Germany’s Nightmare Continues

The German federal elections have concluded, and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) came out the victor with 28.6% of the vote, and 208 seats in the Bundestag. Every member of the collapsed “traffic light” coalition lost seats. Now-former Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) lost 9.3% of their vote share, constituting the party’s worst ever result in a federal election, and its largest election-on-election loss of votes. Two million SPD voters switched to the CDU. The Greens lost 3.1%, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) lost 7.1%, falling below the 5% threshold to enter the Bundestag.

The Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) earned 20.8% of the vote share; gaining 10.4%, and coming in second. These include taking a million voters from the establishment conservative CDU, and attracting two million non-voters. This ability for national populist movements to attract disaffected conservatives and motivate low-propensity voters was what delivered Leave a majority in the Brexit referendum, Boris Johnson a majority in the 2019 general election, put five Reform MPs in Parliament in 2024, and gave President Trump two terms in 2016 and last November. AfD’s only losses (60,000 voters) were to the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – Reason and Justice (BSW) party: a socialist populist party which broke from Die Linke to promote immigration restriction.

However, Die Linke received 8.8% of the vote and 64 seats, whereas BSW gained only 4.97% and therefore no seats in the Bundestag. BSW co-chair Sahra Wagenknecht has suggested she will contest this, saying “The question arises as to the legal validity of the election results”, as some of the 210,297 German citizens living overseas complained their mail-in ballots were not provided or delivered in time to be counted.

Despite the AfD becoming the second largest party in the Bundestag, the incumbent Chancellor, CDU leader Friedrich Merz has said they are “absolutely excluded” from a potential coalition. Instead, the CDU and sister party the CSU will court a three-party coalition with Scholz’s failing SPD. Merz insists he is committed to more stringent illegal immigration restrictions and economic reform than his predecessors — but making the SPD his bedfellows gives Germans reason to doubt his sincerity. At the very least, it will be hard for the CDU to get any reforms through the Bundestag, with AfD leader Alice Weidel warning this coalition will be “a millstone around Merz’s neck”.

Why won’t the CDU respect the mandate given to the AfD by millions of Germans and form a majority government with them? When asked if Merz would form a coalition with the Greens if necessary, he said “It is completely irrelevant who supports this path [on migration] politically … I will not compromise on these issues.” But this openness to cooperation only seems to apply to those to Merz’s left, and therefore those least likely to support the changes. Merz admitted to meeting with the SPD, Greens, and FDP to discuss proposed legislative changes before the election, “but of course not the AfD, we don’t discuss such topics with them”. In its migration proposal, the CDU smeared the AfD as using “problems, worries and fears caused by illegal migration to stir up xenophobia and spread conspiracy theories”. If Weidel, a lesbian partnered with a Sri Lankan immigrant, is considered the second coming of Adolf Hitler, then the criteria for membership of the “far right” is so vague as to be meaningless.

The CDU have helped other parties maintain a Brandmauer (firewall) around the AfD: refusing to pass legislation by courting their support in the Bundestag. In January, 124 lawmakers — including members of the SPD, Greens, and CDU — supported an attempt to ban the AfD according to anti-Nazi provisions in Germany’s post-War constitution. This apparent paradox of insisting on censorship to “save democracy” is exactly what Vice President Vance criticized in his speech at the Munich Security Conference.

“I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process. protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential — and trust me, I say this with all humor — if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

But what no democracy, American, German or European will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.

Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t. Europeans, the people have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.”

For this, Vance was condemned by Germany’s Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, who insisted that:

“democracy does not mean that a vociferous minority will automatically be right, and they cannot decide what truth is. It does not mean that anyone can say anything, and democracy must be able to defend itself against extremists that try to destroy it. I am happy to live in Europe where this democracy is defended every day against its internal and external enemies.”

Merz concurred, promising to make his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can achieve, step by step, real independence from the US … especially after Donald Trump’s statements from last week”.

As explained in a previous essay, “democracy” as used by progressive politicians does not mean a system of government where each citizen is afforded a vote, and politicians are accountable to the electorate. Instead, democracy is the system by which man’s egalitarian nature is revealed by every election resulting in a predictable progressive victory. This is based on the “blank slate” assumption that we are all equal, that all differences are superficial and unnatural, and therefore that any inequality is a result of oppression. One need only censor and ban those who disagree for being “far right”, “racist”, and spreaders of misinformation, and everyone will realize the false consciousness of inequality we have labored under for so long. The will of the people can be ignored if their expressed wishes go against the ideological goal of equality. This is how they square the circle of authoritarian censorship to “defend democracy”.

This belief in the “blank slate” was put on steroids after the Second World War. As I wrote in another essay, in seeking to fulfill the promise “Never Again”, Europe’s politicians adopted a philosophy of value-pluralist liberalism and moral relativism, antithetical to Nazi racism. It enshrined this politics in institutions such as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights. As R.R. Reno explained in Return of the Strong Gods, any preference for one’s own family, people, religion, culture, history, heritage, and nation became synonymous with fascism. A policy of pathological openness had to be practiced, to prevent the smoke-stacks of Auschwitz from being resurrected. We had to act as if an anthropology of indistinguishable human sameness was really true — because making any qualitative observations about cultures and civilizations became the first step toward ineluctably justifying genocide.

This new post-War morality resulted in atrocities of its own. In the 1960s, sexologist Helmut Kentler housed orphans and neglected children in foster-care accommodation run by convicted pedophiles. Kentler argued that the “oppression of children’s sexuality” had produced the Nazis. (This, despite Weimar Berlin being notoriously exhibitionistic and sexually liberal.) Kentler was inspired by the psychoanalytic theories of Austrian Marxist Wilhelm Reich: who coined the term “Sexual Revolution” with a manifesto which argued for “the naturalness of genital self-gratification for the child”. German day-care centers encouraged children to molest one another; a practice which continues today under the guise of “comprehensive sexuality education”, as advised by the World Health Organization. In the 1980s, the newly-formed Green party employed Kentler in the Berlin Pedagogical Center. Members of the party advocated abolishing the age of consent for sex between children and adults. The AfD have since sought accountability for the victims of this abuse; but the modern Greens have accused them of “trying to instrumentalize this crime for its own purposes”.

More recent atrocities include the children and innocent bystanders murdered by Muslim asylum seekers, admitted into Germany by Angela Merkel’s policy of “Wir schaffen das”. These include: a 37-year-old woman and two-year-old child killed by a 24-year-old Afghan immigrant in Munich this month; a 41-year old man and a two-year old boy stabbed to death by a 28-year-old Afghan man in January; six killed by a car, driven by a fifty-year-old Saudi Arabian asylum seeker in December; two men and a woman stabbed to death by a Syrian asylum seeker at a “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen, last August; a 29-year-old police officer stabbed to death by a 25-year-old Afghan asylum seeker in Mannheim in May; and on, and on… Merkel once said, “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed. It won’t be the Europe we imagine.” German citizens continue to live a nightmare, so that its liberal political elite can continue to pursue their utopian dream of an antiracist world. It appears, with their deafened ears to Vance’s warnings, there are no number of dead children that German politicians are unwilling to tolerate to make multiculturalism work.

Author and demographer Paul Morland, the son of German-Jewish refugees who fled to Britain in the 1930s, wrote in the Telegraph six days before the election that

“My grandparents would be horrified at the shoddy, litter-strewn centres of German cities. They would be depressed to find out that, lacking confidence and pride, Germans have not been having enough children to replace themselves for more than half a century. 

They would find it deeply worrying that synagogues in Germany continue to be attacked and anti-Semitic slogans daubed on community buildings. They would be honest enough to see that the threat to Germany’s small and vulnerable Jewish communities, remnants risen from the ashes, comes from a new direction. 

The threat of a revival of anti-Semitism is [sic] Germany is real but it is far from the only problem Germany faces as it struggles to absorb the vast inflow of Middle Eastern immigrants it has received in the last decade. 

Germany must be ever-mindful of its past, and indeed its contrition for the Holocaust has been sincere, long lasting and exemplary. But it must also take responsibility for its future. It cannot do this if it is forever hobbled by a cultural guilt that prevents an honest and open discussion of what ails the country.”

Morland’s point is that, by failing to differentiate between cultures for fear of being called a racist, Germany is endangering its recovering Jewish minority with imported Islamic antisemitism as much as its ethnic German population. The twisted irony is that, in attempting to atone for the atrocities of the Holocaust, Germany has conducted a program of mass migration which has caused further death and destruction.

When these election results are broken down by age, we can see that this suicidal post-War ideology still lingers. In 2024’s Bavarian elections, the AfD was the most popular party for voters aged 18-24 in Thuringia (38%) and Saxony (31%). A third of Germans under 34 voted for the AfD. On Sunday, a majority of Generation Z (1997-2014) voted either to accelerate the socialist revolution with Die Linke, or for the AfD’s promise of remigration for foreign criminals and welfare dependents. The sexes were yet again divided: with young women voting for leftist parties 25% more than the national average, but young men only voting for the AfD at 4% more than average. This gender political polarization exists in almost every Western nation, though was less pronounced than was forecast at the US presidential election.

German Boomers (1946-1965), however, voted overwhelmingly for establishment parties CDU and SPD — both of whom presided over millions of migrants entering Germany, under Merkel and Scholz.

A misplaced sense of collective guilt for Nazi atrocities, which they were not alive to be party to, prevents German Boomers from ending these failed policies of pathological antiracism and mass migration. A healthier model of national identity, national security, and economic prosperity can actually be found in Israel. In No One Left (2024), Morland observed that the Jewish state relies on its strong ethno-cultural and religious identity, and cognizance of being surrounded by existential threats on all sides, to be the sole Westernized nation with a surplus birth-rate. Germany’s birth-rate has been sub-replacement since 1972; adding another excuse for politicians to open its borders to a prospective foreign labor force. However, 63% of welfare recipients are of an immigrant background; so politicians would be hard-pressed to argue migration has been economically productive beyond increasing the population, thereby increasing GDP. Instead, Israel has very selective migration, and maintains an enviably high GDP-per-capita. No wonder, then, that Alice Weidel told Elon Musk that the AfD considers Israel an ally, saying, “We need to protect not only the state of Israel… We also need to take our responsibility as a German nation state to protect Jewish life, Jewish people in our country, who are exposed right now to Muslim crime.” Hardly the rallying cry for Nazi sympathizers hiding in every beer hall.

After the Munich attack, Ayaan and I wrote that,

“Germans may have a chance at the upcoming election to, yes, vote for change. But whomever wins power, must recognize Germany’s fork in the road moment: do more of the same, and continue on the path of decline; or embark on the path of restoration of national identity, national heritage, and national security, and establish a government that serves and protects her citizens. The asylum system, and immigration more broadly, has become a way for people who hate our way of life to enter our home and attack our families. The culprits are predictable, the ideology known, and the pile of bodies already far too high. Act, for it is already very late.”

Germans have a lot more to be grateful for inheriting than they do to be ashamed of. Their nation gave us the music of Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, and Bach. The Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne extended the capacity of for moral dignity to all adults, made in the image of God — which later became the justification for the British Empire’s efforts to abolish the global slave trade. Despite the bloody wars of the twentieth century, without the Germanic tribes of Saxony, we would not have English common law, or English people at all. It would be world tragedy for Germany to commit civilizational suicide out of a misguided sense of collective guilt for historical atrocities.

The best possible atonement the German people could make for past sins is to not inflict avoidable harms on the children of the present, and to rebuild into a great nation per the will of their population. But I fear that this election will mean years more of a managed decline by a German establishment too afraid of being called racist to take the necessary action of removing the violent foreign criminals from their country.