It’s a testament to the strange contours of Germany’s political landscape that, while the physical effects of the Dec. 19 attack on a Berlin Christmas market have been based in the German capital, the center of the political fallout has been located some 360 miles southward. It’s too early to know whether the vicious attack, committed by a Tunisian asylum-seeker, will change the trajectory of Germany’s anti-immigrant far-right movements. But the attack’s aftermath has already produced a consequential divide between northern Germany and the south, whose respective political elites have been engaged in a rivalry that long predates the present migration crisis.
In other words, anyone who wants to understand the political fights that loom in Germany’s immediate future should probably spend less time studying the populist Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) than the entrenched political establishment of the southern German state of Bavaria — familiar to foreigners as the home of Oktoberfest and lederhosen — and the idiosyncratic culture that sustains its heightening feud with Chancellor Angela Merkel. [...]
This modern-era rivalry traces back to the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, when Bavaria fought on the side of France against Prussia; as a reward for its help in Napoleon’s initial victories, the emperor made Bavaria a kingdom in 1806, a designation that survived until 1918. Sixty years later, Bavaria again went to war against Prussia, this time as an ally of Austria in a contest among German-speaking rivals over which power would determine the political future of the region. Bismarck’s Prussia prevailed in this confrontation, allowing Berlin, not Munich, to take the lead in the 1870-71 war against France that produced a unified German empire under Prussian domination. Bavaria had joined Prussia and the other German states in this epic conflict, but only after its unstable king, Ludwig II, received handsome bribes from Bismarck. [...]
Merkel duly apologized for these embarrassing setbacks. Seehofer, by contrast, went on a rampage, issuing a statement demanding an annual 200,000-person cap on immigration as well as a preference for emigres “from our own Christian-Western cultural heritage.” If Berlin did not abide by Munich’s demands, the CSU threatened to field candidates across the entire Federal Republic in the 2017 general election rather than exclusively in Bavaria. “Our land must not change; Germany must remain Germany,” Seehofer blustered.
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