The political and economic crisis in Europe’s largest economy is profound, and the need for a stronger left greater than ever, argues Leandros Fischer 

It was not entirely unexpected. Not exactly the most charismatic of public speakers, German chancellor Olaf Scholz made an unusually assertive speech on 6 November, announcing the dismissal of his finance minister, Christian Lindner from the ultra-neoliberal Free Democratic Party (FDP). Germany will now be heading for early elections on 23 February.

The announcement of Lindner’s firing may have been a stunning development, though it was not exactly a surprising one. The SPD-Green-Liberal coalition, in power since 2021, had been an uneasy marriage of convenience. While winning the elections by cosplaying on classical social democratic themes (and not least, on the back of massive public spending during the COVID 19 pandemic), the SPD, and to a lesser extent the Green Party, had been forced into a coalition with the FDP, Germany’s traditional market-friendliest party and purveyor of ‘fiscal discipline’. The economic convulsions in recent years had put a strain on German deference to the debt ceiling break, the notorious Schuldenbremse, which limits the government’s ability to borrow money. The FDP wanted to protect it at all costs.

In many ways, the FDP’s presence in the governing coalition served as a convenient alibi for the SPD and the Greens in the past three and a half years for the lack of any meaningful social improvement – ‘Yes, we would’ve liked to, but the FDP, you see…’. However, this alibi had been exhausted, as differences had by now become insurmountable. The proximate cause of the collapse of the ruling coalition had been the refusal of the SPD to pay for military aid to Ukraine by tapping into the reserves of the social budget. It wanted instead to loosen the fiscal constraints imposed by the Schuldenbremse. Needless to say, ‘support for Ukraine’ is something all three coalition partners agree on, even if the Greens have been out-hawking the other partners, especially the SPD, whose Scholz – quite tellingly – had a phone call with Vladimir Putin on 15 November. While Scholz reiterated his government’s support for Ukraine, the call marks a significant departure from the mood two years ago, where the collapse of Russia appeared like the only acceptable outcome to Western leaders.

End of the road for the ‘German model’

However, the breakup of Germany’s dysfunctional ruling coalition is in many ways a symptom of the palpable malaise the country finds itself in, which reflects the near-terminal crisis of the economic model that had dominated the Eurozone for the past two decades. The economic equivalent to Scholz’s speech was the recent announcement by Volkswagen – probably German capitalism’s most iconic brand – of plans to downsize production by potentially closing several facilities, cutting ten percent off salaries, and freezing those for the next two years. This adds another nail to the coffin of German industry, which had been the victim of skyrocketing energy prices and falling global demand for German products in recent years.

Indeed, the short-term thinking that had come to define the Merkel era has now come to haunt the country once described as Europe’s ‘sick man’ in the late 1990s. Coming to power in 2005, Angela Merkel had continued and expanded the ‘reform agenda’ of the SPD’s Gerhard Schröder, meant to overcome this stagnation. By liberalising the labour market and reconfiguring welfare on a disciplinary basis, German governments had restored capital’s profitability by squeezing real wages, which are well below productivity levels. This in turn allowed German industry to outcompete its main European rivals, notably France and Italy.

In many ways, the perpetual political crisis in France – the relative electoral collapse of the Socialist Party and the Gaullist right, the emergence of a centrist Bonapartism in the guise of Macronism, and the latter’s subsequent crisis – have resulted from French capital’s desire to emulate its German rival, as well as the steadfast resistance of organised labour to these plans. The last element stands in marked contrast to the collaboration of the German trade union bureaucracy, not only in accepting lower wages as the ‘price for globalisation’, but also in effectively partaking in the brutal austerity regime that German governments had imposed on the European South, particularly Greece.

The downside to this ‘export miracle’ was the religious adherence to export surpluses and the debt ceiling brake. Germany is a country with collapsing infrastructure and high levels of chronic underinvestment about to rival those of the US. Anyone who has travelled on German trains in recent years will easily reach the conclusion that ‘German efficiency’ is nothing but a well-cultivated myth. Furthermore, the world’s fourth largest economy is hopelessly lagging in digitalisation. Innovation also took a back seat, with German car companies, with their love of the diesel motor, left far behind in the development of electric vehicles by China. For the Merkel-led governments before Scholz, all this was a small price to pay for Germany being an ‘export champion’.

The geopolitics of the German model: From ‘normative power’ to global pariah

However, the bedrock of Germany’s prior export bonanza was not solely the increase in the rate of exploitation combined with ‘ordoliberal orthodoxy’, as the official German consensus was known. It was also the product of a certain geopolitical niche that German elites had carved out for themselves in the last two decades. German soft power had relied on the country’s foreign policy being understated and reactive rather than proactive. Accordingly, Germany was an ‘economic giant and a political dwarf’. Even though German governments post-1990 would follow a more assertive interventionist posture – participating in wars in former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Mali – they were sure to prioritise economic interests, which could only be served globally by the development of soft, ‘normative power’ within the framework of European integration.

The apex of this approach had undoubtedly been the Schröder government’s refusal to participate in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Germany did, however, provide crucial targeting intelligence to the Anglo-American forces). While being a proud Atlanticist who criticised Germany’s rejection of the war in opposition, Merkel continued this line. During the crucial UN Security Council vote on military intervention in Libya in 2011, Germany abstained. Such policies had the effect of providing openings for German investments in countries such as China, India, Russia, and South Africa, all the while preserving German economic ties with the US.

Yet the most crucial ingredient in this regard was the flow of cheap Russian gas, which had powered German industry for decades. The roots of these economic relations date back to Soviet times and Willy Brandt’s opening to the Eastern Bloc, the Ostpolitik. Even Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 did not dent Germany’s plans to proceed with the construction of the Nordstream pipeline, designed to bypass potentially troublesome states like Poland and Ukraine. Such economic thinking was reflected politically in the Merkel government’s failure to adjust its defence spending to the US-demanded level of 2 per cent of the country’s GDP.  The confidence of such a mercantilist strategy rested on Germany’s domination of the Eurozone. It was short-term thinking dictated by the particularist interests of German firms that did not factor in the depths to which relations between the US and Russia over Ukraine would plunge.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a game changer that put the country on a course of assertive militarisation, with even the reintroduction of the draft being openly discussed. The ‘mysterious explosions’ that put the Nordstream pipelines out of commission in October 2022 ensured that Germany would never again be dependent economically on Russia. The Scholz government has been actively participating in the escalation over Ukraine, something justified as making up for past naiveté towards Vladimir Putin. Yet the skyrocketing of the stock of Rheinmetall – the maker of the Leopard battle tank – cannot offset the detrimental effect of sanctions against Russia, which have seen the collapse of mid-sized industries in the past two years, especially in eastern Germany. The recent announcement by Volkswagen compounds an already desperate situation.

In these economic dire straits, the management of foreign policy by Green minister Annalena Baerbock has only made things worse. Promising a ‘feminist foreign policy’ before being elected, the Greens have walked on the global stage with the grace of an elephant. Following the collapse of economic links to Russia, foreign policy elites seem to have accepted the fact that competing with Britain for the role of the US’s foremost European lieutenant is the only game left in town. Yet they have made sure to play this part with the utmost arrogance and lack of self-awareness, pointing, for example, the finger and threatening China, the world’s second economic powerhouse, for its economic ties to Russia. 

Indeed, Baerbock’s ‘feminist foreign policy’ has so far included reducing the ‘collective West’s’ isolation in imposing sanctions on Russia by selling weapons to such paragons of human rights as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. More importantly, Germany’s unequivocal diplomatic and military support for the Israeli regime, as it commits genocide on the people of Gaza while expanding its war of annihilation to Lebanon, has witnessed the final collapse of German soft power, with the political foundations of German parties as well as the Goethe Institute (Germany’s equivalent to the British Council) becoming the target of boycott campaigns in the Global South.

Fascists at the gates

Deindustrialisation and a sense of collapsing national prestige have been classic ingredients for the strengthening of fascist forces as well as those ‘pregnant with fascism’, and Germany in 2024 is by no means an exception. There is, however, nothing irresistible about the electoral rise of the AfD, the ‘Alternative for Germany’, now polling close to 20 percent nationally and containing a growing internal faction of outright Nazis. Demagogically adopting an anti-war stance over Ukraine, the AfD is Germany’s version of MAGA politics, formulating a political antagonism between ‘the people’, who it claims to represent, and an economically incompetent ‘elite’ immersed in ‘woke politics’ and ‘political correctness’. Alarmingly, the AfD has made significant inroads into the working class, particularly but not only in eastern Germany, mirroring similar developments in France and the US. If polling around recent regional elections is to be trusted, racism and the belief that immigration is the key problem facing Germany is the prime motivation of AfD voters, with their pseudo-pacifist stance on Ukraine only playing a minor role.

However, the Scholz-led government has done its best to legitimise key talking points of the AfD. In the wake of Israel’s unfolding genocide against the Palestinian people in late 2023, Scholz publicly spoke of the need to ‘massively deport’ potential ‘antisemites’, which in this case always means German working-class youth of Muslim backgrounds, naturally inclined as victims of racism themselves to identify with the besieged of Gaza. The clownish minister of economic affairs, Robert Habeck, took to television around the same time to remind German Muslims that their acceptance as equal citizens was conditional on them throwing solidarity with Palestine under the bus.

When in early 2024, revelations surfaced of a secret meeting between high-ranking AfD officials and known neo-Nazis, discussing the ‘remigration’ of millions of people, not just migrants but Germans with foreign roots, massive anti-AfD demonstrations took place in every key German city. While the majority of protestors undoubtedly took to the streets out of a sense of genuine revulsion at the AfD, the organisers made sure their framing was one supportive, not only of the Scholz government but of key racist institutions such as the police. The irony was not lost on pro-Palestine protestors who tried to intervene at those demonstrations but were in many cases disturbingly kicked out with cries of ‘This is not your protest’. German liberalism, especially the Green variety, is being increasingly exposed as a set of racist and feelgood performative politics.

On 7 November, the Bundestag voted for a resolution allegedly targeting antisemitism, in which antisemitism is defined almost exclusively as opposition to Zionism, while enabling the denial or withdrawal of funding to researchers and artists expressing support for Palestinian rights. It is another step on the road towards authoritarianism and the shrinking of public spaces for critical thought. The resolution was worked out behind closed doors between the government and the CDU-led opposition, with MPs privately complaining of immense pressure exercised on them by the Israeli embassy and lobbying groups. The AfD enthusiastically supported the resolution, while Die Linke, the country’s bumbling left-wing party, shamefully abstained. Only BSW, a recent split from Die Linke led by Sahra Wagenknecht, voted against. Quite tellingly, the AfD congratulated the Greens, their alleged nemesis, for finally coming to their senses in recognising that the main source of antisemitism in today’s Germany is Muslim migrants.

The electoral growth of the AfD follows a well-known pattern through which mainstream parties try to ‘relate to the common people’ by adopting the talking points of the far right, thereby lending the latter more political legitimacy. The crackdown on pro-Palestine demonstrations and the cancelling of events featuring critics of Israel – many among them conspicuously Jewish – has been a key factor among others in the legitimisation of the AfD, which is not only dangerous to Muslims but has increasingly disturbing ramifications for Jews in Germany as well.

Since 7 October, government institutions and mainstream forces have done their best to instil fear in Jewish communities, reminding them at every step along the way that their real home lies elsewhere, in a state guilty of committing genocide. Symptomatic of this has been a recent headline in Der Spiegel concerning a foiled attack at the Israeli embassy in Berlin (edited since), which referred to the embassy as ‘the Jewish embassy’. What better gift to a party like the AfD, where many key actors hold a völkisch, antisemitic worldview, disguised behind an overzealous support of Israel. 

Die Linke: still without a spine

The lack of a credible alternative on the left is a further key ingredient in the rise of the far right. Die Linke, Germany’s main party of the radical left since the late 2000s, has seen its polling steadily remain under the 5 percent threshold needed to enter parliament. It remains to be seen if it can defy predictions next February and re-enter the Bundestag. Judging by its miserable election results in three eastern states formerly considered its heartlands – Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg (where, for the first time in its history, it was voted out of an eastern assembly), the future does not bode well.

The head of its slate during the last European Parliament elections, Carola Rakete, is a humanitarian with fuzzy, almost non-existent politics, who voted for increasing military aid to Ukraine. Its outgoing leadership has been an unmitigated disaster, taking no real stance over the proxy war between Russia and NATO and framing the cost-of-living crisis as completely irrelevant to increased inter-state rivalries. Key members of the party’s left took a couple of months before calling for a ceasefire in Gaza out of fears of being called ‘antisemitic’. With some exceptions the party has been absent from pro-Palestine mobilisations, with activists in the numerous Palestine solidarity encampments that proliferated at German universities last spring massively voting for MERA25, the pan-European formation of former Greek finance minister Yiannis Varoufakis, which has been vocal in condemning the German government’s support for Israel. An honourable exception to Die Linke’s feebleness has been the European Parliament member, Özlem Demirel, whose positions on both Ukraine and Gaza have been unapologetic. Nonetheless, as the saying goes, the exception proves the rule.

An increased sense that the party has lost touch with working-class voters has been key to the emergence of a new leadership at the party conference a month ago, composed of Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken, after the previous duo of Janine Wissler and Martin Schirderwan announced it would not seek re-election. It was a conference in which the left of the party held its ground, something epitomised by the abandonment of the party by some of its most right-wing and Zionist officials, who, however, have kept their mandates in regional parliaments with a view to keep destabilising and blackmailing the party from without. The new leadership was also boosted by an injection to the party of the entire executive board of the Green Youth, which collectively left their mother party recently, citing the Greens’ failure on migration and environmental issues, but also the fact that the Greens do not stand for an ‘alternative economic model’ to capitalism. It is not far fetched to interpret this shift as an indirect result of pro-Palestine mobilisation, in which many participants have come from radical environmental and anti-racist movements.

However, the new leadership has already failed its first test by abstaining on the misnamed antisemitism resolution in the Bundestag, allegedly done because one of the more right-wing MPs threatened the rest via a text message that he would vote for the resolution if they voted against. On the one-year anniversary of 7 October, Schwerdtner also put out a statement that, while condemning Israel’s actions, attributed ‘eliminatory hatred’ to Hamas, a terminology straight out of the Zionist playbook that proclaims Palestinian resistance as the heirs to the SS. Such spinelessness is glossed over with performative spectacles, such as the announcement of Schwerdtner and van Aken that they will only be collecting a minor salary in their new capacities as party leaders.

More crucially, the party has initiated a motion to expel German-Palestinian member and prominent solidarity activist Ramsis Kilani, based on the same cocktail of wild accusations, misrepresentations and distortions that was at play during the anti-Corbyn witch-hunt within Labour. This contrasts starkly with the lenience received by former Thuringia chancellor Bodo Ramelow, who – in violation of party decisions – has advocated for arms transfers to Ukraine.

One thing is certain: The party will not be advancing anywhere by attempting to please all and at the end pleasing no one. Focusing only on ‘bread and butter’ issues – an economism disguised as a ‘return to class’ – and hoping that the politics around the EU, Ukraine, or Gaza will somehow magically go away is something that the party has been doing for the past ten years with disastrous results. Moreover, it remains pure fantasy to imagine representing the working class in all its diversity by avoiding the one issue that unites all of ‘migrant’ Germany, which is, of course, Palestine. Should the party eventually move to the left, it will certainly not be due to some ‘clever inner-party strategy’ devised by its left wing but due to concerted pressures from extra-parliamentary movements that challenge, among others, the ideology of Staatsräson – Germany’s unconditional support for Israel – head on.

BSW – Not an alternative

Die Linke’s fortunes have not been helped by the electoral advances made by Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht), the national-sovereigntist split led by Die Linke’s renegade former speaker in parliament. BSW has eaten away at Die Linke’s support, especially among pensioners, in the last three elections in eastern Germany. According to polling, its stance on opposing the war in Ukraine has been one of the strongest factors for a BSW vote, as the party ran on opposing the stationing of new intermediate range US nuclear missiles in Germany.

Wagenknecht had been challenging Die Linke’s pro-migration policies since 2015, arguing that the party was losing working-class support over these. She has framed her politics as the most effective way to undercut the AfD’s appeal, going as far as attacking the government’s already draconian asylum policies from the right. Yet the last regional election results seem to tell another story. BSW has not weakened the AfD but Die Linke instead. Does this mean that Wagenknecht has got it all wrong?

Well, yes and no. She is definitely dangerous and irresponsible by opportunistically adapting to the prevailing climate of xenophobia, and on that she must be fiercely opposed, while BSW members who do not necessarily share her views on this issue must be challenged. There is nothing ‘natural’ about racism, an ideology cultivated by an assemblage of ruling class institutions, politicians and media. But this certainly does not absolve Die Linke.

It seems that BSW has found a niche as the only party in parliament (it inherited several Linke mandates following the split) consistently opposed to the German arming of Israel and Ukraine. Its vote against the dismal ‘antisemitism resolution’ stems from a desire to offset Die Linke’s continuing capitulations on foreign policy. Pro-Palestine activists seeking parliamentary support with queries on German arms deliveries to Israel report encountering an open door at BSW, while members from Die Linke’s left wing have to grapple with the byzantine internal politics of a party that also includes members proudly wearing IDF T-shirts at anti-Palestinian rallies.

Migration is not the only problematic area of BSW. Wagenknecht has repeatedly stated that her party is not of the left, because in her view the left today is associated with ‘identity politics’. While detractors are always quick to paint her party as a red-brown swamp, its emphasis on ‘sensible politics’ rather reeks of a pre-2008 centrism that views itself as the heir apparent to both the SPD and the CDU, before these two parties ‘went mad’ by becoming pro-war and ‘opening the borders’ respectively. No wonder that the BSW has entered coalition negotiations after the recent regional elections with exactly these parties.

Economically, the BSW’s ambition to take over the mantle of Die Linke’s past as a protest party does not sit well with Wagenknecht’s class corporatist outlook and its fetishisation of the Mittelstand, Germany’s small- and medium-sized enterprises that often employ hundreds of workers. The point here is that BSW is a party of serious contradictions, politically, strategically, and organisationally. It claims Die Linke has abandoned workers, yet it emphasises that capitalists opposed to ‘economic feudalism’ are welcome within its ranks; it makes anti-migrant noises, yet with last names such as Dagdelen, Mohammed Ali, De Masi, Nastic, and Hunko, it arguably has the most diverse team of leading members and MPs; it proclaims itself an open party with no ideological attachments, yet it is an exclusive members’ club with rigorous entry procedures.

The contradictions are partly due to Wagenknecht following the textbook of post-Marxist theorist of populism Ernesto Laclau in creating ‘chains of equivalence’ – connecting oppositional stances on a series of issues, some progressive, others reactionary, with her acting as the embodiment of the ‘popular will’. This is, however, an entirely reactive politics that will eventually be forced to choose a camp, left or right, if it wants to remain relevant. Such was the case with Podemos in Spain and La France Insoumise in France, which began along similar lines of ‘neither left nor right’.

The radical left is well advised to take these contradictions seriously with the goal of exploiting them. Viewing BSW exclusively through the prism of its social chauvinist attitudes to migration, themselves akin to those of governing Danish Social Democracy, is thoroughly mistaken. With a new Trump presidency looming, the pressure will grow on the left to fold in a front against abstract ‘racism’ – ‘Forget about Gaza, we have a racist US president now controlled by the Kremlin and spreading misinformation through “populists”.’ A position that views BSW exclusively as a right-wing split from Die Linke is completely disarmed in the face of such blackmail. Those allegedly ‘anti-racist’ forces, notably the Greens, have offered nothing to those facing racism on a daily basis in Germany but deportations, impoverishment, and genocide support. They are irredeemable.

In reality, the BSW is the mirror image of Die Linke’s drift to anodyne social liberalism. People with sincerely left-wing instincts, as well as opportunists of all sorts, are to be found within both parties. Rather than proclaiming any of these two formations as ‘the real thing’, a better strategy at the moment would be to broaden and expand the Palestine solidarity movement, which nowadays is the vanguard of oppositional progressive politics in Germany. Despite being isolated by most political parties and the trade union bureaucracy, the movement has proven resilient, loud, and extremely diverse, the nodal point of all serious struggles against racism, including antisemitism, against imperialism and militarism, ecocide, and, of course, genocide in Palestine.

Furthermore, the left has to speak to ever-growing dangers of nuclear escalation over Ukraine, which have resurfaced with Joe Biden’s ‘parting gift’ to Zelensky of allowing the use of long-rage US missiles against targets deep within Russia. Finally, any left that strives to be hegemonic will have to speak to the detrimental effects of deindustrialisation rather than just abstractly proclaiming that the solution lies in ‘class struggle’. Of course it does in many ways, but in themselves such struggles will not undercut the AfD’s appeal. The left has to be seen and recognised as the most oppositional force to the status quo, something that Die Linke’s grovelling to liberal audiences and the BSW’s pandering to the manufactured anti-immigrant mood automatically preclude.

Leandros Fischer is a socialist living in Germany and a former member of Die Linke between 2007 and 2022