Opinions #36/24

Declared success, frightening defeat. Germany archived the results of the vote in the states of Thuringia and Saxony with confidence that the political phase was coming to an end. At the national level, the “traffic light” coalition led by Chancellor Scholz, fragile and turbulent from the start, seems doomed to struggle to complete the four-year period that expires in September 2025. The Social Democrats, Greens, and Liberals still cling to the government, but have long been a minority in the country. The bell of the European elections in June has already rung loudly, but the bell that rang last Sunday is reminiscent of an eviction notice. An expected but no less stinging defeat: “a bitter result,” according to Scholz. The winners, as expected, were the CDU (Christian Democrats) and, above all, the AfD, an extreme right-wing party, which evokes the unceasing Nazi nostalgia that survived Germany’s postwar period. In Thuringia, Björn Hocke’s party was the most popular: every third voter chose it. In Saxony, it is breathing down the CDU’s neck with more than 30 percent of the vote. Brandenburg will hold elections on September 22, and polls seem to confirm the same trend. These are three important lands of the former East Germany that first suffered the side effects of the imbalance of reunification and then turbo-globalization. Disappointments that were kept secret during the long years of economic prosperity, but which quickly exploded with the crisis that has been slowing down the “German locomotive” for some time now. But if the identity-based, sovereigntist, nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-European appeal of the AfD allows the rest of the political spectrum to brand it as fascist and anti-democratic, turning it into a ghetto in opposition, the situation will be different for the other party that wins the election: BSW. The Sahra Wagenknecht Union, founded just a few months ago and named after its leader, presents a dilemma for left-wing forces. Already a charismatic hero in the ranks of the Linke, a sophisticated intellectual and a charming orator, Wagenknecht embodies a new and unprincipled conception of understanding oneself as a progressive. Socialist on social, trade union, and financial issues; conservative on immigration; sovereignty within the European Union; critic of NATO; opponent of German militarism; opposed to rearming Ukraine. The notion of a “conservative left,” according to Pierre Rimbert and Peter Wahal’s (Le Monde Diplomatique) apt definition, which finds no analogues in Europe but could find them in America, where the Trump-Kennedy alliance summarizes the same, contradictory vocations. Thanks to a jump to 12 percent in Thuringia and even 16 percent in Saxony in the first election, Wagenknecht and her party have an excellent chance to enter the game of alliances between the two regions, but also, in the long run, after the next political election, at the federal level. The parties that have been in power for the last three years are in the grip between the radical right and the radical left. If the SPD found in Scholz only a faded copy of predecessors on the level of Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Gerard Schroeder, the Liberals pushed their willingness to enter into contradictory alliances to the limit. As for the Greens, having exhausted the glorious environmentalist-pacifist season that raised them to the rank of an important party in the German arena, they have squandered their electoral assets by becoming the standard-bearers of this militant, Atlanticist, and Russophobic Germany, which has gradually lost consensus in public opinion since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine. They, and Chancellor Scholz in particular, are accused of self-destructively agreeing to the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. A strategic goal of their own, conceived and implemented by the “Allies,” which has brought the German economy to the brink of recession due to soaring energy costs, with corresponding consequences for the working class, which now looks to the extremes of the political spectrum. And Thomas Flichy de La Neville’s analysis focuses on future Russian-Ukrainian postwar developments that reflect, in the foreseeable weakening of Ukraine, the possibility of another rebalancing of power between Russia and Turkey. While Tim Murithi from Cape Town suggests that we focus our attention on a great movement whose protagonists are more than forty African countries intent on creating a vast free trade zone. This is also an ambitious response to the crisis of globalization with an uncertain outcome.