Juliet Samuel:
To the dismay of Berlin, the hard Right is gaining support and is now the main opposition party
The federal finance ministry in Berlin is an imposing building. It was designed to be. The uniform, grey edifice was first built to house Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe. Now, with the Nazi insignia long replaced by modern art, it’s home to Germany’s finest bean counters and their political masters. Thanks to the euro crisis it has, for some years, been Europe’s power centre.
Rebranding a building is unfortunately much easier than reorienting a nation, a task made harder by the fact that, since the Second World War, the very idea of a German nation as a political force has been a great taboo. Instead, with the creation of the European Community, Germans fled into the idea of “Europe” so as to avoid the idea of Germany. Self-effacement and internationalism were chosen as the vehicles of its redemption.
To the dismay of the political consensus in Berlin, however, the nation is back. The eurozone crisis, by revealing the widely disparate strengths Europe’s economies, raised the question of whether lenders or borrowers ought to pay for the resulting mess. Whatever the economic rights and wrongs – not least the behaviour of Germany’s banks – the political reality became clear: Germans might be happy to plough state subsidies into East Germany, but they do not want to pay for non-germans. And this financial fault line has spread, through the migration crisis, to become a question of religion, citizenship and ethnicity. Despite the pretence that it was becoming vestigial in European politics, the nation is still there.
The question is what to do about it. Germany faces a choice between soldiering on with its policy of “disappearing” into Europe or reviving and celebrating its nationhood. Sticking with the former is increasingly untenable, even dangerous, but the latter should make us all feel queasy. We know that what Germany decides, the rest of Europe has to manage.
The issue is being forced by the success of the hard-right Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) party. Just like Ukip in the UK, AFD has eaten into the electoral support base of the country’s conventional centre-right alliance, the CDU/CSU and, in March this year, the AFD became the chief opposition party in Germany’s Bundestag. The battle for the future is, however, being fought within the centre Right. Should the CDU/CSU tack Right to try and re-absorb those frustrated AFD voters, or should it stay close to the proeuropean, centrist consensus? Britain’s Tories can certainly sympathise.
In policy terms, the choices range from how to maintain Germany’s nuclear shield, currently provided gratis by the US, to what financial backing to give the euro and whether to stick strictly to the Schengen immigration system despite Europe’s failure to police its external borders. Culturally, politicians are suddenly called upon to take public positions on events such as the resignation of Mesut Özil, the German football player of Turkish origin, due to racial abuse.
Judicial controversies, long familiar in the UK, are also now popping up in Germany. Recently, its Supreme Court ruled that the state could not deport a Tunisian Islamist known as Sami A (who was reportedly Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard) because he might be harmed in Tunisia. The judges might have been following procedure in reaching their unpopular decision, but they didn’t exactly advertise their modern nous when they chose to notify the authorities by fax machine, getting the ruling through only after the deportation had been carried out.
Donald Trump’s withering verdict on German security policy, from its reliance on Russian gas to its anaemic military spending, has also set alarm bells ringing. Without the transatlantic alliance that forms the bedrock of its security, Germany might have to take responsibility for its own defence in very concrete ways. This year, for example, it will have to decide whether to be “European” by acquiring billions of euros worth of new Eurofighters to replace its ageing fleet, or whether to buy American so as to guarantee the new fighters are compatible with its Us-provided nuclear shield.
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron is pressuring Berlin on another front. He wants Germany to bless his plan for a massive EU spending splurge in order to boost investment, get unemployment down and increase support for Brussels. Germany’s political leaders have already agreed, in theory, to stand behind the region’s banking system, but their voters have had enough of funding the euro, so Berlin has balked at agreeing to the pan-european deposit insurance needed to make the banking union work. Doing so might well be a backdoor way of handing Mr Macron a smaller, less controversial victory, but it is strongly opposed on the Right.
For now, German politics are under the stultifying gaze of Angela Merkel. Having spent her entire career demolishing her potential replacements, the chancellor is now trying to line up a centrist successor to continue her legacy. But the times have moved on. CDU Right-wingers are instead eyeing Jens Spahn, health minister and loud critic of Islam, to take over in due course. In Berlin, there is even some plotting talk of forcing Mrs Merkel out with mass street protests and bringing back Wolfgang Schäuble, the former finance minister and “big bad wolf ” of the Eurozone crisis, to provide stability while new leaders emerge who would shift the party firmly on to AFD territory.
Most mainstream German politicos still hold firmly to the idea that Germany’s future must be a paneuropean one. They feel it is only by uniting the continent that Berlin can ensure its security against foreign aggressors, hold its own in economic tussles between the US and China, and keep a lid on the nastier elements of domestic nationalism. “Uniting Europe”, though, is a nice way of saying that Germany needs to spend more – on defence, on consumption and on the euro – in order to make the EU work. That is a platform unlikely to win.
Yet talk of elections or a leadership change won’t go away. The CSU, a key ally to Mrs Merkel’s party, faces a regional vote in Bavaria in the autumn and is keenly aware that its electorate is moving Rightward. Germans, like other Europeans, are hungry for a sense of belonging in a world of secularisation, globalisation and demographic change. However uneasy it makes the postwar generations of political leaders – and however unsettling it is for the rest of Europe – it is surely better for Germany’s conservatives to absorb these voters and freeze out the nasty fringe than to ignore them and risk a political cataclysm.
There is even talk of forcing Angela Merkel out so that new leaders can shift the alliance firmly on to AFD territory