On journeys – Anne Mcelvoy in TLS:

‘The last time I saw Angela Merkel she was striding through the chancellery – a vast, echoing mausoleum of a building in the Reichstag. It was shortly after the last German Bundestag election in 2017, and the woman who had run Germany since 2005, and the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2000, had been through a gruelling campaign that had resulted, after months of wrangling, in a second successive “GroKo” – a grand coalition, with the lagging Social Democrats (SPD). I had peppered her with questions about her coalition options in a close and slightly testy encounter on the night of the final election debate and followed her on the campaign trail. Now, as I was stepping out of the lift and she was entering, with aides fanning out around her, she looked me in the eye – “You again!” – before artfully avoiding any more interrogation.
Despite her re-election, Merkel had reason to be cagey. Her share of the vote had dropped, from 41.5 per cent to 33 per cent, and even the SPD were torn about reforming the “coalition of elephants”, as the combination of the two main parties is known. The SPD’s own showing had been disastrous: a loss of forty seats and a crash to a mere 20 per cent of the vote, a performance blamed by many of its rank-and-file on its partnership with the centre-right. Now, more than ever, the party was tote Hose (dead trousers). Yet four years later, on the eve of Germany’s federal election on September 26, the SPD has bounced back. While the CDU candidate (and Merkel’s anointed successor), the Rheinland minister and party capo Armin Laschet, has struggled with personal pratfalls and an inability to establish a clear post-Merkel message, a new heir has emerged in the form of the SPD’s Olaf Scholz: the broad-faced former finance minister in the grand coalition, who has journeyed from the Left of his party, via a “political detox” in the 1990s, to the pragmatic centre-left.’

(…)

‘Putting aside the clunky academese, readers will find a useful analysis of the modern myth-building that has emanated from the more radical fringes of the AfD but nonetheless permeates German political discourse (and populist discourse the world over, for that matter) – a position that looks sceptically on distant government and the EU, doubts the ability of non-white refugees and economic migrants to integrate, and disavows “chichi” urban identity politics. At its extreme, it indulges fretfulness about the dilution of racial “purity” and elevates “ethno-cultural nationhood”.
The authors rightly view the AfD’s rise to 12.6 per cent of the vote (the third largest) in the previous election as a democratic alarm bell. But the problem with attaching broad arguments to the results of German federal elections is that the fortunes of the multifarious smaller parties are so changeable. In the run-up to this current election, AfD is polling nationally at 11 per cent – well behind the upbeat SPD on 25 per cent, the despondent CDU on 21 per cent, the Greens on 17 per cent, and roughly the same as the FDP. Because of its strength in local politics, however, it looms larger in the lives of some east Germans than that headline polling suggests.
Perhaps more than the left-leaning authors wish to concede, the AfD is also a logical development on the Right of German politics – to an extent perhaps inevitable as Merkel straddled the centre to hold on to power. When I toured across the old East a couple of years ago for a radio documentary about the Merkelkinder (children of the Merkel era), many of my encounters with AfD voters showed them as likely to be disgruntled former CDU or SPD affiliates as they were diehard right-wingers. They were people who felt that the two main parties had turned their backs on the old East and were stuffed with “elites” more concerned with their nation’s standing as the world’s “humanitarian superpower” than with attending to Germany’s stressed localities. Contrary to fears of an unstoppable rise, the AfD is not advancing in 2021 – but nor does it show much sign of dying back.’

(…)

‘Lough believes “trauma about Russia and gratitude for reunification” create a push for co-operation and antipathy to a collision course. One might also argue that a relationship with such deep underpinnings is always going to be distinctive and, to the critical eye of an anglosphere security hawk like Lough, insufficiently robust. So how might a Chancellor Scholz – who would arrive as one of the least experienced figures in geopolitical debate to hold German office – square the circle? Putin’s agitations, from cyber-warfare to the undermining of western democracies and involvement in proxy theatres of conflict such as Belarus, will make it hard for the new chancellor not to choose sides. Scholz has perfected internal party management in pursuit of his ambition to lead Germany but if he prevails on September 26, he will, as one researcher at a defence think tank with close links to the SPD told me, “soon find himself in a situation where you cannot make four phone calls promising six different things”. And, in an irony that would not have been lost on the founders of the Green movement during the East–West standoff over nuclear missiles in the 1980s, it is now their heirs in the Green Party who could provide the balance of power on crucial foreign policy choices in the twenty-first century.
The loss of a long-serving chancellor’s familiarity and diligence will be keenly felt in Germany and beyond. After the postwar era came the post-Wall one – but that too is now passing into memory. What comes next remains shrouded in the mists of the great German plains.’

Read the article here.

The AfD is not dying, but it’s telling that in this campaign the AfD has been hardly mentioned, the sexiness of the AfD faded away rather quickly. Unlike in France, Belgium or in the Netherlands, where the sexiness of the extreme-right for various reasons endures.

If Scholz will be Germany’s new chancellor, that’s because the electorate trusted him more to be the next Merkel than Laschet.
Merkel was careful enough never to provoke a real crisis with Putin, not about Ukraine, not about Navalny, not about Belarus. Probably not always very satisfying, but I’m not sure what the alternative would have been?

I don’t see an end to the Germany’s 75-year old ‘Westbindung’ – an end to that would probably expose the fragility of the European project in a rather ugly way.
And Scholz doesn’t make geopolitical developments. Some people on Twitter might long for visions, but politicians in democracies cannot do much more than react to circumstances they don’t control.
The longing for the strong man who dictates the circumstances is nothing new, will always be present.