Germans Say They’re Fed Up, Nazi Accusations Be Damned
In her political ads in the leadup to last week’s EU parliamentary elections, European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen bizarrely walks and jogs through a forest in her native Germany as she explains why she’s running. That she would retreat to the woods to make her electoral pitch is fitting for the ruling class she represents.
Across the Rhine from Strasbourg’s European Parliament building, in the dingy border town Kehl, a newly built mosque towers over the train station and greets arrivals to Germany. In the central region of Thuringia, the German national soccer team participated in anti-terrorist drills with local special forces during preparations for the 2024 European Championships, which Germany will host. (The team will wear purple and pink uniforms to reflect the “diversity of the country.”) The economy faces continued anemic growth, if not outright recession, as the country grapples with a dearth of Russian energy and aggressive climate regulations, among other structural flaws. Just as elsewhere in Europe, farmers have been in revolt. (RELATED: French Farmers Are Fighting Woke Climate Policies in Paris With Tractors)
Political violence has also been on display. On May 31, an Afghan migrant fatally stabbed a police officer and injured five others at an anti-Islamism rally in Mannheim. Video of the stabbing spree circulated online and instilled little confidence in police preparedness. One week later, again in Mannheim, an Antifa activist stabbed a politician of the populist-nationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Politicians of both populist and establishment stripes have been targets of violence this year, with predictably disparate reactions from media and politicians.
These developments might plausibly be dismissed as cyclical blips, likely to subside in a year or two. But another development, namely the widespread opposition to state-sanctioned immigration and multiculturalism, is unprecedented in the modern era.
First, AfD has attained record popularity, despite a cordon sanitaire strictly enforced by establishment parties. The populists even achieved a shocking second-place result in last week’s elections, a historical occurrence. (RELATED: A Message From Europe)
In one headline development preceding the elections, a regional court tagged AfD politician and former model Marie-Thérèse Kaiser with a fine of €6,000 and a criminal record for a 2021 Twitter post noting the extreme overrepresentation of Afghans in official government statistics on gang-rape crime. Elon Musk responded, “Are you saying the fine was for repeating accurate government statistics?”
A quarter-century-old dance tune paired with the words Ausländer raus! (Foreigners out!) has caused a societal furor. Police are investigating young partygoers shown in a video from the North Sea island Sylt. Some of those depicted reportedly lost their jobs, and one German politician demanded a maximum five-year prison sentence for participants. Nonetheless, the song has attained positions one and two (in different track lengths) on German charts.
Then, a poll from state broadcaster ARD suggested that 21 percent of Germans would prefer to see more white German players on the national soccer team. (According to soccer database Transfermarkt, nine of the 28 players in Germany’s Euro 2024 tournament squad were initially eligible to play for another country; six players in the Turkey squad were born in Germany.) The inevitable hand-wringing ensued. (READ MORE: What Europeans and Americans Really Want)
These are not intellectually compelling arguments for change, but they are remarkable in that they emerged in a Germany where national sentiment is tightly — even legally — suppressed. The partygoers and provocative pollsters might more constructively have asked, “You say this is a democracy, but when did we have a say in any of this?” The controversies should be analyzed in that light.
Germany’s manifest policy failures should also be analyzed from a context broader than Angela Merkel’s brazenly unilateral decision to admit over one million migrants — mostly young, male, and Muslim — in 2015. In his 2009 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Christopher Caldwell notes that 2.6 million Gastarbeiter (guest workers) lived in West Germany by 1973. “Recruiting, vetting, and medically examining replacements was expensive. So corporations pressured the government to make Gastarbeiter contracts renewable, to let workers’ families join them in Germany, and to permit those who had formed families to stay…Virtually no one in Germany would have considered this an acceptable outcome at the time the Gastarbeiter program was launched.” That last assessment has remained true throughout the German immigration saga.
By 2006, Germany had a foreign population of over seven million. In The Last Days of Europe, published in 2007, Walter Laqueur details German society’s immigration-related struggles with “ghettoization, re-Islamization, high youth unemployment, and failure in the educational system.” Indeed, the Afghan responsible for the Mannheim police stabbing arrived in 2013, two years year before Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” pronouncement. Merkel might have performed a coup de grâce, but Germany would be in largely the same position without her tenure. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 118: Conservatives Win European Elections, Shocking Leftist Elites)
Germans are increasingly saying they’ve had enough, Nazi accusations be damned.
Though the liberal establishment might be buckling, it does not intend to go quietly. Chancellor Olaf Scholz is among those piling on the Sylt partygoers. Establishment parties have conspired in recent years to ban AfD. The party lost a recent court case contesting the state security service’s directive to monitor AfD as a security threat. Earlier this year, the Bundestag passed a law to remove “extremist” civil servants and potentially deny their pensions. According to a June 6 press release, German police have recently raided over 70 homes in investigations of “online hate posting.” Germany’s Catholic Church, renowned for its doctrinal heterodoxy, has regularly jabbed AfD. Finally, Der Spiegel last month published a cover with a swastika superimposed onto the modern German flag and the headline Nichts Gelernt? (“Nothing Learned?”)
This specter of jackboots, so often conjured by the establishment class, is highly contrived. Nonetheless, something must fill the vacuum of decrepit liberalism in a country that has been demographically wrecked, culturally neutered, and bled dry for profit. A woodland banishment for figures like von der Leyen should be a productive start.
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