The populist train sweeping through the West finally pulled into Germany — running, as ever, behind schedule. Until now, the country had resisted Europe’s rightward shift. Sunday’s election put an end to that: the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), often described as “far-right,” surged to become the Bundestag’s second-largest party after doubling its 2019 vote share. Still shunned by Germany’s political class, the AfD made the biggest gains, cementing itself as an electoral force the establishment can no longer ignore.
With 20 per cent of the vote, the AfD — alongside the Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) 29 percent — helped push right-wing parties to just under 50 percent of the total vote.
Friedrich Merz, leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Germany’s likely next chancellor, faces weeks of coalition horse-trading before taking office. A former BlackRock executive, he has vowed never to cooperate with the AfD, meaning he’ll likely govern with Olaf Scholz’s SPD — the very party that just suffered a humiliating collapse, plunging to 16 per cent, its worst result since 1887. Germany’s electorate made its feelings clear: the status quo is no longer an option. Yet, thanks to the wonders of coalition politics, that may be exactly what they get.
How did a country once the envy of Europe become so politically disillusioned? In recent years, Germany has embarked on bold economic and social experiments that turned an efficiency powerhouse into a slow-motion car crash.
Nowhere is this clearer than in energy. In what may be the 21st century’s greatest act of economic self-sabotage, Germany gutted its energy sector at the behest of environmental alarmists. It scrapped nuclear power in favour of wind and solar — the least efficient green alternatives — while deepening its dependence on Russian gas. Fearing a Fukushima-style meltdown, its leaders ignored the minor detail that their tsunami risk was precisely zero and jettisoned cheap, reliable and clean energy. When Moscow turned off the tap, energy prices did what they always do in a crisis: soar.
The coup de grâce came in 2023, at the peak of a global energy crisis, when Germany closed its last three nuclear plants.
The result? Industrial output is in freefall. Energy-intensive industries are producing 20 per cent less than before the pandemic, and even Volkswagen is laying off workers for the first time.
The same blind complacency doomed its car industry. As electric and driverless technology reshaped global markets, Germany’s automakers scoffed. Now, as China and Silicon Valley approach the finish line, Germany is still stuck in the pits, fumbling with its laces.
Germany’s economic and political failures mirror each other perfectly. An entrenched elite clung to the past, ignored the present, and sabotaged the future. But its most consequential misstep — one that cost it dearly at the ballot box — was its reckless embrace of mass immigration.
When millions of asylum seekers headed for Europe during the 2015 migrant crisis, Angela Merkel threw open Germany’s borders. Though initially sceptical about whether Germany could absorb such numbers, Merkel soon decided the country had no choice. One observer told me Merkel feared images of border guards repelling refugees with water cannons and barbed wire — an image, she feared, too evocative of Germany’s treatment of stateless peoples under the Third Reich.
Since then, German leaders have ignored public demands for tighter border control, allowing hundreds of thousands more arrivals each year.
The result? A once-tranquil nation now plagued by mass attacks — 10 dead and more than 340 injured in the past two months alone — and forced to endure airport-style security at Christmas markets.
Brutal attacks that left mothers and children dead in the street galvanized first-time voters, driving turnout to a record 84 per cent. The AfD, which won 20.5 per cent of their votes, was the most popular party among them.
Ironically, the party denounced as anti-democratic helped deliver one of Germany’s most robust elections.
Yet for 10 million AfD voters, the message is clear: their votes don’t count. The political establishment enforces a rigid “Brandmauer,” or firewall, banning all cooperation with the AfD. If a bill relies on AfD votes, it must be scrapped. Some politicians take it even further — refusing to acknowledge their AfD colleagues at all.
When JD Vance called the firewall anti-democratic, Germany’s political class sniffed — secure in the belief that defending democracy requires defying voters.
If Germany’s industries are failing, its politicians’ ability to manufacture hypocrisy remains world-class.
Nothing captures this better than Olaf Scholz’s reaction to his “bitter” election defeat. On Sunday, he stood before supporters and declared: “We are fighting for democracy” — while vowing to “never accept” the AfD’s “good election result.”
And who are these unacceptable voters? Nearly 40 per cent of the working class backed the AfD. A quarter of young men did the same. Gay men are overrepresented, and even immigrants are more likely to support the AfD and right-wing parties.
So, in the name of stopping fascism, the democratic will of workers, youth, and minorities must be suppressed? It is often these very groups who feel most affected by mass migration — yet their dissent is treated as illegitimate.
In the upside-down world of German politics, this orthodoxy is seldom questioned.
The firewall may keep the AfD out of government, but it won’t stop reality from kicking down the door. If the political class won’t engage with these voters’ concerns, the firewall they built may, in the end, consume them.
Michael Murphy is a journalist based in London. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and presented the documentary ‘Ireland is full! Anti-immigration backlash in Ireland’. You can follow him on X: @michaelmurph_y.