(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Alemania vota y todos tiemblan)

The politicians of the parties of the globalist consensus in the Western democracies are determined to persist with their policies and remedies of the past thirty years in an obstinate attitude of denial in the face of the political earthquake that has first challenged them and today is already leading them slowly toward electoral defeats and marginality. As always, Germany is a case in which everyone must look at themselves, first because of its size and power, and second because it has a European Union tailor-made to impose its policies within it and therefore all its defects, excesses and errors. And the disaster of the European Union over the last five years is clear proof of this.

The rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is so solid and spectacular — its candidate for the chancellery, Alice Weidel, is already the candidate who enjoys the greatest sympathies, above Friedrich Merz of the CDU, Olaf Scholz of the SPD and Robert Habeck of the Greens. Even if the polls are borne out and the winning party is the CDU, its commitment to ally with anyone except the AfD, which occupies the space the CDU abandoned, augurs for the so-called “far right” the enviable role of sole opposition, as Giorgia Meloni was before winning the elections.

In Austria the FPÖ — ally of VOX in the Patriots for Europe group and the party of the same name now presided over by Santiago Abascal — won the elections, but the popular ÖVP, the socialist SPÖ and the liberals of NEOS have been trying since September to form a government against the sole opposition of the FPÖ. Well, in the latest polls this party has risen ten points since the elections and already adds up to more than the People’s Party and Socialists combined. Whether or not the tripartite government of losers is formed in Austria, one can already bet that there will soon be a government presided over by the FPÖ. The Austrian model is not far from the German prospects. Unless they start annulling elections and banning parties with foolish and clumsy pretexts, as some are trying, and not only in Germany. Then democracy is buried and we are talking about other things.

Now the German government has fallen because of its incompetence and because it applied a policy as demented as it was erratic in every field, and made Germany — and, in passing, all of Europe — a poorer, more frightened, more dependent, less free society. And of course much less competitive with the U.S., China and Asia in general, which every day increase their advantage in innovation, technology, competitive power and expansion against a Europe devoted to legislating, regulating and reglamenting everything to the point of asphyxiation, in a way of impeding all dynamism in the national economies that guarantees decadence, weakness and depression.

That is where Germany is now, in that depression which, nevertheless, the once-big parties — today ever more middling and some already very small — seem determined to deepen with the same policy. In Berlin and in Brussels, where the CDU, which commands the European People’s Party with its Ursula von der Leyen in ever more autocratic postures in the European Commission, has once again allied itself with the left and the ecologists, the great authors of the degradation and of the path toward inoperability and bankruptcy. And it has rejected all cooperation with the forces of the emerging right, which week by week keep increasing their weight throughout Europe, a phenomenon that the traditional parties view with panic but without a reasonable response.

The German head of state, Frank Walter Steinmeier, has dissolved the German federal parliament after the fall of the tripartite coalition government of Socialists (SPD), Greens and liberals (FDP), with a failed confidence motion. Thus died the most disastrous government in the history of the Federal Republic since 1949. Although a large part of the ills that have plunged Germany into its worst economic, political and social crisis come from the era of the as-glorified-as-catastrophic Angela Merkel, the disaster of the tandem of the mediocre socialist chancellor Olaf Scholz with the arrogant and ignorant ultra-ecologist green vice-chancellor Robert Habeck is without parallel.

But President Steinmeier thinks that everything must continue on the same course for the good of democracy. Steinmeier — a great friend, by the way, of Vladimir Putin — now celebrates the annulment of the presidential elections in Romania because the winning candidate is attributed with sympathies toward the former friend of Steinmeier, Scholz, Gabriel and so many German socialists that the current German president never hid over twenty years. And the head of state permits himself to speak of interference when Germany has exercised obscene interference in all the European countries and even in the North American elections since 2016. And it has installed puppet governments like the current one in Poland or the one it changed in Italy because it did not like it. Or von der Leyen’s threats to those who do not vote as she wishes, in Italy and other countries. It is not exactly Berlin that ought to bring up interference.

It has been a long time since the long German phase of that illness which is political consensus generated irreparable damage. The Grosse Koalition so praised in other places, the alliance between the traditional social democrats of the SPD and the social democrats converted from the Christian democracy of the CDU — both watched over by that other illness of German idealism turned ecologist fanaticism — in order to govern together or separately but always doing the same thing, has been a time bomb for these parties and for the system itself. The general elections for the new legislature are on 23 February and their mere calling is already cause for alarm. The times have changed radically. As Mikhail Gorbachev said to Erich Honecker, he who does not know how to read the sign of the times will be run over by them. Well, there you have it.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.