(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Mil disfraces de la tiranía)

Europe finds itself in a state of alarm, declared by nobody, but so taken for granted by so many that it gives rise to political operations extraordinary in their irregularity, in their audacity and in the immense dangers that many of them entail. The trial of strength between the social democratic majorities of the two traditional parties and the growing forces of the new right has entered a very virulent and bitter phase. The former, greatly alarmed by the trend the elections are marking, have decided that anything goes. With the political debate lost, the parties of the left, which see themselves threatened and cast as the great losers, are seeking to resort to extra-political methods in order to check adversaries they did not reckon with only a decade ago and who now dispute the majority and the power with them in more and more countries.

Under the protection and the funding of Brussels, the Popular and Socialist parties and their satellites are assembling every kind of extra-political mechanism to try to halt the “far right”. A term by which they in fact refer to all the conservative and national parties that do not go along with social democracy, with social engineering, with wokeism and gender ideology, and with climate change as a pretext for interference, controls and the curtailment of liberties. The methods used supposedly to defend democracy are mechanisms of tyranny and they do away with every elementary condition of a democracy. Beneath the banner of democracy there arise a thousand different disguises for tyranny, which seek to defend a system of a single ideology but one already in irreversible shipwreck.

In Poland, for example, the OP party of Donald Tusk, a member of the European People’s Party, which came to power thanks to massive interference by the European Commission and the Berlin Government, has allied itself with the left to form an antidemocratic, repressive and abusive Government absolutely comparable to the delinquent and unconstitutional Government of Pedro Sánchez with his socialists, communists and terrorist and coup-plotting allies.

In France the favourite to be president is disqualified from office, turning into a crime for that purpose what for hundreds of MEPs were in their day no more than administrative errors. In Romania they outright steal the presidency from the man who had won it, on the ridiculous and false pretext, soon forgotten, of Russian interference. And in fresh elections they install a perfect woke president who owes everything to Brussels, like Donald Tusk.

And in Hungary they are preparing, for next April’s elections, the umpteenth assault to try to finish off Viktor Orbán and put in his place a puppet of Brussels and of Germany, like Tusk once again, whose name is Peter Magyar and who belongs to the People’s Party, but who would govern with socialists and the far left. In Austria, Berlin and Brussels have prevented a right-wing Government led by the FPÖ party even though it won the elections by a wide margin and today almost doubles the second-placed party. From outside, a Government of the People’s Party with the dying losers of the Socialist Party was imposed.

Nevertheless it is Germany, logically, that is the setting for some of the most significant of these operations of social democratic and globalist bunkerisation aimed at trying to prevent the change of era and to ignore the popular will. Unheard-of things happen there. It is in Berlin that the latest episode reveals the strategy of the left throughout Europe. It is there that deputies of the traditional centre-right party, the CDU, of the European People’s Party, rebelled last week against an agreement by their leaders with the socialists to elect new judges of the Constitutional Court. They say they did so because one left-wing candidate is unbearably radical in seeking abortion up to the day of birth.

But beyond an act of rebellion against Chancellor Friedrich Merz for pursuing an election that is ethically unacceptable to them, what they in fact did was to block, for the moment at least, the assault on the Constitutional Court by an ever more radicalised SPD left, intended to cement by summary means a banning of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which has already comfortably passed 25%, in several states exceeds a third and in one comes close to an absolute majority.

The AfD, in continuous growth and expansion, is the only existing potential partner of the CDU for a conservative coalition and for a real change of course, not merely the cosmetic one of today. That radical change and liberating change of tack is what Germany needs in order to emerge from the degradation and the economic collapse imposed by the red-green ideology, thanks precisely to the complicity of the CDU, the party of Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard and Helmut Kohl, which under the disastrous Angela Merkel turned into another social democratic force like the SPD, harvesting conservative votes for social democratic and radical ecological policies.

The irruption of the AfD onto the political stage has radically changed the situation. Logic dictates that when this latest attempt at a coalition between the SPD and the CDU, with a policy indistinguishable from that of left-wing governments, fails, the cadres of the CDU will opt to break the cordon sanitaire around the AfD. The vote against the left-wing judge was a first stirring in that direction and against a chancellor locked in an embrace with the SPD. Once that antidemocratic veto on an alliance with the AfD, self-imposed under pressure from the left, is broken, they could move towards that grand alliance of the German right which today already commands an immense majority, in a CDU-AfD or AfD-CDU coalition. Banning the AfD, which is practically impossible without a very militantly left-wing Constitutional Court, would leave Germany without an alternative to governments of an ever more radical, intolerant and irrational left. And the CDU would be condemned to be a party held prisoner or a satellite of a systematic left-wing majority within an already socialist system. And a majority of the voting population, that of the AfD or of the alliance with the AfD, would be definitively outside the system.

The unheard-of uprising of the CDU deputies against Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in refusing on Friday to vote for the radical socialist candidate Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, has blocked that whole process. The rebels insist that it is because of this candidate’s brutal position on the question of respect for life, since she defends a right to abortion up to the very day of birth. The CDU deputies said that this position is incompatible with the position of their Christian Democratic party, but also with that of the Constitution, which speaks of the absolute dignity of human life.

The German Parliament, the Bundestag, was going to vote through that partial renewal of the Constitutional Court without any great upset. The candidates had been agreed within the leadership of the federal government coalition between the CDU and the SPD, where ideologically the left always prevails. That very Friday morning Chancellor Merz believed it to be little more than a formality that would help to give at least the appearance of normality to an ever more unpopular Government whose only efficient achievement has been to send soaring a debt that until recently was prohibited.

The colossal indebtedness in which the new Government is immersing itself ceased to be prohibited thanks to a far-fetched manoeuvre that led to the necessary constitutional change being voted on by the Parliament of the previous legislature, because in the new one there was no majority for it. Everything is exceptional manoeuvring, bordering on illegality and unconstitutionality, but in any case fully immersed in political indecency. If in every European country the levels of irregularity now being imposed on institutional relations and on the exercise of executive power are alarming, in Germany they are doubly so, because its rigour and scruple had very concrete reasons in the marking of a difference from a shadowy past. Certainly what they are allowing themselves today has never been seen in German institutional politics since the founding of the Federal Republic on the ashes of National Socialism.

Since they are not allowed to make pacts with the AfD, the CDU builds majorities on the other side and, if necessary, buys them from the green and communist far left. That too is what the parallel budget they have arranged within the coalition is for. If something has to be given to the Greens, they are given 100 billion in ecological transition, which is nothing but financing for the ruin of industrial Germany. Or they are granted the anchoring in the Constitution of the preposterous objective of “climate neutrality”, because when it comes to clowning of that sort the Christian Democrats are as enthusiastic as authentic social democrats.

The German economy is in its death throes just as it was under the previous left-wing Government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which foundered resoundingly without finishing the legislature. This week six large chemical companies have announced factory closures or relocation to the United States. But it makes no difference, because the problem is not the immigration that is plunging municipalities and the social security system into insecurity, anxiety and ruin. The problem is not the industrial dismantling, the disaster of research and development that is fleeing to the United States, and the abandonment of agriculture.

At the borders little or nothing has changed with the immigration that Merz promised to stop dead before the elections, only to go back on it within hours, on election night itself. And the discontent of the population grows, the two governing parties lose strength in the polls and the AfD keeps growing, the party to the right of the CDU with which Merz refuses to form a coalition that would command a very broad majority. The Merz Government is going to sink sooner rather than later.

What seems clear is that ever more people in the CDU know that Germany will no longer withstand another attempt at survival by way of the scaffold that is the lethal embrace with a dwindling social democracy. A socialism that sees its salvation only in the banning of the parties of the right, which are ever more the majority throughout Europe. A ban that would serve to keep the Popular parties permanent hostages of its drift towards a tyranny that despises the will of the majority and prevents any possibility of change. And it is in radical change that the only way out lies, towards a recovery and reconstruction that would avert the European disaster, with a European Union trapped in a system in terminal crisis from its overdose of ideology, hyper-regulation and lack of freedom, which was imposed by Germany on Brussels and which today has in Germany one of its principal victims.

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.