed on the cultural side. They believe they can defeat the far right by adopting far-right ideas around identity and immigration and Islam. And that, again, is a Europe-wide phenomenon.

But the AfD is really interesting because if you look at, say, Giorgia Meloni in Italy or even Marine Le Pen in France, in the last few years they have at least selectively moderated in certain policy areas. In particular, they’ve moderated their Euroskepticism. Now, there’s a big debate about how real that moderation is, how much it might change now that Trump has become President. But at least they’re playing with the idea that they’re becoming more moderate. The AfD is going in the opposite direction, becoming more radical over time, and still getting stronger in the polls. A lot of people hoped that Germany was an exception, that its history had somehow made it immune to the rise of the far right. I think it now almost seems as if it’s an exception in a negative sense—that you have a party that’s getting stronger and stronger, and yet becoming more and more radical over time.

I read a piece that you wrote in 2017 saying why the AfD could be “good for German democracy.” It wasn’t at all pro-AfD, but can you explain your argument and, I assume, why you don’t believe it anymore?

It wasn’t really praising the AfD in any way. It was driving at the comparative idea that in the United States the shock of Trump being elected in 2016 forced the Democrats to rethink a lot of their assumptions around economic policy. That’s how you get Bidenomics. I hoped that the shock of the AfD getting into the Bundestag in 2017 and becoming the leading opposition party would force the center-left and center-right parties in Germany to rethink some of their assumptions.

Now, that didn’t happen, in particular, because the center-right parties, including the C.D.U., drew all the wrong lessons from the rise of the AfD. But then, on top of that, the AfD has also changed. Even after it shifted away from its initial focus on economic policy, against giving money to other European states, it became about the refugee crisis and it became more radical.

There is a distinction in Germany between the so-called radical right and the extreme right. Radical-right parties, which are often what we would call right-wing populist parties, may have extreme positions on particular issues like immigration, but the idea is that they’re not challenging democracy itself. Once you cross that line and you do start to challenge democracy itself, or the liberal democracy of the German constitution, then you are categorized as an extreme-right party. That means that the German domestic intelligence service, the equivalent of the F.B.I., monitors you and investigates you and potentially prosecutes you. What’s been happening over the last few years in Germany is that the AfD in individual states, particularly in the east of Germany, are being categorized as extreme right rather than radical right. Now, the AfD as a whole nationally is not yet categorized in that way, but it’s on its way to becoming an extreme-right party. It’s increasingly becoming basically a neo-Nazi party, which is something different from just a radical-right or populist party,

We’re two weeks from Donald Trump being inaugurated, Italy is run by the far right, and France, in two years, could be run by the far right—but there’s really no chance that the AfD can come to power next month.

That’s right.

So then there’s something to be said for the German political system and all these things we’ve talked about, the over-compromising and the parties being similar?

We don’t need to worry as much about the AfD as we need to worry about, say, Le Pen becoming the French President. We see the same toxic dynamic in Germany as elsewhere, it just may be a little bit less advanced. In response to the rise of populism or the far right, the centrist parties tend to close ranks, and that in turn strengthens both far-left and far-right parties even more. This strengthens the sense that the centrist parties form a bloc or a cartel, and that voting for them doesn’t change anything, and therefore the only way to change anything is by voting for more radical parties.

Part of the problem that we’ve had since 2016 is that we’ve become so fixated on one particular threat to democracy, which is the threat from populism, that we’ve tended to think that that’s the only possible threat to democracy. As long as you don’t have populist parties in power, then everything’s fine in your democracy. Studying the European Union, and in particular studying Germany, makes you realize that there are multiple threats to democracy.

I’ve always thought that, in some ways, the problem with democracy in Germany is almost the opposite of the problems in American democracy. In the United States, obviously you have this problem of polarization. In some ways, Germany’s not polarized enough. And then on top of that you’ve got the problem of technocracy, by which I mean a massive growth of technocratic institutions in Europe and Germany, sometimes called counter-majoritarian institutions, and economic decision-making has been outsourced to them. What that does is take these decisions out of the space of democratic contestation. So technocracy is also a threat to democracy; it’s almost the opposite threat from populism, but it’s also a threat, because we’ve become so fixated on the problem of populism in Germany. This is against the background, particularly, of Trump.

Maybe this comes down to the distinction between threats to democracy and problems with democracy, because when we talk about the C.D.U. and the Social Democrats competing for the same voters in another boring centrist election in Germany, I can see the different ways in which the lack of real choice is a problem for democracy. I’m not sure I see it in the way January 6th is a threat.

Well, this is what I mean. We’ve become so fixated on things like January 6th. I think the German issue is absolutely a threat to democracy. One of the fascinating things about the rise of populism—and this goes for Trump in the U.S., but it also goes for the AfD in Germany—is that in the 2017 elections, the AfD brought 1.2 million non-voters back into the democratic process. This is part of the problem with our debates about populism, because we see it exclusively as a threat, but it can also be a corrective for a crisis of liberal democracy. If you have declining voter turnout where voters are switching off from the whole democratic process, that is a threat to democracy. I don’t think it’s enough to just say it’s a problem for democracy.

But it’s a little tautological to say that the threat is centrism as well as the far right, because people are going to stop voting thanks to centrism, and they will be drawn back by the far right. You are still saying the far right is the threat.

I guess so, yeah. But this is the way in which this centrist consensus itself produces populism. So yeah, you end up in the same place through a different route. And this part of the discussion started because you said, “Well, look, but maybe we can relax about Germany,” right?

Is it right that the AfD seems to have some ceiling of support given that Germany is in some sense two distinct countries still, and the AfD is just not going to have real support in the West?

It’s a little more complicated. There is this temptation to think that the problem of the far right is an East German problem, not a West German problem. Because you have an increasingly radical AfD that is able to do quite well in eastern Germany means that you don’t have the same kind of pressures on a far-right party to become more moderate as you do in, say, Italy or France, because there’s a strong enough base in those eastern German states as an incentive for them to continue to radicalize. ♦