How Germany faces polarised society, fumbling polity and faltering economy – Firstpost

Europe is in turmoil with the implosion of two of its biggest countries—France and Germany. In my
previous opinion piece in Firstpost, “Faltering economy, divided polity: How new French prime minister accedes to a crown of thorns”, I explained the story of France reeling in political and economic chaos and confusion. This piece focuses on the economic and political meltdown of Germany.

I will return to it a bit later. It suffices to say that it is the implosion time for Germany, the biggest economy in Europe and the third-largest exporting country in the world. But I must begin with the latest crisis that has plunged Germany into mourning.

Germany in Mourning

Germany is in mourning.

It was precipitated by an attacker driving a black BMW SUV at high speed, ramming the car into festive mood pedestrians at a crowded outdoor Christmas market in the evening on Friday, December 20, in the city of Magdeburg, the capital of the central German state of Saxony-Anhalt—a city with a population of 240,000, located 150 kilometres west of Berlin.

The attack killed five people (a nine-year-old boy and four women) and wounded 205 others, 41 of them seriously. Among the injured, seven are Indians.

Police have taken the perpetrator of the crime into custody—a Saudi doctor (psychotherapist) who has been staying in Germany since 2006—and are investigating the motive of the crime, among other aspects.

Terrible Catastrophe

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, along with Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, after visiting the site, called the attack “terrible, insane” and “terrible catastrophe”, calling for unity, saying, “It was important that we stick together, that we link arms, that it is not hatred that determines our coexistence but the fact that we are a community that seeks a common future.”

History Repeats

Germany’s Christmas markets are quite buzzy. Every year the country organises 2,500-3,000 of them, starting at the end of November and ending just before Christmas. Also common in recent times are attacks on these festive markets.

Prior to the Magdeburg tragedy, On December 1, 2020, a car rammed into a Christmas market in Trier, killing 5 and injuring 15. The attacker was sentenced to life. Before that, on December 1, 2017, live explosives were found close to a Christmas market in Potsdam. The police saved the day with a controlled explosion of explosives. But the worst attack happened in Berlin on December 16, 2016, where a truck rammed into a Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring 50.

There exist parallels between the Magdeburg and Berlin attacks. Anis Amri, the Berlin attacker, was an unsuccessful asylum seeker from Tunisia. Amri was on police and intelligence radar for a year; among others, he had told an intelligence informant he wanted to commit an attack on German soil. With the information percolating about the 50-year-old Saudi attacker of Magdeburg, he too appears to have made online death threats against German citizens and had a history of quarreling with state authorities. News magazine Der Spiegel, citing security sources, adds, “The Saudi secret service had warned Germany’s spy agency BND a year ago about a tweet in which the suspect threatened Germany would pay a ‘price’ for its treatment of Saudi refugees.”

Slugfest

Even as investigators remain tight-lipped, conspiracy theories abound about the Magdeburg tragedy. The German media is fast digging out skeletons from the attacker’s past, and the political slugfest has begun with Scholz under fire from both the “far-right and far-left parties”. Bernd Baumann, far-right AfD parliamentary head, has demanded Scholz call a special session of the Bundestag on the “desolate” security situation, while the head of the far-left BSW party, Sahra Wagenknecht, has demanded an explanation from Interior Minister Nancy Faeser on why so many tips and warnings were ignored beforehand.

Also, the mass-circulation daily Bild questioned: “Why did German police and intelligence services do nothing, even though they had Saudi on their radar?… And why were the tips from Saudi Arabia apparently ignored?” has called for sweeping reforms for a complete “turnaround in internal security”.

Fallout

The fallout of the Magdeburg tragedy will be the far-right outcry against German and European immigration policies that have allowed high immigration in recent times. Anti-immigration Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban has already jumped in the frame using the Magdeburg tragedy to lambast European Union immigration policies, labelling it as a terrorist act. Already, the Magdeburg incident and “anti-immigration” are threatening to become two of the key issues in the February elections in Germany.

Inopportune Implosion Time

The Magdeburg disaster comes at a hugely inopportune time.

On Monday, December 16, barely four days before the Magdeburg tragedy, Germany imploded when the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz collapsed after losing a vote of confidence in the 733-member lower house of Parliament (Bundestag) with 394 lawmakers voting against and 206 for the motion and 116 abstaining.

This made Scholz a lame-duck Chancellor with the election for a new parliament scheduled to take place on February 23. Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens till then shall continue running the country without parliamentary backing until a new government is formed.

Short Tenure

Scholz will go down in history as the shortest-tenured German chancellor in the past 65 years and one of the shortest in German history. His mighty predecessor, Angela Merkel, the only female Chancellor of Germany, had an unprecedented four terms (16 years and 16 days), only 10 days less than her mentor, Helmut Kohl, who served as Chancellor for 16 years and 26 days and who oversaw the German reunification in 1990. Others too had long tenures—Helmut Schmidt (8 years, 138 days) and Gerhard Schroder (7 years, 26 days). Even Willy Brandt, who had the shortest tenure before Scholz, was Chancellor for 4 years and 198 days.

Self-Inflicted

Asking for a vote of confidence was a move by the embattled Olaf Scholz to deliberately ensure that he loses the confidence vote so that once the lower house of the Parliament sealed his fate by declaring its lack of confidence in him, he could take the next logical step, asking the President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to dissolve the parliament and prematurely declare a fresh election within sixty days of his ouster.

Pathways to the Downhill Slide

The litany of woes of Scholz was many. Here are a few below:

One, misfit in the big shoes—Scholz, Deputy Chancellor and Finance Minister of Germany in Merkel’s last term, proved misfit in the big shoes of his predecessor, a four-term Chancellor and first to retire and not getting ousted.

Two, fraught from the beginning—his centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) struggled to distinguish itself after years supporting Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Worse, cobbling together a coalition with the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats—the first three-way coalition in decades at the federal level and the first time Germany has had this combination try to run the country—was fraught with the beginning.

Three, strange bedfellows—the three-way combination proved to be warring strange bedfellows. While the SPD and Greens began as natural allies on the centre-left of the political spectrum, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) views on limited state interference, low taxes and regulation, and a tight hold on the public purse clashed with the other side’s more expansive view of government.

Fourth, it is the stupid economy—it all finally boiled down to the stupid economy and continuous bickering of alliance partners. Germany has gone for two years with zero growth; in fact, it is likely to contract this year. Its famed “industrial behemoth” has contracted 18 per cent in three years, with exports hampered due to aggressive China, and the cost of keeping homes warm after the Russia-Ukraine war increased energy prices by 40 per cent in a year, a travesty of a long economic crisis due to Covid and the financial cost to Germany of support to the long-standing Russia-Ukraine war in its east.

Much of 2024 was lost in the internal tensions bickering on how to fix the economy, with divergent views often exploding into the open. The final nail in the coffin was the row that triggered over the 2025 budget, leading to the collapse of the government in November after Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner, head of the pro-business Free Democrats.

Existential Crisis

The political implosion in Germany has sent Europe’s’ most populous country, its largest economy, and the world’s third-largest country reeling into an intractable existential crisis at a time when Donald Trump’s US election victory has triggered deep uncertainty about the future of the continent’s economy (with his open declaration of intent to have reciprocal tariffs) and security (due to his ambivalent attitude towards NATO).

With the Scholz era eclipsed, all eyes are on parliamentary elections on February 23. But here lies the bigger crisis: mainstreaming and the rise in the popularity of two parties, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the far-left Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). Both reject the post-World War II liberal and globalist worldview, giving rise to heightened domestic polarisation and German nationalism with the mainstreaming of erstwhile fringe ideas and parties on the one hand and the rejection of multicultural globalist norms on the other hand.

It is over to February 23, a day that will decide which way Germany moves, whether it will regain its leadership position in Europe, with France already in disarray, or will become the basket case of Europe.

The author is a multi-disciplinary thought leader with Action Bias and an India based impact consultant. He is a keen watcher of changing national and international scenarios. He works as President Advisory Services of Consulting Company BARSYL. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.