Es war einmal “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. Über alles in der Welt” (Once upon a time there was “Germany, Germany above all else. Above everything in the world”). Thus begins the “Song of the Germans”, composed by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben way back in 1841 during the dispute over the Rhine territories with France, hailing the unity of the divided German States against the common enemy, set to a splendid string quartet by the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn (specifically the second movement of Quartet No. 3, Opus 76). The Song of the Germans was subsequently used on various military-propaganda occasions until the Nazis adopted it, altering its meaning to imply a German superiority over other nations. But as we know, interpretations often trump reality.
At any rate, there is no doubt whatsoever that Germany has played, for better or worse, a crucial role at least in the last 150 years in Europe and the entire world. Defeated in two World Wars, it “picked itself up” and positioned itself at the helm of the Old Continent as its undisputed leader. Since the end of the Second World War, however, it has held a hegemonic role predominantly in the economic field and no longer the military one. This was due to the explicit will of the new “masters of the world” who from across the pond colonised the European territory, doing with it whatever pleased them most. Thus it was put “in charge” of the European Union, allowed to become the “locomotive of Europe” and made into the richest country of the entire Union. At least until recently.
Ever since the master decided that Europe was no longer so important for its vision of world domination, and therefore expendable as a whole, even the top of the class began to be targeted by political and economic broadsides aimed at destroying its productive capabilities first, and its social fabric second.
I won’t dwell here on the various “warning” episodes that have occurred in Germany in recent years, sent by Uncle Sam. Suffice it to mention “Dieselgate”, the espionage of Chancellor Merkel’s mobile phone by the American “ally” right while the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack the Bomber Obama was visiting Berlin, the mysterious explosion of an arms depot just outside Berlin a few years ago, the various terrorist attacks across Germany (including the recent ones before the elections) and, dulcis in fundo, the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline that connected Russia to the German coast, supplying Germany with abundant, ultra-cheap energy. The true engine of German industry.
Iconic is the image of Chancellor Scholz, mute, while during a press conference Sleepy Joe Biden answered a specific question by stating that the United States had the means to prevent the Russians from continuing to supply gas to Germany.
An unbridled economic collapse
Dozens upon dozens of companies close their doors every day in Germany. According to a study by the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, in collaboration with Creditreform, a company closes in Germany every three minutes. The general economic situation has worsened everywhere. Just to give an example, even what was considered the “Mecca” of artists and freethinkers, the city of Berlin, has seen its until recently munificent city Senate tighten the purse strings in all sectors: from cultural funding to social welfare, from medical assistance to transport. The general feeling is that the Institutions are desperately searching for cash.
According to the German consultancy firm Falkenstag, the total number of bankruptcies of large companies in 2024 reached a record level of 202, the highest in the last ten years. And this without counting the tariffs that Trump wants to impose on Europe.
Aggravating the situation caused by the industrial collapse in all sectors (from automotive to logistics, from heavy industry to services) has been the “no ifs, no buts” policy, willed by all the governing parties (but the Greens in particular), of military and economic support for Ukraine and the refugees (they are supposedly around 1.3 million according to the Bamf, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees; according to other sources over 1.6 million), who receive an average of 1,250 euros a month in financial support, not counting families with children who receive an extra 250 euros per child.
In short, as one would have said in other times, “There are no more Germans like there used to be, madam!”.
Truth be told, they haven’t been around for a long time. We are accustomed to speaking of a single Germany, from the fall of the Wall (1989) onwards. But is the reality truly what we have been told on so many occasions? Immediately following the reunification between the then East Germany (former GDR) and the West (former FRG), it was said that the latter had generously taken upon itself to economically absorb, in the face of enormous sacrifices, the practically failed state of the GDR. But things weren’t exactly like that, as Vladimiro Giacché explained well in his book Anschluss. The East German State was not a failed state at all, as the then Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his ministers implied. Quite the opposite. What actually happened, as the Bundesbank governor Karl Otto Pöhl stated a few years later, was that East Germany was subjected to a “drastic shock therapy” that no country would be able to withstand. Adopting an exchange rate of 1 to 1 (against the 1 to 4.44 that was then in force between the two Germanies) meant that the German citizens of the former GDR saw in a single night, between the 30th of June and the 1st of July 1990 (when the monetary union came into effect), an increase in the cost of goods of 350 per cent.
Adding to this economic disaster was the establishment of the “Treuhandanstalt”, namely the Trust Agency which operated from 1990 to 1994 and which, after having ousted all Eastern representatives from it, was transformed into an entity dedicated to the privatisation of the enterprises of the former GDR. Companies, industries (and the land they stood on) were sold off to people from the West (for about 87 per cent of the total, against 7 per cent sold to foreign hands) for derisory sums, even for a single Deutschmark.
The suicide rate in the territories of the former East Germany increased exponentially and the migratory flow that took place in the early years from East to West was of more than 4 million citizens, out of a total of about 16 million. A veritable exodus. Even today, more than 35 years after the “reunification”, many of the small towns in the former GDR appear to the visitor as “strangely” empty.
In the modern Germany of the 21st century, wage and pension levels, for the same job function, between a former Eastern citizen and a Western one are unequal. In 2023, according to the job search portal Stepstone, the maximum gap between such salaries reached over 26 per cent.
AfD, or the Sun of the Future
Why all this economic-historical analysis of Germany of mine? Simple, because the result of the recent general elections (held on the 23rd of February), which saw an announced rise of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party to 20.80 per cent of the German electorate’s preferences (the second largest party after the CDU/CSU Union), should not really be that surprising. If one looks at the map of Germany after the elections, it seems one can clearly see the old borders of the nation, back when there were two Germanies.
The light blue of the AfD dominates all the territories of the former GDR. And this does not mean that the Wall has returned, as many commentators have written and said. The Wall, in reality, for the reasons I have listed above, never fell.
Until a few years ago, these “Class B” citizens saw the Linke, the “Left” party, as the natural political outlet that sought to protect their interests at a national and local level. But the Linke, in my opinion, has not played a “left-wing” role for a long time now. On the contrary, it has aligned itself with all the other parties (which I could define as a “single party” from an ideological point of view), with the exception of the “defector” (according to her former party) Sahra Wagenknecht who founded her own party “BSW”, namely Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (S. W. Alliance). In reality, the latter is the only prominent political figure left in the desolate German political landscape, and the only one left to defend what would once have been defined as the values of the “left”, namely the defence of the weakest. Since her ideas include, besides social justice, a return to normal economic and political relations with Putin’s Russia and an immediate end to the war in Ukraine, as well as an end to uncontrolled immigration, she was boycotted throughout the election campaign. And, dulcis in fundo, she obtained (what a coincidence) only 4.97 per cent of the preferences nationwide, thus missing out by a whisker (the minimum threshold is 5 per cent) on entering Parliament. The missing 13,400 votes meant that the number of MPs she would have been entitled to (33) could be divided between the Union and the SPD, a move which allowed them to reach the majority necessary to govern. Otherwise, things would have been further complicated for the formation of the future German Government. I will skip the polemics about unsealed and swapped ballot papers (videos are circulating on the Web about this), but the fact that a good 230,000 Germans living abroad (who might include the aforementioned 13,400) did not receive their ballot papers in time (for the dispatch of which there had been all the necessary time) to cast their vote, could lead the BSW to take legal action. Unfortunately, the lawyers are still considering the hypothesis, because in Germany it is very difficult for it to be upheld.
Watchword? “Normalisation”
A final thought I want to express is precisely on the AfD, the party initially founded in 2013 in Hesse, precisely in Oberursel im Taunus, by a group of people who wanted Germany to exit the Euro, including some university professors. The first federal spokespersons at the time were Bernd Lucke, Frauke Petry and Konrad Adam. In the autumn of 2013, the party failed to enter the Bundestag with 4.7 per cent of the vote. In the following years, the AfD entered the European Parliament, all the parliaments of the German Länder and, in 2017, the Bundestag. Slowly it distanced itself more and more from its original core themes. Of the 18 founding members, only a few remain in the party, including the honorary chairman Alexander Gauland.
The current party chairmen are Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel. Within the party, they assume the title of “federal spokespersons”. Chrupalla shared the position with Jörg Meuthen until January 2022. However, the latter left the party because, in his view, it had moved far to the right and no longer stood on the foundations of the free democratic order. Stephan Brandner, Peter Boehringer and Kay Gottschalk are deputy board members.
Highly controversial are figures such as the State Chairman of Thuringia, Björn Höcke, who indeed is characterised by, let us say, a language and an expression of ideas that, if not Nazi, are not far off. And so too are other members of the party, so much so that the latter is still under the constant magnifying glass of the German domestic intelligence services and in 2014 a request was made in Parliament for the AfD’s exclusion from it.
Beyond these considerations, what has seemed increasingly evident to me in the last two years has been a progressive shift of the party leadership towards “institutional” positions, whilst maintaining some characteristics and themes so dear to its base. Most recently, during the election campaign for the elections held on the 23rd of February, the party repeatedly received the applause and support (only moral? Or perhaps something more?) of that little character Elon Musk. In my opinion, not by chance, quite the contrary. But this is not for the reasons that many German commentators and others halfway around the world have hypothesised, referring to direct interference in German politics the former, and putting forward arguments relating to Nazism (due to Musk’s famous raised arm during a recent speech in front of the Republican audience that had recently re-elected Big Trump) the latter.
Well, in my opinion, in reality there is an attempt, perhaps implemented by infiltrators from the intelligence services themselves, to “normalise” the party, in order to channel into it tomorrow the protests of the masses, whether of extremist derivation or not. To be clearer, a process is underway analogous to the one applied to the 5 Stables Movement (Movimento 5 stalle), ahem, pardon, the 5 Star Movement in Italialand (notice to sailors: I, deluding myself that they were a real possibility of breaking with the old parties, voted for them in 2014. Alas). Hence the choice of a figure as party secretary and candidate for the Chancellery like Alice Weidel, homosexual, married to a film producer of Sri Lankan origin, Sarah Bossard, with whom she is raising two children, born of two different fathers.
About as “different” from the ideas of the extremist base of the party as you can get and, at the same time, as “inclusive” as you can get, just the way the “system” likes it nowadays. In practice, the perfect figure to “ferry” a party, otherwise seen as right-wing extremist, towards a party that acts as a catalyst for popular discontent without a specific “colour”. Yes, because even the rich West of Germany, seeing what has been decided must happen to the Old Continent (of which Germany represents the spearhead), is beginning to suffer from the crisis. A crisis which, incidentally, was implemented directly or indirectly (by letting events “flow” without putting up resistance, as in the case of Nord Stream), by the German political and economic class itself. Then the intelligence services, via terrorist attacks and infiltrations, did the rest. And so even some Wessis (as the East Germans call the West Germans) have begun to give their preference to the “blues”.
So the AfD as a system-compliant party and not an anti-system one of a Nazi mould. But for the common narrative, the smokescreen of Nazism (which certainly, I repeat, is present in a certain part of the party) is convenient and diverts attention from the path that has been planned for this party.
Only time will tell if I was wrong or if, as I fear, the “normalisation” project in function of the single world government is proceeding swimmingly.
We shall see soon: 2030 is just around the corner!
