(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Duitsland staart na ‘Maagdenburg’ in een zwart gat)

Elon Musk stated this weekend in Welt am Sonntag that Germany stood before the economic and cultural abyss and with that put his finger on the sore spot. Thanks to the attack in Magdeburg, on 20 December, precisely what the German political establishment was trying to prevent happened: migration high on the agenda at the Bundestag elections of 23 February.

The governing parties – the social-democratic SPD and the Greens – and also the liberal FDP, which withdrew its ministers in November, are in a bad position. The Christian Democratic CDU/CSU is positioning itself more sharply, but is struggling with division. The attack is grist to the mill of the anti-migration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Germany stares into a black hole.

With the many Christmas markets in Germany there are many targets for malicious figures. The Saudi citizen Taleb A. raced with a car through the crowd at the Christmas market of Magdeburg. The consequences were terrible: 5 dead and 200 injured, of whom 41 seriously. In the attack by a Syrian knife-wielder in Solingen, at the end of August, three people died. German politics had just recovered from it, hoped for an election battle over economic themes, but the migration problems do not go away. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Magdeburg and was received with booing.

It is remarkable that German media focus not so much on the causes of the attack, but rather on an electoral theme: the ‘political instrumentalization by the far right’. By that the AfD is meant. Most newspapers and weeklies and also the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF immediately directed their reporting at possible ‘disinformation’ about the presumed perpetrator and denounced the ‘far right’.

Alice Weidel, the chair of the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag, immediately went to Magdeburg and gave a speech on the Domplatz. She demanded ‘echte Aufklärung’, the true facts, because the population’s trust in politics and media is at a low point. Many Germans have the idea that they are being lied to. Weidel drew, according to the police, an audience of 3,500 people, but anyone who saw the footage could conclude that this number was rather stingily calculated.

‘Magdeburg’ could not have hit political Berlin at a worse moment. The government coalition that, because of the party colors red-yellow-green, got the name ‘Ampel’ (traffic light), has fallen apart out of misery. The ‘Ampel’ is without power. The government of Olaf Scholz was actually a continuation of sixteen years of Angela Merkel, but then without Merkel.

It became the continuation of a bankrupt policy in the area of migration and energy and climate policy. Both themes threw the Federal Republic into a real crisis. At the end of June 2024 Germany counted almost 3.5 million ‘refugees’, with various residence titles. In addition there are 1.2 million Ukrainians who are not counted as refugees. With all the consequences thereof for available housing, education, healthcare and safety. As in the Netherlands, but then even worse.

At the same time the energy and climate policy has been causing economic stagnation for five years. ‘Deutsche Wirtschaft am Scheideweg’, concluded the authoritative Ifo Institute in a recent economic forecast. Employers warn of an exodus of companies, a ‘creeping de-industrialization’ because of too-high energy costs. The ‘Standort Deutschland’ is, according to employers, in the mire. Painfully enough it is the former automotive giant Volkswagen that is steadily steering toward the abyss. The closing of the excellent German nuclear power plants turned out to be the greatest stupidity in German postwar history. In the Netherlands the postponement of the construction of new nuclear power plants is an equally great ‘Dummheit’.

Germany is in the whirlpool of both crises: the unease about the excessive increase of asylum seekers and impoverishment through economic stagnation that especially hits less wealthy citizens. The same scenario as the Netherlands.

There are indications of what effect that decline has on the coming Bundestag elections. The mix of various polls gives a picture. The CDU/CSU, led by chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz, is polling between 30 and 35 percent. But Merz has to maneuver between the more right-wing partner from Bavaria, the CSU, led by Markus Söder, and the more left-wing minister-president Hendrik Wüst of the most populous federal state North Rhine-Westphalia. Wüst – who grew up in the border region with the Netherlands at the level of Aalten – is not happy with the right-wing course.

Merz, once parliamentary group leader of the CDU, was pushed aside by Merkel in 2002 and left politics. He went to work for the American investment company BlackRock and, according to the weekly Focus, amassed a fortune of around 12 million euros. After Merkel’s departure he returned. The relationship between the two is meanwhile less icy. Merkel even calls Merz ‘lieber Friedrich’.

The SPD is running with the sitting chancellor Scholz, a friendly man but powerless. The SPD is polling between 14 and 18 percent. The party would do much better under the leadership of minister of defense Boris Pistorius. Pistorius is, with his solid, calm and decisive approach, the most popular politician in Germany. But he does not aspire to the chancellorship. So the socialists have to carry on with the burnt-out Scholz.

The Greens are polling between 12 and 14 percent, which, given all the criticism, is not bad. Robert Habeck, the minister of economy and climate, pulls the green cart. Remarkably enough he suggests reopening the German nuclear power plants, but that may be a temporary flare-up until the elections.

The smaller parties dance around the electoral threshold of 5 percent, as does (once again) the liberal FDP, led by Christian Lindner, the resigned minister of Finance. The FDP fluctuates in the polls between 3 and 5 percent. Lindner has to stand out and maintains a discourse under the title: ‘mehr Milei und Musk wagen’, by analogy with the former slogan of SPD chancellor Willy Brandt: ‘mehr Demokratie wagen’. Lindner propagates an ultra-liberal course but showed little of it during his ministership because he was blocked by Scholz.

The Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW) scores in the polls between 5 and 8 percent. Wagenknecht is doing well in East Germany, but has to step it up a notch in the west. Die Linke, the right-hand successor of the former communist party of the GDR, has deflated like a flat tire.

The great unknown: AfD. That party fluctuates in the polls between 18 and 19.5 percent and is especially strong in East Germany. All other parties, except BSW, have excluded the AfD. The AfD sits in a ‘cordon sanitaire’ or rather behind a ‘Brandmauer’. Germans have a strange relationship with ‘walls’.

It is striking that the AfD leadership pushed Alice Weidel (45) forward as chancellor candidate. She is the friendly face of the party, but can also hit back hard. Her partner is a woman, Sarah Bossard. Weidel worked at Goldman Sachs and wrote a dissertation about the Chinese pension system for which she obtained her doctorate cum laude. She is so strong in debate that Habeck does not dare the duel with her. The radical strong man of the AfD, Björn Höcke, remains out of sight. With immigration Weidel has the ‘golden theme’.

There is yet a third factor: Germany is carrying out a reform of the electoral system. The Bundestag, now 736 members, must shrink to 630 members. That exercise is being carried out by henceforth making the ‘Zweitstimme’ central: that vote, cast for a party, determines the number of seats. With the ‘Erststimme’, cast for a person, one delegate is elected in each electoral district, who gets a ‘Direktmandat’. Both votes do not have to be of the same political color and that creates a gap. On that basis the number of delegates was expanded for the party that won too few seats to still get its directly elected candidates – with a Direktmandat – into the Bundestag. The Bundestag got obesity. That is now coming to an end: the so-called Überhang and Ausgleichsmandate are being abolished.

The AfD has few well-known candidates in the electoral districts, but campaigns with a vote-puller, under its own party name, on the desired theme.

Every election has its surprise. On 23 February too?

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