(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. El pánico al cambio imprescindible)

I reported on German elections for more than three decades, before and after unification, and although elections in the most powerful country in Europe were always important, they had never aroused the interest generated by this Sunday’s. There is a great deal of interest, but it is generated by anguish. And there is a great deal of fear, which in some cases borders on panic. Not only in Germany. In principle there seems to be no reason for it. The polls say that the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a member of the European People’s Party, is going to win. That it will need a coalition with someone. And that it is going to replace a government led by the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Which governed in coalition. That has happened many times. But that is where the similarities between this election and past ones end.

The fear in the great traditional European parties and the panic in the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels have reasons, and weighty ones. Because they all already know, although nobody dares to put it this way, that this election is going to be the last in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany in which the hegemonic social democratic ideology prevails against the interests of the German population. Because for the first time there is an alternative of real change, and Germans know that the current drift is making their lives worse day by day.

The system parties do not want to ally themselves with the only party that carries common sense on its banner, Alternative for Germany. Therefore, in order to set themselves apart from the “far right”, they have stopped using common sense, and they all share in the magical thinking of the left with total contempt for reality until reality runs them over, with tens of thousands of layoffs, with mass business closures, with people murdered in the streets, with a collapse of services and schools that are often in third-world condition.

This is a snap election, something that has hardly ever happened in Germany. The government of the socialist chancellor Olaf Scholz has had to throw in the towel a year early because his two partners knew that staying together to the end was suicide. It has been, and few doubt it, the worst government since the founding of the republic in 1949. Practically everything it has done has had negative, when not catastrophic, effects on the population, on the economy and on the country’s security.

The “traffic-light coalition” of reds, greens and yellow liberals has acted as a catalyst that has aggravated and set off all the ills of a Germany that has spent two decades now defying common sense, rationality and reality with an overdose of ideology, social engineering and uncontrolled illegal immigration.

All the polls say that the CDU will win, and its candidate Friedrich Merz has already said that since he is going to need an alliance to form a majority he will make it with Scholz’s socialists or with Habeck’s greens, or with both if one alone does not add up. In other words, German voters go to the polls in the certainty that Scholz’s catastrophic government will be followed by a government containing two parties from Scholz’s catastrophic government. And probably with the incompetent Scholz himself in it. Anyone who thought that experience had taught them a lesson was mistaken. They will go back to the same thing.

Some will ask whether there is any option other than that utter tedium which has those three parties governing together or in a jumble, as they have done for decades, and therefore responsible for the dizzying degradation of every indicator. There is, of course. There is the possibility of a grand alliance of the forces of the right, of the CDU/CSU with Alternative for Germany, which is already the second party and which some even fear seeing come first on Sunday. Which is what happened in Austria, where the FPÖ overtook and now doubles the other two parties, the ÖVP and the SPÖ, and is nevertheless still denied the right to lead the government. In large part because of the obscene and massive interference from Brussels and Berlin.

In Germany, Merz has said that he will never make an alliance with a party made up in large part of activists and voters of the CDU who are fed up with the drift toward the left, radical environmentalism, uncontrolled immigration and soaring crime, the hyper-regulation of green fanaticism and the ever more oppressive lack of freedom of expression and of academic freedom, imposed without distinction by those three parties which do the same thing and defend the same thing only because they want to be governing always, without real changes that would expose their colossal failures of this century.

A coalition of the CDU and the AfD could undertake, with a broad majority, the absolutely necessary reforms to pull Germany and Europe out of a disastrous, paralysing and impoverishing lethargy. The gap between the European economy and that of the United States, and even of China with its problems, widens by the day. But in Germany the debate is about controls and rules for regulations on controls of control rules, about how many drag-queen shows there should be in kindergarten, or about the heating appliances that the government imposes, ruining families, only to change the regulations afterwards. Politics is bent on obstructing everything that is not its business. And everything it ought to do and decide is left undone in order to avoid friction.

So, foreseeably, after months of negotiations there will be a coalition of the CDU with the socialists, with the greens or with both in another three-party government, in which the only thing they will agree on is to carry on down the road to ruin. Until that government succumbs. Then, foreseeably, the AfD will already be the largest party in Germany and will be close to an absolute majority. Although nobody can rule out that this very Sunday the nightmare of the traditional party interests, of the media and of the elites may be consummated, and that Germans may decide to bang their fist on the table by voting for the AfD, as Elon Musk recommends to them.

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.