(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Fraude y fracaso alemán)
The general degradation of politics and administration in Germany generates stupefaction even among those who have been warning for many years, for several decades, that the policy of systematic social democratic consensus between what were until recently the two great German parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was leading irremediably to failure. Germany is today a country radically different from the one that existed from the economic miracle of the 1950s until 2015, although even then it had already been for years on the path of this misfortune.
Because it soon became apparent that the initially so celebrated Grosse Koalition, to which the Greens and the Liberals later attached themselves in various governments, led to a coordination of the interests of them all that prevented necessary reforms, generated obstinacy in maintaining mistaken policies and ended in corruption and failure. There was no opposition. And without a real opposition there is no correction of policy.
Thus unthinkable things have happened, and not only aberrant decisions in law such as approving a constitutional reform after the elections with the parliament that preceded them, because the composition of the new one had not permitted it. That kind of banana-republic manoeuvre is mixed with a runaway inefficiency in transport and in federal, state and municipal social services and with a corruption previously unthinkable.
There are incredible scandals such as the one that has just broken: the Federal Statistical Office now announces that it has been systematically “getting it wrong” in its quarterly GDP growth figures and that in reality things have been far worse. According to the official information, in 2023 GDP did not fall by 0.2% but by 0.9%, and in 2014 it was not 0.3% but 0.6%. We are talking about many billions of euros. The “errors” of the Federal Statistical Office have of course favoured the Government, the one of that time and the one of today.
The cosmetic treatment of the fall in GDP in 2023 favoured the parties of the previous Government ahead of the elections. And the cosmetic treatment of the 2024 result favours the present government because it will be easier for it to improve upon. In any case, the policy that Friedrich Merz of the CDU is practising in coalition with the SPD really differs in nothing from the previous Government with the Greens and the Liberals, led by the SPD with Olaf Scholz as chancellor, which ended in terrible failure and early elections. As you can see, four parties involved in various combinations in the various governments, all with the same basically social democratic policy that Angela Merkel already imposed in her 16 catastrophic years.
The basic social democratic consensus prevents anything previously done from being called into question. So with all these governments the same immigration policy has been pursued, with brutal consequences for security and quality of life, the same energy policy that has sunk the economy and impoverished society as a whole, the same labour policy that has sunk productivity and, above all, the environmental policy, converted into the ideological totem that automatically eradicates all rationality from the decisions that are taken.
Since the abyss between the reality lived by Germans and the message and the rhetoric of the consensus parties has not stopped growing, the moment has arrived in which all the parties included in it are losing support and only one party is rising, the one that is radically different and that emerged precisely to fill that vacuum left by the absence of opposition, and which according to the latest polls is already the first party, the AfD.
Once a real opposition was finally generated with the AfD, all the parties of the social democratic consensus agreed to brand it far-right and extremist in order to ignore it, to impose a cordon sanitaire, to refuse all cooperation and contact and thus to go on functioning as if that new party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), did not exist. And so they went on governing as if that opposition did not exist.
However, the AfD not only did not cease to exist but has grown without pause until today it is already the first party in Germany, two points ahead of the CDU and doubling the result of the third, which is the SPD. The logical thing would have been that, after the last elections in which the CDU came first and the AfD second, with a brutal failure for the entire left, the first two should have formed a coalition of a new type, clearly on the right, which could have carried out all the reforms of the follies committed that nobody in the CDU denies to be necessary.
But since the boycott of the AfD by all the parties of the social democratic consensus continues, and the CDU persists in keeping itself shut inside that pen with the losing left, the only possible Government after the elections was the one that is now in its death throes, having done nothing but aggravate the situation. September approaches like a black cloud for a Government that the immense majority of Germans consider incapable and already disqualified.
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.
