The Division in Germany

Recently Fraser Myers of Sp!ked magazine had an article about a potential ban of the AfD. In reality such talks are a continuous background noise in the country, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier did not name the AfD directly and he was also not particularly specific. What is real, though, is that the political division in Germany which caused the stir is worse than in America or the UK. For cultural reasons this is an admission you will usually not hear from Germans, but I’m going to explain it anyway.

But before I come to that I begin by weeding out some of the other mistakes in the article. Fraser Myer uses the word ‘populist’ to describe the AfD. There is no mutually accepted definition of the word and as far as I know the editors of US magazine Breitbart are the only people who use the terminology to describe themselves. A German word that is spelled the same way would only be used as a slur and as such should be avoided. Neither the English nor the German word are descriptive and the AfD does not hold identical views to the editorial board of Breitbart.

Whilst I agree with Sp!ked that some circles within the AfD hold views that I would also describe as obnoxious, I would not describe them as right-wing. Indeed, the example of views Myers offers are innocuous ones.

The party’s opposition to immigration can stray into outright xenophobia and racism. It is not uncommon to hear AfD spokespeople distinguish between ‘real Germans’ and ‘passport Germans’ – that is, German citizens who are not ethnically German. Prominent AfD politicians have spoken at rallies organised by the far-right, anti-Islam Pegida movement. And the increasingly influential Björn Höcke, who leads the party in Thuringia, has been accused of downplaying the Holocaust.

The AfD is not xenophobic and during the Covid lockdown they even asked for more foreign harvest helpers. As far as I’m concerned this makes them stray too much towards open borders. There is nothing wrong with distinguishing between ethnic Germans and those people the left showers with passports to create a solid voting block at the cost of public security and economic prosperity. Pegida is neither far-right nor anti-Islam per se. Also it is not a moral failure to be anti-Islam as long as one is fair. What you dare to say about ‘the god of the old testament’ is fair to say about the god of the Koran. Even though left-wingers seem to be confused about it, Adolf Hitler murdered around six million Jews, not six million Muslims. Nobody’s got an obligation to make more ado about Muslims than about Jews. And Björn Höcke did not deny the Holocaust.

Most of the article is correct, though, and I begin my dive into the division of the nation with a quote from it.

Each of the mainstream parties has long maintained a strict cordon sanitaire around the AfD, refusing to work with it in government.

This can be illustrated by a recent remark of our Chancellor Olaf SCholz. He suggested that local communities who are confronted with a good AfD initiative, should still vote against it and re-issue the exact same proposal on their own.

And whilst the president did not say that the AfD should be outlawed, such remarks were made by Chancellor Scholz and others. A recent petition of blog ‘Volksverpetzer’ has collected 67,000 signatures to bolster such ambitions.

Saskia Esken, one half of the leadership duo of the Social Democrats, said in an interview that the AfD should be banned if the secret service Verfassungsschutz classified it as right-wing extremist. She says, “The fight against AfD is one that all of society, all male and female democrats must fight in unison.”

Banning political parties is, of course, a human rights violation (freedom of association, article 20 of the UN Charter on Human Rights), but even such an aggressive move would change little. One in five Germans say to pollsters that they would vote for them. They are likely to wriggle their way through the institutions when push comes to shove. Those twenty so per cent are the lowest estimate of deeply dissatisfied citizens. Other surveys suggest a much broader dissatisfaction. A direct result of an AfD ban would be an immediate relocation of the electorate to some random alternative currently hidden under the 5%-parliament-entry threshold. In the city of Bremen the AfD failed to register their candidacies which led to their seats being taken by the group ‘citizens in anger.’ This is not how a representative democracy should work, but at this point the quality of all political candidates are so low that they are exchangeable on all levels and people just want to voice their sense of disaffection. The reasons for the general low quality of our essentially faceless mandarins run deep and are beyond the scope of this article. The AfD is no exception. All parties here are only protest parties against all other parties.

54% of Germans said in a poll (conducted by Körber-Stiftung) that they don’t have confidence in the “current form of democracy” in Germany. 90% say that living in a free democracy is important to them, but only 9% trust the organised political parties.

The mathematically astute may have noticed that a 90% who consider a life in a democracy important to them implies that one in ten would feel differently. Note that a temporary life in a dictatorship like China or Kuwait is a fairly normal CV trajectory for Westerners and such a stay is perfectly safe in a world that is still broadly led by freedom and peace promoting democracies.

But opposition to democracy is real. And one of the ways the pathologically driven among the left try to anger conservatives is by showing that now with power being effectively concentrated in their hands, they do not think much of freedom and democracy. Recently Mark Schieritz, Harvard alumni, of course, and chief editor of the economics section of ZEIT, wrote an op-ed that the country should simply be changed against the will of the people.

As I mentioned the co-leader of the Social Democrats Saskia Esken wants to justify a ban of the AfD with a public verdict of the secret service Verfassungsschutz. Said agency is currently investigating Hans-Georg Maaßen. The following is maybe a little bit confusing. Remember that this article is not about the AfD, but the overall division! Hans-Georg Maaßen is, indeed, not a member of the AfD and never was. He is a member of Angela Merkel’s party CDU. Before Thomas Haldenwang, the current president of Verfassungsschutz, got the job, his predecessor was chased out of office in a crazy thunderstorm of media hostility. And this former colleague of Haldenwang was Hans-Georg Maaßen. This is division.

Maaßen is accused to have been a part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government because he sent a Whatsapp birthday message to bestselling author Markus Krall which includes the line ‘we must keep fighting.’ Markus Krall had written an email to a dude called Heinrich Reuss in which Krall used the phrase ‘The time for a change is near.’ That’s like a coup by selfy with feet on Pelosi’s desk.

Heinrich Reuss is most likely a psychologically unstable guy. He is accused of having an ambition to become king of Germany. King! There is this whole silly narrative in the media that we had an opposition group that wished to reestablish the late 19th century mode of government. Before Merkel opened the borders to mass immigration, nobody has ever heard of such a political current. Interestingly, it used to be a popular joke among left-wingers socialised in the student movement of the late 1960s that all of their opponents were supposedly so backwards that ‘they want their Wilhelm back.’ Wilhelm was, of course, the name of the Kaiser who escalated WWI and also the name of his predecessor. It is quite a “coincidence” that such a joke suddenly manifests when the elites need some Orwellian 1984-villain group, a “Brotherhood.” I would not be surprised when psychologically unstable and dumb individuals were manipulated on purpose by circles within the security apparatus. But that is speculation, of course.

Irme Stetter-Karp of the Central Committee of Catholics says that people should be screened for AfD opinions before they serve in the church. This includes lay men. Maybe this is a good sign, though, because she seems to feel the heat from the twenty-plus percent who want their religious, cultural and governmental institutions back.

Lina E. organised violent attacks on people she sees as neo-Nazis. Judge Hans Schlüter-Staat spoke of a ‘respectable motivation’ and regrets that the state in general supposedly had a ‘deplorable’ deficit facing right-wing extremism. She’s sentenced to five and a half years in prison. The violence committed by her group included crushing somebody’s knee caps with an iron rod and smashing a hammer into the face of a guy. The head had to be reconstructed with metal inlets.

Andreas Jurca was allegedly beaten up by a group of migrant men who shouted ‘Sh*t Nazi’!

But there is also some hope in all of the division. The SED, the party that led the communist East German dictatorship, falls apart. Amira Mohammed Ali stepped down from the leadership position of the parliamentary group in the Bundestag. Her co-partner in that same position, Dietmar Bartsch, followed her a few days later. Sahra Wagenknecht, who also held that same position before Ali and Bartsch, considers founding a new party. The SED, now a mere fringe party, is not the key issue here. The split could be a blue print for others. With our catastrophic voting system it is nearly impossible to shoot newcomers up onto the political stage. The fraction of parliamentary groups on various levels of government could immediately flush new political forces onto the scene. So far this is not noticed by many and it is not a likely scenario, but it shows that the game is not over yet.