Germany’s economic success would suggest that populism and nationalism will not flourish on this soil. The evidence is noteworthy. Chancellor Merkel presides over a fiscally robust country that boasts among the highest real GDP in the EU, a strong export sector that has produced a trade surplus of about €270bn, and in July this year an unemployment rate at just 3.7 per cent. After a sharp drop in 2009, the global financial crisis hasn’t restrained the upward trajectory of the German economy. Indeed, the Chancellor reminds Germans that they have “never had it so good.” [...]
Their historic breakthrough would suggest sound sustainable economic prosperity is no longer the main criterion for political success. The two main political parties behind Germany’s economic prosperity lost votes. Merkel’s CDU lost 7.4 per cent and former coalition partner, SPD, 5.2 per cent. What could possibly explain this seismic political shift? For the ruling parties to lose votes to a party that did not so much as promise any more economic prosperity, let alone guarantee to sustain it. That Germans have never had it so good clearly does not appeal nor apply to the 5,877,094 who voted AfD. [...]
Merkel has reportedly offered to listen to the “concerns and anxieties” of those electors from the east. How and to what extent her listening will test those safeguards and restrain the AfD within the political establishment is a key question. It is certain their participation within it will change Germany. An AfD leader, Alexander Gauland, is widely reported to have said as much: “we will change this country.” Contemplating how they would do it reminds me of Carl Schmitt, a famed German jurist who later became an unabashed Nazi supporter. He argued in 1932 that parliamentary democracy, as constituted by the principles of liberalism, had failed. He pointed to an impotent “weak Germany” as evidence. To build a “strong state” Germany must do “away with politics!”
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