RESURGENCE OF THE FAR RIGHT CASTS A SHADOW OVER GERMANY’S POLITICS
▶ Frontrunners’ lacklustre election campaigns and apathy open door to country’s dark and dangerous past
It is fair to say that the vast majority of Germans have been raised to heights of frenzied apathy by the 2017 election campaign – despite the tectonic changes it will wreak on the national landscape.
Angela “Mutti” Merkel is cruising for a comfortable win, notwithstanding a few close encounters with airborne tomatoes, campaign-trail insults and a cleaning lady who pinned her down on air about her paltry pension after 40 years of work.
Her so-called prime-time TV confrontation with rival Martin Schulz of the centre-left Social Democratic party was so dull, the exchanges were dubbed a “duet instead of a duel”.
Germans, a rather insular people, have not taken to the streets en masse demanding change. The economy is whirring, joblessness palatably low, the emissions scandals of the car giants seemingly remote from everyday life.
This disinterest in the election comes despite the fact that after the vote is in, their country will have changed – and changed for ever.
For although Europe’s most powerful woman, the preacher’s daughter raised in the former communist east of a divided land, will enter the history books by dint of her fourth victory, there is a dark and sinister corollary to it, that she – and most of her countrymen – prefer not to talk about.
Her decision to open the country’s borders to unchecked immigration over the past two years has opened the Pandora’s Box of the country’s dark past, propelling into the parliament that bogeyman that all Germany’s leaders feared most: a hard right-wing opposition tapping into the basest emotions of the national character.
The Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is poised to win seats at the polls on Sunday. In four of the last five polls conducted before this vote, the anti-immigrant, EU-sceptic party has pulled up to third place. What began as an act of great humanity, borne in part out of Germany’s lingering guilt for the Second World War, has morphed into Mrs Merkel’s political legacy: perhaps, in the long run, even her epitaph.
Across the economic powerhouse of the continent the social fabric of society has been tearing ever thinner. While bogus right-wing scare stories of migrants raping, abusing, burgling and stealing have proved – mostly – unfounded, their presence alone has served to trigger the biggest rise in rightwing support since the 1930s.
They have also provided what passes for excitement on the tepid campaign trail. Bearing “Merkel Get Lost” and “Merkel Must Go” banners – as well as hurling tomatoes at the chancellor – the AfD is the only jolt in an otherwise snoozy vote-harvest.
However many AfD candidates end up in parliament – and one poll projects they will win 89 seats out of 703 – they will have been put there by disaffected voters who deserted Mrs Merkel’s CDU for the AfD in droves. And with 15 per cent of voters still undecided, the outcome could yet be more painful than she currently imagines.
This, say observers, is proof of the greatest fear among liberal politicians – citizens pushed into the embrace of the far-right and its intolerant attitudes that brought Hitler to power in the 1930s. Given the dangers lurking in this election, one might have expected more fire in the belly from Mrs Merkel, more passion from the blue-collar prophet and Social Democratic Party leader Martin Schulz in their respective bids to woo the electorate.
But election campaigns in Germany – whether local, regional or national – are not boisterous affairs.
In their one and only debate, the SPD leader and former EU president Mr Schulz succumbed to extreme civility and blew his one and only chance to revive a lacklustre campaign.
Their 90-minute face-off on September 3 was more a gentle trading of ideas – about refugees, the economy and even Donald Trump – than a political brawling match.
Mr Schulz lived up to his reputation as a charisma-free zone, Mrs Merkel to her “Mutti” (mother) nickname, alternately lecturing and admonishing.
The chancellor is not known for her light popular touch. When hospital cleaner Petra Vogel confronted her on TV to complain that 40 years of working have earned her a pension of just €654(Dh2,855) a month, Mrs Merkel was lost for words and short on empathy.
It is hard to define exactly where Mr Schulz went wrong, except perhaps to say he is no Angela Merkel.
His years steeped in EU bureaucracy also seem to have exorcised any ability he once had to connect with the man in the street.
Those who thought the Greens might rise once more in Europe’s most environmentally friendly nation have been bitterly disappointed, too.
The party is polling at about 8 per cent, its raft of new energy proposals failing to enthuse voters.
The general Gleich gültigkeit – apathy – surrounding the election appears to have at least benefited the far-left Die Linke party, with polls indicating it has the support of 10 per cent of the voting population, enough to make it a force to be reckoned with in parliament.
Come 6pm on Sunday, when the first of the exit polls will – usually with uncanny accuracy – predict the winner of the election, Germany will be a different place for Angela Merkel to govern.
Being the one who created the problem of the AfD in the first place, her task – if she gets four more years – will somehow be to solve it and steer Germany back on to the middle way it so cherishes.
The Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is poised to win seats at the election on Sunday