Tracking the Threats to German Democracy

In December, the German government—a coalition led by Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats—lost a no-confidence vote. Elections will be held next month. Scholz came to power after the sixteen-year reign of Angela Merkel, but has become unpopular amid a stagnant economy—one that was once the pride, if not exactly the envy, of the continent. The favorite in the election is the center-right Christian Democratic Union (C.D.U.)—which Merkel once led—although support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been growing in the country’s east. (Elon Musk recently made news, and attracted Scholz’s scorn, for saying that he hoped the populist AfD, which is defined above all else by its extreme hostility to immigrants, would win the election.) The most likely result is another coalition government, this one led by the C.D.U. and including the Social Democrats.

To better understand the state of German politics, I recently spoke by phone with Hans Kundnani, the author of multiple books about the country, and the former head of the Europe Programme at Chatham House, a British think tank. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Merkel’s once vaunted legacy set her successor up to fail, how the German far right is distinct from its European counterparts, and whether the lack of disagreement among Germany’s major political parties is a threat to its democracy.

What do you see as Germany’s central political problems? And do you view these as sui generis, compared to other countries experiencing political instability?

What you have in German politics is a permanent grand coalition. When Angela Merkel became chancellor, in 2005, there had only ever been one grand coalition in the history of the Federal Republic. Since then, grand coalitions have become the norm. She led a grand coalition for three of her four terms in office. Under Scholz, we had this so-called “traffic light” coalition, which is not technically a grand coalition because it doesn’t include the Christian Democrats, but it’s functionally a grand coalition. And that’s partly to do with the way that it includes parties from across the political spectrum. You have the Social Democrats on the center left, you have the Greens, who at least on some issues are a left-wing party, but then you have the Free Democrats, which is very much a right-wing party.

But there is such a consensus in the center ground of German politics that basically all the parties that might be in government agree on nearly everything. The differences are really very minor, which is very different from the United States. So I think of the Scholz government as a continuation of the Merkel consensus. And in the last election, three years ago, the two leading candidates—Scholz, who was the Social Democrat candidate for chancellor, and Armin Laschet, who was the Christian Democrat candidate—were essentially competing with each other to persuade the German people that they were more like Merkel than their opponent. Since Scholz became chancellor, the outbreak of the war in Ukraine has forced him to shift on certain things, especially about the need to spend more on defense and to look for alternate sources of energy.

Even if Germany is quite distinct in the manner of how much consensus there is, it’s also true that voters elsewhere in Europe and in the United States are unhappy with incumbent governments.

I think the anti-incumbency mood that you are talking about is a response to the failure of centrist governments to offer citizens solutions to their problems. France is a good example, where the far right, in particular, is getting stronger and stronger, and that then forces the centrist parties to close ranks and join forces against the extreme. This is very much how Emmanuel Macron presented himself when he first ran for the French Presidency. But that then means that they don’t really have a program that offers citizens very much and then the far right gets stronger. I think there is a version of that happening in Germany.

Do you think that the failures of Merkel’s sixteen years are responsible for the failure of this current government, in the sense of the decisions she made and their impact? I’m thinking of the initiative to get closer to Russia, of rejecting nuclear power, and of immigration, whatever you think of the moral weight of her decision on accepting refugees?

I think Merkel has been an absolute disaster for Germany in every possible way, and you’ve mentioned some of the ways in which she’s been disastrous for Germany. There’s another dimension to this, less often discussed, which is that there was something quite anti-democratic about Merkel. The AfD is explicitly a response to her “no alternative” politics. Even their name was a response to Merkel’s assertion that there was no alternative to her approach to the Euro crisis.

It’s important to emphasize that it was a consensus, so, in a way, it’s a little unfair to just blame Merkel. Merkel was just the expression of that consensus, and this brings me back to the point about grand coalitions. On all of these decisions, whether it’s economic-policy decisions—so, for example, we could talk about the debt brake—or whether it’s foreign-policy decisions like the German approach to China and Russia, this wasn’t just Merkel pushing this through; this was a consensus in German politics that included the Social Democrats.

Can you talk about the debt brake?

The debt brake was this limit on government debt and deficits that was introduced in the first Merkel grand coalition, in 2009. This was Germany’s response to the global financial crisis, which was to write into the German constitution a limit on the deficit and on debt.

Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democrat finance minister, was the key figure in that. Merkel got most of the remaining E.U. member states to agree to a similar debt brake. This has been absolutely disastrous, both for Germany and for the rest of Europe, because it’s limited much-needed investment in everything from infrastructure to education to defense.

I mention all that, because the one good thing that might come out of the grand coalition that we are likely to have after the election at the end of February is to get rid of the debt brake.

And how, specifically, do you see the decisions she made about closeness to Russia?

There was a consensus in the West—which was particularly strong in Germany, but it was also shared around the rest of Europe and even in the United States—that the more economic interdependence you had with China and Russia, the more they would become “civilized.” I think Europeans believed it more than Americans, and I think within Europe Germans believed it even more. And so the German version of this, which was particularly extreme, was called “change through trade.” It would make China and Russia responsible stakeholders in international systems, but it would also push them toward democratization. After the Russian annexation of Crimea, in 2014, and even going further back, to Putin’s speeches in 2007, you could see this wasn’t happening, but the Germans really dug in on this.

After Crimea, though, Merkel was widely praised for having coördinated E.U. sanctions against Russia in response to the Russian annexation. In fact, I remember people talking about how Germany, after 2014, had had a geopolitical awakening and had all of its illusions about Russia shattered, and it was now adopting a much more hardheaded approach embodied by these economic sanctions, which were actually quite limited. At the same time, Merkel was shutting down discussion about any kind of military response to Russian actions in Ukraine. Obama was President, and he was trying to start a debate about whether we should arm the Ukrainians, and Merkel immediately shut that down.

Perhaps even more important, what then happens is that Merkel pushes ahead with the creation of Nord Stream 2 [a natural-gas pipeline running between Russia and Germany]. In fact, part of her response to the Russian annexation of Crimea is to double down on this energy interdependence with Russia. She was still, I think, very much enthralled with this idea that that was a way of reducing conflict with Russia. There was also a certain amount of cynicism, I think, because this meant cheap gas for German corporations, and Merkel was very much in the pocket of big German corporations.