Be optimistic about Merz, but the spectre of the 1930s remains

Telegraph

25-02-2025

When Germany surrendered unconditionally in 1945, almost everyone assumed that the Nazis would be a threat for many years to come. Even in 1949, the first Secretary General of Nato, Lord Ismay, summed up its purpose as 'to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down'.
But the Nazi revival never happened. For 75 years the Federal Republic was conspicuous as Europe's most successful economy and an exemplary civil society, giving the lie to Spenglerian prophecies of doom.
Until now, that is. Sunday's election saw the first serious threat to German democracy emerge since the defeat of the Third Reich.
That threat goes by the name of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Despite the fact that it echoes Putin's propaganda and is classified as an extremist party by the German equivalent of MI5, the AfD has just become the official opposition, with 10.3 million votes, more than a fifth of the electorate. In the new Bundestag, 152 seats out of 630 will be AfD: not quite enough to take over parliamentary committees, but enough to sabotage the system.
Since the invasion of Ukraine three years ago, the AfD have been the dominant party in the former East Germany, but now they are the most popular choice for younger voters right across the country. For now, the oldies have saved German democracy. Still: if this trend continues, the AfD could be the largest party by the next election in 2029.
This is a party that tells Germans they have been enslaved since 1945 by a 'guilt cult' imposed by the Allies. They quibble over how many of the SS should be seen as war criminals, or whether the Holocaust was just a 'speck of birdshit' on their nation's otherwise spotless history. The AfD is so openly pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian and authoritarian that even Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni will have nothing to do with them. The AfD's leader Alice Weidel is not just a Leni Riefenstahl fantasy version of Nigel Farage.
To anyone who has followed the outer fringes of German politics, this is all familiar. Surely, though, the AfD is a legitimate party? In deepest Thuringia, its mob-orator Björn Höcke is unrepentant, despite prosecutions for using banned Hitlerian slogans. But at national level Alice Weidel disdains dog whistles and gestures of dubious legality: no Sieg Heils or swastikas for her.
But sticking to the letter of the law may be just a tactic. Nearly a century ago, though, the original Nazis made their breakthrough in 1930 with an election campaign that secured 107 seats. Hitler then appeared as a witness in a Leipzig court, where three army officers were accused of disobeying orders by fraternising with the Nazis, to declare that he and his party stood 'hard as granite' on the foundation of legality. The judges agreed and an exuberant Joseph Goebbels told one of the defendants: 'What can they do to us now? Now we're strictly legit – and that's it.'
Now, as in the 1930s, the AfD's reassurances about the law are hollow. Once in power, these Putinversteher (Putin apologists) would follow their Tsar. Friedrich Merz, the new Chancellor, certainly doesn't trust them an inch. Quite rightly, he prefers to form a coalition with the Social Democrats, despite them having experienced the worst defeat in their history.
The latter must waste no time in replacing Olaf Scholz, the most terrible Chancellor in postwar German history, with Boris Pistorius, the highly capable defence minister. It seems likely that Pistorius will become vice chancellor in the new coalition, perhaps charged with rebuilding the military and the arms industry.
At his press conference yesterday, Merz said that for Europe, it is 'five minutes to midnight'. He understands that the transatlantic relationship is now on a knife-edge. Unlike some of his predecessors at home and allies abroad, though, this staunch Atlanticist loathes Putin.
Though the reckless wooing of Alice Weidel by vice president Vance and Elon Musk had little impact, Merz has no choice but to take their meddling seriously. Yesterday he told the press that Ms Weidel had no policies on the economy or migration, only false or exaggerated criticisms. But he also conceded that the established parties are in the last chance saloon. His own Christian Democrat Union failed to win a single seat in the former Communist East. The Social Democrats, whose working-class vote has just been cannibalised by the AfD, were a key part of the German democratic system, he said. 'I have no interest in seeing [them] destroyed.'
Yet Merz now has a chance to restore the kind of resolute, reasonable and responsible leadership that made the Federal Republic of the postwar era so much admired. Helmut Schmidt (1974-82) and Helmut Kohl (1982-98) were bitter rivals, but seen from London, Washington or Moscow, it hardly mattered that one was centre-Left, the other centre-Right. Both Chancellors worked with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to win the Cold War and bring down the Iron Curtain.
Having covered Germany during part of that period for this newspaper and played a walk-on part in the fall of the Berlin Wall, I am confident that Merz and Pistorius are cut from the same cloth as Kohl and Schmidt. But Alice Weidel and the other AfD demagogues, like their far-Left counterparts Sahra Wagenknecht and Heidi Reichinnek, are unfit to hold high office.
The crisis that the West faces today is at least as serious as that of 1989. Then we faced Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping; now we face Putin and Xi Jinping. Germany, at least, has chosen leaders of real calibre, not charlatans who would betray Western civilisation to its enemies.