Germany’s second-most-regrettable chancellor is devastated by the electoral success of the Alternative for Germany party. She’s also responsible for it.
When Calais, a city once (almost) as English as Ceuta is Spanish, fell to the French in 1558, England’s regrettable Queen Mary (who may have inspired the naming of a certain cocktail) may have said that when she was “dead and opened, you shall find ‘Calais’ lying in my heart.” Given her part in the city’s loss, that would have been only fair.
And so to Germany’s second-most-regrettable chancellor, Angela Merkel.
The Daily Telegraph:
Angela Merkel said her “heart is bleeding” after the state election victory by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Saxony-Anhalt.
Sad. But, according to the newspaper, “analysts have accused the former chancellor of paving the way for the AfD.”
Analysts are right. The AfD was born as the “professors’ party” founded by two free-market economists and others opposed to the eurozone bailouts made possible by Merkel. A preference for a more restrictive immigration policy was a secondary strand in the AfD’s platform, but that changed after Merkel’s narcissistic and reckless decision to throw open Germany’s doors in 2015. The free-market strain can still be found here and there within the AfD, but Merkel’s refusal to countenance serious dissent to her policy within the center-right created an opening of which the AfD, transforming itself into a party of the populist right, took full advantage.
And the AfD only benefited further when Merkel, infuriated by popular opposition to her folly, became one of the pioneers of online censorship. As I noted in an essay in National Review in 2018:
The mainstream media had enthusiastically echoed the chancellor’s Willkommenskultur narrative of kindly Germans cheerfully greeting the migrants, but establishment unanimity was not enough for the instinctively authoritarian Merkel. Her less “welcoming” compatriots had found an audience on social media. That would not do.
Merkel thus endorsed a new censorship law, with the catchy name Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz. By doing so, she undermined her already tatty democratic credibility and reinforced the ability of the AfD to distinguish itself from the Kartellparteien (“cartel parties”).
The same year, at the annual conference of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (she was no longer leader but rather chairwoman of the CDU, and, of course, still Germany’s chancellor), the party turned an informal convention into a binding rule (Unvereinbarkeitsbeschluss) that the CDU would not enter into any coalitions or similar forms of cooperation with the AfD or the far-left Die Linke. This formalized the CDU’s contribution to the Brandmauer (“firewall”). The idea was to cordon off the AfD, but the consequences were not as intended. It took a while, but the firewall turned out to be an incendiary device.
A far better approach would have been to follow the lead of the Nordic region (rather belatedly in Sweden’s case) to draw the “far right” into the broader political marketplace.
Interestingly, Merkel favored maintaining something somewhat akin to a firewall against the AfD even in its early, free-market days, another reminder perhaps that some of her inner East German lingers on. Also interestingly, with her famous profile in courage on full display, she is now distancing herself from the concept of the firewall, although she says that she would not cooperate with the AfD.
Meanwhile, via The Economist:
How to deal with the “new-right revolution”? In an incisive recent study, Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, recommends “curiosity for their ideas and respect for their voters, rather than contempt and bemusement”. In Germany that would mean a willingness to talk to the AfD about its concerns over immigration, foreign policy and the energy transition, drawing red lines instead of erecting firewalls. No alliance with Vladimir Putin, a commitment to the Western alliance and the rule of law, a willingness to integrate legal immigrants—such conditions for co-operation would force the AfD to ask itself whether it wants to moderate its stance and seek political integration, or would prefer radicalism and continued exclusion.
That is also a better approach.
The problem for Germany’s unpopular Chancellor Friedrich Merz (who now heads the CDU) is that it would (as we mentioned yesterday) be very difficult for him to tear down that firewall even if he wanted to, which he denies. Doing so might well rip his party apart. Especially since it would require a formal change to the CDU’s rules. It is not something that can be done carefully and incrementally, as in the successful Nordic model. Merz is about as boxed in as it is possible to be.
The electoral result in Saxony-Anhalt may still be just a moment, albeit a big one. But if the CDU were to die (something that is still very unlikely), Merkel will have been one of its gravediggers, and the sides of its coffin will have come from the Brandmauer.