Episode 20B - Special: German Elections 2025

This unique, mostly extemporaneous episode is a deep dive into modern European politics. The current United States government has destabilized the political scene by indicating it will reduce military support for NATO, and by having some of its top officials endorse the controversial far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) Party. We profile all of the main German political parties that were contenders in the February 2025 federal parliamentary elections: the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), the climate-focused Greens, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), the hard-right AfD, the Die Linke (Left) party, and the populist BSW party. We discuss the dissatisfaction with the status quo under Chancellor Olaf Scholz that led to this disruptive election, and analyze the continued influence of anti-migrant sentiment pulling European politics to the right. Finally, we discuss the election's outcomes, including the victory of the CDU that will make Friedrich Merz the next leader of Germany, the continued rise in support for the right-populist AfD in formerly Communist East Germany, and the surprising revival in the fortunes of the left-wing Die Linke party. We conclude by examining how plans to increase German defense spending reflect a diminished partnership between Europe and the USA.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

From Boomers to Millennials is a U.S. history podcast? This is episode 20B, entitled German Elections 2025. It's a special supplemental episode. This is going to be a different kind of episode than any we've ever recorded, because I am trying something different here. I'm trying to do a non-scripted episode, which is very difficult for me because typically I prefer to carefully craft everything I want to say in a script, and now I feel like I'm kind of working without a net. But I do have an outline, of course, to keep this from getting too chaotic. But this episode will be more improvised than usual. more in a Dan Carlin style than a Mike Duncan style for all the history podcast obsessives out there. But certainly I'm no Dan Carlin, who's a master of that style. I've seen him in person talking off the cuff, and he's so good at it. I have a lot less experience with that type of thing. So this is going to be an interesting experiment, and it definitely is going to involve a lot more rambling from me. I'm not going to be quite as focused and eloquent as I usually am, but please stay tuned because I think this will be a very interesting episode. For one thing, it gives me the opportunity to get more content out there before the end of this month. The only caveat I would give is that if you have zero interest in current European geopolitics, This may not be the episode for you. And it is getting a bit away from our main focus of US history and particularly going back to the 60s. This is another current events podcast like the one we did at the end of 2024, but it certainly draws on historical sources. The long history between the US and Europe in the post-World War II era and how that relationship emerged during the Cold War After the Cold War and now with this current new phase where the relationship between the United States and Europe seems to be changing. So that's part of why this episode is interesting. And I do like to nerd out on international politics. So this is something that I can talk about extemporaneously because I did follow the German election pretty closely. I'm in Europe right now. I even know someone who voted in the election, although not in Germany. I know a couple German people. I've been paying more attention to European media sources like Deutsche Welle and BBC and things like that to try to get up to speed. So maybe I can translate a little bit and explain a little bit to my mostly American listeners how the German system is different, maybe what we can learn from it, and how the recent changes to their political coalitions may affect the future of the United States and the rest of the world, in addition to the future of Europe. These recent German elections are particularly significant, I think, for two main reasons. One is the global rise of the far right all across Europe, largely focused on anti-migrant sentiment. other things as well, but I think the increased number of people coming from Asia and Africa into Europe has kind of disrupted the political status quo, has created a backlash, and has allowed some of these far-right parties to emerge in so many places. You're looking at National Rally, I think she's calling it now, with Marine Le Pen in France. You have Nigel Farage's movement in the UK. You have Georgia Maloney actually in power, albeit as part of a coalition with an anti-migrant right-wing party in Italy. The most extreme example outside of Russia is Viktor Orban in Hungary, who has taken a very different tack on many cultural issues and foreign policy issues that are outside the mainstream of the European Union. and has aligned himself more closely with the far-right in America, including Donald Trump, who gave a shout-out to Orban in his debate with Kamala Harris. I'm not sure a lot of Americans recognize the reference to Orban or knew who he is, but Trump bragged about how much Viktor Orban loves me. So all this is to foreground that there's even a far-right party in Germany which, for historical reasons... People are extra nervous about the extreme right in Germany. That party is the alternative for Deutschland party. One of the big questions in front of these elections was, there seemed to be this surge of support for the AFD. How big would it be? How powerful would they get? Would they actually have a chance to get into government? And what would that mean for the EU? So that was one thing. The second element was, that hung over everyone's head awaiting this election in Germany is how the changing relationship between the USA and the EU would affect the outcome because all of a sudden you're having an administration in the USA with the Trump-Vance administration that is more hostile or at least skeptical to the European Union and to NATO saying Europe needs to carry it It's weight. They need to pay more for their own defense. J.D. Vance really shocked some people when he made his first, I think it was his first trip to Europe, and he went over there and basically said Europeans don't value free speech. They're doing too much censorship of the far right. He even said that the biggest threat to Europe and its values were from within, from like... government censorship and intolerance of certain views outside the mainstream. And this is at a time when people in some parts of Europe feel potentially threatened by Russia. You recently had Sweden and Finland, who had been neutral for so long, finally joined NATO because they were so freaked out by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And there are concerns about China and other powers around the world. So it really shocked a lot of people in Europe to have Vance basically say, I have a lot of problems with with you people. And I think, you know, you're doing a lot of things wrong. It was, you know, and you can have a debate over what is free speech and what is hate speech and what shouldn't shouldn't be allowed. Should you be able to post Nazi stuff on public forums? Well, in the USA, that's Totally legal in Germany, not so much. And we can have a debate about that. But it just seemed like a weird thing to do for countries that have been longtime U.S. partners and allies to go over there and be so critical of them and their political systems. So the rhetoric coming from this new administration, you know, some of the speeches by Trump and Vance about not liking what the EU is doing and not being sure about continuing on with NATO and needing Europe to pay more and to take care of itself. You have all that creating diplomatic uncertainty. And then you have the tariffs issue creating economic uncertainty in Europe. The administration has been I didn't expect a big... international conflict with Canada. There were a lot of things I saw potentially on the horizon when Trump won the election in November. That came kind of out of the blue to me. But today we're focusing on Europe. So I'll stop rambling about the background to the election and talk about the status quo in Germany before the election started. Because Thank you. But many European countries have a very different political structure to their system, which makes it far more conducive to having a multi-party system. And that's certainly the case in Germany. Going into the recent election, Germany was governed by a coalition of three parties. The SPD, the Green Party, and the FPD. So first I'd like to tell you a little bit about those parties. The first one... I want to get into is the SDP, which translates, or sorry, the SPD. It's very easy to get that mixed up because it translates to Social Democratic Party. But the actual full name, and I've never formally studied German, so you really have to bear with me on these. Its full name is Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. So to understand the origins of the SPD, you need to go back to 19th century Germany. And we won't do this much of a deep dive into every single political party or we'll be here all day. But SPD emerged out of the working class in Germany. Like the United States, the German Empire industrialized later than, for instance, Britain, which was where the Industrial Revolution started. So in the late 19th century, you have this huge shift where all these factories are opening up in Germany. Many people are moving from the countryside into the factories. There's opportunities for advancement, but also life is very hard in the factories. Many workers are dissatisfied with the dangerous conditions and low pay. So you start developing these working class movements. And the SPD came out of that time period. And it contained some pretty radical elements, including people who were influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels about having an eventual socialist revolution. And for that reason... Under the Second Reich, which was the government of the German Empire from the new unified German state that emerged in 1870 under the leadership of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, formerly ruled by Kaisers or monarchs, basically, they weren't really a democracy. They did have a parliamentary body that had a role, but there was some limitations on the power of the Social Democrats, particularly because they were considered to be a potentially subversive force to the empire. The rubber really hits the road as to what kind of role the SPD will play when you get to the outbreak of World War I. The question is, will the socialists, and they were considered not just social democrats but outright socialists at the time, will the socialists support the war effort for Germany? And it was a big dilemma for the leaders because there was this idea out there that workers in France, Germany, Britain, wherever, have no reason to hate each other for these petty nationalistic differences. And really, they should unite against the upper classes rather than fighting their brothers who happen to be across a border. Now, if you're a strong nationalist, that kind of universalist rhetoric is going to seem ridiculous to you. But, you know, a lot of socialists believe that. They believed in unity of the international working class. But at the end of the day, what ends up happening in Germany and in most other European countries involved in the war is the socialists largely go along with the government and support the war effort. One major exception to that is in Russia, where unexpectedly during World War I you have the famous Russian Revolution in 1917. And this becomes a major flashpoint that really splits the left throughout Europe. Coming out of the Russian Revolution, the SPD splits into different factions. The more radical faction leaves and becomes the communists, and the more moderate... center-left faction remains in the SPD. And there was all kinds of drama between the Communists and the Social Democrats in the aftermath of World War I right up to into the 1930s. I don't have time to get into all that. But the most important thing to know is ever since then, the SPD has been a party that appealed predominantly to the urban working class, but was more center-left, not a radical party. Now today, the SPD's support is strongest in cities within what was formerly the nation of West Germany. There's a big divide within the various parties over whether they're more popular in the West or in the East, which we'll get into more as we discuss some of the other parties. But the SPD's particularly popular in areas of northwestern Germany, like up near Hamburg, closer to Scandinavia, some of the traditionally Protestant areas. but also in areas far to the west near the border of France. These are more traditionally Catholic areas, areas with the industrialized Rhineland, areas like Saarland, which was a traditional kind of working class mining area, Cologne or Cologne, cities like that. They remain strong in those areas, but their base is aging. Some of the younger people who are more progressive and may have traditionally voted with the SPD have been attracted to the Green Party and other parties. SPD nevertheless won the 2021 German federal election with the largest plurality vote of any party, defeating the CDU after the departure of its longtime leader, Angela Merkel. Merkel's potential successor lost the election to Olaf Scholz, the current chancellor of Germany, very soon to lose that role, as we'll explain, due to the results of the election. But Olaf Scholz has been the chancellor. He's considered moderate, pragmatic, a bit boring, even by German standards. And his party would be negatively affected by dissatisfaction with the status quo in the recent elections. Now then we get to the next party, the Green Party. The Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats were together in what was called the Traffic Light Coalition. This refers to the colors of the respective parties. The Social Democrats' official color is red. The Green Party is, shocker, as green as its official color. And the Free Democrats have yellow as their official color. So in this very cutesy designation, they call this the Traffic Light Coalition because it's like the colors on a traffic light. The Green Party emerged in West Germany out of the activism related to environmental issues that came out of the 1960s and 1970s. They were founded in 1980. Now at the time, there was a big concern not only about pollution, Germany was a very industrialized country where that was a major issue, but also with other environmental threats such as nuclear waste and a general fear also of nuclear weapons. In the early 80s, there was this huge no-nukes movement in Europe. This was against a backdrop where you have... The Cold War getting very scary for the final time, really, in the early 1980s. You have Reagan coming to power in the USA. You have Margaret Thatcher coming to power in the UK. These leaders take a more aggressive tone. They invest in a lot of weapons systems, including more nuclear weapons. And the Soviets respond in kind. Actually, the Soviets during the 1980s created a really scary biological weapons program. If you want to learn more about that, you can read David Hoffman's book, The Dead Hand. I will include on our Patreon site a list of recommended reading related to this episode. Anyway, the Greens become an influential party based on environmental concerns and opposition to... nuclear waste, nuclear power, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Unsurprisingly, currently their main focus is climate change. They're generally considered, or center-left, so how are they different from the center-left SPD? Well, a lot of it has to do with their base. Their base tends to be a bit younger than the SPD and a bit more upwardly mobile, I would say. They're very big in college towns in the western part of Germany. A lot of young professionals are attracted to them. Their views are what we in the United States would call socially liberal in terms of attitudes toward immigration, LGBT issues, things like that. An example of a situation where the Greens and the Social Democrats might come into conflict is, for instance, maintaining jobs in a factory that is polluting the atmosphere. The Social Democrats, who have the support of the unionized laborers who work at that factory, might say, hey, we need to keep that factory open, whereas the Greens might say, no, it isn't worth the damage it's doing to the environment that factory needs to close. So those are some of the tensions that could come up. But generally, both of these parties are left-leaning, so it kind of makes sense for them to go into coalition together. That brings us to the third member of the Traffic Light Coalition, kind of the oddball, which is the Free Democrats. FPD officially stands for Freie Demokratische Partei. Again, pardon my terrible German. This is basically a classically liberal party, liberal in the sense of favoring free markets and free trade. If you go back to episode 13a of our podcast entitled Defining Liberalism, We did a deep dive into the meaning of the term liberalism and how it emerged as meaning something different in Europe versus in the United States. So this is more the European definition of liberal, which is to the right of what is considered liberal in North America. Generally, the supporters of the FPD are socially or culturally more liberal, but in terms of economics, they're more pro-business. I think they're supported by a lot of entrepreneurial people, people who own small businesses, people who are trying to work their way up the corporate ladder and are frustrated by government red tape. I wouldn't necessarily call them libertarian because there's almost no one in Europe that is so viscerally anti-government as American libertarians are. But they're kind of leaning in a slightly libertarian direction. While the Free Democrats may see eye to eye with their coalition partners and the Social Democrats and the Green Party on some issues regarding maybe immigration policy or other cultural issues, clearly this group has the biggest cause to come into conflict with the other parties on economic issues. because the other parties in the traffic-like coalition usually want more regulation across the board, whereas the Free Democrats tend to want less. Unsurprisingly, it was the FPD that finally blew up the coalition because they did not find the budget that the other two parties were pushing for to be acceptable. The leader of the Free Democrats, a guy named Christian Linder, basically led the effort to pull out of the coalition, and that is what triggered the need to have the recent election. The largest opposition party outside of the main governing coalition is the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union. This is a center-right party, and it has dominated German politics for most of the 21st century. Christian Democratic parties emerged in the aftermath of World War II The far right, particularly the fascistic movements, obviously had been discredited. Christian democratic parties filled the vacuum of being conservative parties that wanted to protect traditional ways of life, the traditional role of Christianity in Europe, but which also wanted to support democracy. Christian democratic parties tended to support the creation of welfare states in post-war Europe, but favored a more limited version than that proposed by the Social Democrats. They were supported by traditionally religious people in small towns and rural areas, and they were especially strong in Catholic areas. But despite having the word Christian in its name, the modern CDU is definitely not a theocratic party in an increasingly secular Germany. It isn't trying to ban abortion or follow other parts of the agenda of the USA's so-called Christian right. In the 21st century, the German CDU has stood for fiscal discipline, free trade, and close ties with the EU and NATO. It is basically a pragmatic centrist party that tweaks the status quo just enough to maintain the trust of its aging supporters. In fact, their most successful politician, Angela Merkel... due to her stance on migration and the fact that she didn't get along so well with George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Many Americans probably would have assumed she was more on the left side of the political spectrum, but that's not the case. The Christian Democrats are more fiscally conservative. They want a balanced budget. In Germany, they pushed austerity policies for both their own country and across the EU. In terms of foreign policy, they have a strong tradition of being militantly anti-communist. In many countries, they were associated with the Catholic Church's strong stance against communism during the Cold War. There is this strange element also where the Christian Democrats... governed in partnership with sort of a subsidiary called the Christian Social Union, which is the party that dominates in the very Catholic region of Bavaria in the southwest of Germany. That's where Munich is. It's where BMW comes from, obviously. And it's kind of a one-party region, obviously. And usually when one party dominates, you think there's something shady going on and things aren't really democratic. But democracy in Germany, including in Bavaria, seems quite robust. It just seems that the CSU is super popular there. That's a very prosperous region in Germany. So things are going well. The population figures, if it's not broke, don't fix it. I should point out the Christian Democrats are not only popular in Catholic areas, and they're not as explicitly affiliated with the Catholic side of Christianity as, say, their equivalents in countries like Italy would tend to be. So they don't have a sectarian affiliation, and they have many Protestant supporters in traditionally Protestant parts of Germany. Europe is generally a lot less religious than it used to be. The percentage of people who attend church has been declining for decades. So I'm fairly certain you don't need to explicitly be Christian or self-identify as Christian to be in the CDU. So this is a party that secular people very much participate in and can feel comfortable in, despite its Christian roots and ideological origins. Angela Merkel was really arguably the great centrist politician of the 21st century in Europe. Although she wasn't traditionally charismatic, for a time she was wildly popular and widely trusted by the German public. Even those critical of her policies can acknowledge her incredible political talents, but probably the most controversial thing she ever did regarded the migrant crisis. In the aftermath of the USA's 2003 decision to invade Iraq, the country devolved into chaos and insurrection. and US troops were stuck fighting there for years. When Barack Obama came in in 2009, he fulfilled his campaign promise of largely pulling US troops out of Iraq. Unfortunately, the aftermath of the chaos caused by the US toppling of the Iraqi regime I'm not here to defend Saddam Hussein or anything, but toppling that regime did create a power vacuum and cascading chaos across the region. And that's what you see happen. You see things destabilize politically in Iraq and Syria, which led to the rise of scary groups like ISIS and a lot of internal fighting and civil war. And that creates a lot of suffering, misery, and people fleeing up through Turkey into the EU. At the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, Merkel agreed to accept over half a million asylum seekers, most of them from the Middle East, for humanitarian reasons. Political backlash over this decision became strong by early 2016, following reports that large groups of migrant men had attacked women on New Year's Eve 2015 in Cologne, Germany. While most immigrants were law-abiding, the small portion of them involved in crime or terrorist incidents became a major talking point for a growing far-right movement. And that leads us to the second biggest opposition party, the AFD, which emerged in the aftermath of the migrant crisis. The AFD is the Alternative for Deutschland party. It was founded in 2013. They differ with the center-right CDU in a couple of areas. For one thing, they're more of a Euroskeptic party, which means they're skeptical of alliances like the EU and NATO. Traditionally, the center-right CDU was very strongly supportive of those alliances, very strongly supportive of a partnership with the U.S. and the reliance on the U.S. for military protection, as the U.S. has several military bases in Germany, and this has allowed Germany to avoid spending a ton of money on defense. There's a lot of unease, both inside of Germany and throughout Europe, about the Germany being heavily militarized because a large percentage of the countries in Europe were at one point or another invaded or occupied by Germans during the 20th century. So letting the USA carry that burden was a compromise that seemed to work out well for everybody. Although it's increasingly one the Americans in the aftermath of the Cold War are questioning. But for the AFD, they want something different. They want Germany to more go it alone, Germany for the Germans, because they are highly nationalistic as a far-right party. They were founded in opposition to migration, so they're very anti-immigrant. They want Germans to be able to feel more proud of being German. This includes less guilt over Germany's history, including the Second World War, the Holocaust, things like that. So it probably won't shock you to hear that some of the more extreme neo-fascist or neo-Nazi elements in Germany have been attracted to this party and have had affiliations with this party. The really interesting and kind of puzzling thing about the AfD is their role as a regional party, because they are far more popular in the formerly communist eastern part of Germany than they are in the west. Now let's flashback for a minute to 1989. The Berlin Wall comes down. East Germany and West Germany had been apart for over 40 years. The East Germans lived under a communist dictatorship. They dealt with a heavy-handed secret police known as the Stasi. By the time of German reunification in 1990, it seemed most people in East Germany did want to move away from communism and reunite with the West. There was a merger of East and West, but generally it was the East being folded into the West German capitalistic democratic system. Communist East Germany lagged behind prosperous capitalist West Germany economically. West Germany had all these successful companies and was one of the most prosperous countries in Europe. My understanding is that the German government Once Germany reunited into one country, they tried to make a lot of efforts to invest in formerly communist East Germany and bring them up to speed and a greater degree of parity with the West. But despite all these efforts, ultimately over 40 years of being under totally different systems has just proven really difficult to completely undo. So to this day, on a whole list of economic factors, unemployment rate, per capita income, number of cars per household, a significant gap between East and West Germany remains in place. The continued economic problems in the East have led its population to have a lot of political frustration. And in recent years, some have turned to the far-right AFD party to express this. Obviously, the far right has appealed to a lot of downwardly mobile, economically marginalized people in other places, including in the United States. It gives those people something to be proud of, their national identity. It gives them people to blame for their problems, which is often elites and foreigners. The most confusing thing about why the AfD has been so popular in the East, however, is there are way more immigrants and migrants in the West than there are in the East. So it's a bit of a puzzle. But for whatever the reason, the AfD has become more and more popular in the former East Germany. Now, if you're going to try to be successful as a far-right nationalist party in 21st century Germany, one huge obstacle you're going to face is that, due to the history of the Third Reich... which ultimately ended in disaster for Germany and led the Germans to be perceived. Most of us would agree that at least under the Nazis, the Germans were among the main villains of the 20th century. In the aftermath of World War II, the Germans wanted to move away from all that. They wanted to become a peaceful, prosperous, democratic country. They wanted to move away from militarism and hyper-nationalism. As a result... People are taught in schools across Germany of the dangers and the risks of extreme nationalism. So if you're a party like the AfD, how do you avoid the label of being the breeding grounds of a new Hitler? Well, one way is you can pick a leader who no one would confuse with Hitler if she were walking down the Strasse. The AFD's current leader, Alice Weidel, is openly lesbian, and her domestic partner is a non-white woman originally from Sri Lanka. So clearly someone like that is not easy to label as a Nazi with the associations we have with Nazis being racist, homophobic, etc. Weidel is not representative of her party's predominantly struggling male East German base in other ways, too. She is a financially successful woman, a former banker from West Germany. She has portrayed Muslim immigrants as a threat to women's rights and LGBT rights. Now, Islamist terrorism has become a salient issue in Europe ever since 9-11 and the start of the U.S.-led War on Terror. In 2004 and 2005, bombings occurred in Spain and in the UK that killed a total of 249 people. They seem to have been partially motivated by those governments' support of the American invasion of Iraq. Then, between January 2015 and August 2017, There was another shocking wave of attacks, most of which were committed by members and supporters of ISIS. These attacks occurred in Paris, Brussels, Nice, Berlin, Manchester, and Barcelona. Over 330 civilians were killed in this surge of Islamist terrorism. And it is understandable that these events, coinciding with more refugees coming into Europe during the migrant crisis, was something that created widespread public concern. However, it is worth remembering that most of the migrants were themselves fleeing the violence of groups like ISIS. Also, it should be noted that there have been no more attacks that killed over 10 people since 2017, although there have been some smaller attacks. This decrease in terrorism occurred despite the continued presence of Middle Eastern immigrants and refugees in Europe. But parties like the AFD still see them as a threat, if not to Europeans' immediate physical security, then a threat to their culture, economic well-being, and way of life. It's important to point out now that I've mentioned that there have actually been incidents of violence by extreme Islamist groups in Europe since the start of the 21st century, that Muslims are not a political monolith. Just because someone is a devout Muslim doesn't necessarily mean they're trying to oppose their views on non-Muslims or trying to promote a theocratic agenda any more than all Christians are trying to promote a theocratic agenda. Moreover, the Arab and Muslim populations that have come to Europe in recent decades have different degrees of religiosity, various types of political and cultural views. This idea that Muslims are going to take over and force Western women to cover their heads, I'm not aware of a single example of that ever happening anywhere in Europe. At least it hasn't happened unless you go back to the invasions of the Ottoman Empire or something. But nevertheless, the bogeyman of an Islamic takeover of Europe is something that fuels far-right sentiment. So let's get back to the AFD. The AFD in previous national elections have captured 12-15% of the overall vote, But the thing that many people found alarming across Europe was that in the most recent polls, the AFD was looking like they were going to get over 20% of the vote. And the big question was, could they actually be brought into the government? In many European countries, there's this whole idea of a firewall or a cordon sanitaire, as the French would say, to keep potential neo-fascist elements out of government. And in many countries... The center-left, the moderates, and the center-right all agreed we should not work with extreme-right parties. But the more successful the far-right parties become, the more tempting it's going to be, particularly for center-right parties, to go into coalition with them. because that can be the difference between the center-right party being shut out of government power to being part of the governing coalition. For instance, in Sweden, the firewall has broken down. The current governing coalition in Sweden is center-right, but in order to beat the Social Democrats who have traditionally dominated the political scene in post-World War II Sweden, the center and center-right parties made a deal with the far-right anti-migrant Sweden Democrats. Technically, the Sweden Democrats are not part of the governing coalition, but they are defined as like partners who voted for the center-right coalition and allowed it to become a governing majority. So you're seeing these things break down across Europe. Concerns about a weakening firewall in Germany grew during 2023. when it was revealed that AFD officials had secretly met with far-right leaders and discussed a plan to deport not only resident aliens, but also German citizens with an immigrant background. Before the 2025 federal elections, AFD nevertheless seemed to be growing more popular than ever, according to the opinion polls. Okay, so that's more than enough information about the far-right and the AFD. So let's move to the other main opposition parties, which are more on the left extreme of German politics. In the post-reunification era, Die Linke has traditionally been considered the most left-wing party. They currently identify as a democratic socialist party. The most controversial thing about Die Linke is their origins in East Germany. They emerged out of the remnants of the Communist Party of East Germany. There were even some communist East German politicians who then became successful politicians under democracy, affiliating with Die Linke. Die Linke literally means the left in German, if I'm not mistaken. Like the AFD, Die Linke has been disproportionately popular in Eastern Germany. Now didn't the population of formerly communist East Germany openly rebel against the communist regime at the end of the Cold War? Didn't they want to become part of the West and be incorporated into West Germany's capitalist democratic system? Well, for the most part, the answer is yes, but these things are complicated. Many older people lost their jobs and their social status during the transition to capitalism. and a significant number of East Germans developed a nostalgia for the old system. There is a good German film made back in 2003 called Goodbye Lenin that deals with this nostalgia issue. There genuinely was a population within the former East that thought at least some things were better under the old system. Usually they didn't necessarily want the Stasi back or to rebuild the wall or anything like that. But they did advocate for some of these farther left policies, which led to the popularity of Die Linke in some of these places. Meanwhile, Die Linke's roots in East German communism made even left-leaning people in the part of Germany that was under the capitalistic democratic government of West Germany very nervous about voting for Die Linke. Their strong association with East Germany, the fact that they incorporated politicians from its authoritarian communist system made them absolutely politically toxic to a lot of people in West Germany, even very left-leaning people. So a lot of left-leaning people would support the leftmost wing of the Social Democrats, the SPD, or would support the Green Party or some other party. Now, both of the major parties in post-World War II Germany, which is the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, have traditionally been very supportive of NATO and also the EU. They were very supportive of Germany's alliance with the USA, although under SPD leadership, Germany did decline to participate in the coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003. Otherwise, the main two parties have been big supporters of international cooperation and affiliation with the other countries of the Western Democratic Bloc. This is another area where D-Link has been different. They've been more Euro-skeptic, which means more skeptical of the EU, and they have been home to some explicitly pro-Russian elements, people who side more with Vladimir Putin's Russia than with, for instance, the United States. in recent geopolitical conflicts. So this is another thing that makes people in West Germany traditionally be pretty queasy about Die Linke and not being open to supporting them. After all, East Germany was kind of a puppet state of Russia when it was the Soviet Union, and now we see this party with partially communist origins still having these pro-Russian leanings. However, in recent years, Die Linke faced another big problem. With the rise of the AfD in the East, they were increasingly losing market share. They were losing part of their support base from the far-left party to the far-right party. As strange as that may be, there definitely were voters who made that journey in the former East Germany. Internal tensions finally led a faction within Die Linke to split off and form their own party. This faction was led by a former delinquent politician by the name of Sarah Wagenknecht. She created a new party, modestly named after herself, called the Bundes-Sarah Wagenknecht, or BSW, which apparently translates into English as the Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance. Now, it seems to me that a big part of the motivation behind the BSW is was to kind of try to recapture some of those voters who had gone over to the AFD. So the BSW favors left-wing economic policies, more generous benefits for citizens from the government, but the BSW also took more conservative views on cultural issues, especially migration. The BSW position is that Germany should be taking far fewer migrants in. They've also staked out more conservative positions on issues like LGBT rights. I believe the BSW is particularly skeptical of trans rights. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given these cultural views, the BSW also has absorbed those former members of Dylanka who are most skeptical of NATO, most sympathetic to Putin's Russia. So the BSW has emerged as this party that seems to be tailor-made toward a lot of people in the former East Germany who are more culturally conservative but need more economic help from the government. The polls heading into the 2025 election showed that the BSW is getting more than 5% of the national vote, which would give them a position within the Bundestag, within the legislature of Germany. These polls also showed BSW exceeding the percentage being earned by the remaining portion of Die Linke. So for a time prior to the election, it looked like Die Linke may basically be a spent force politically and would be replaced by this weird kind of left conservative hybrid party, the BSW. So now let's discuss the conditions immediately before the election. Olaf Scholz and the Governing Coalition... had become very unpopular. A big part of this was some of the same economic turmoil that provoked a lot of backlash against the Biden administration and the USA. Complaints about rising inflation, the cost of living, the increasing cost of housing. As the global economy has undergone these aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and everything it did to the supply chain, We've been going through these waves of inflation. All around the world, we've seen so much anti-status quo political sentiment and all this populist anti-establishment energy. And Germany is certainly no exception to that. Part of that populist energy includes skepticism about letting in more migrants. While there are some people who advocate for an extreme position... such as having a totally open border on the one hand or closing off national borders completely to all immigrants on the other, mainstream European political parties generally accept the premise that they will have to screen potential newcomers, letting in some migrants and deporting others. Among both center-right and center-left parties, The general trend in recent years has been toward adopting stricter criteria and thus admitting fewer immigrants. This policy shift has taken place in part out of a reaction to the rise of hardline, far-right anti-migrant parties all across Europe. While many agree it is necessary to adopt these tougher policies to limit the appeal of extreme-right parties with authoritarian tendencies... Some, mostly on the left, express concern that this will cause mainstream parties themselves to become more extreme and intolerant. So this is pretty complicated. With growing anti-migrant sentiment in European countries including Germany, the CDU, the center-right party we discussed before, which was leading in the polls, but was facing the AFD in their rearview mirror, with the AFD in second place. So it's understandable that the CDU was tempted to pivot to the right on immigration, and that's exactly what they did. The CDU, under the leadership of their candidate, Friedrich Merz, came out in favor of tougher laws against illegal immigration and more restrictions on migration. And in January of this year, they pushed a bill in the Bundestag that would implement those policies. Now, there was a convention that mainstream parties, due to the firewall, should never openly welcome or seek out the support of the extreme far-right party, the AFD. But in the case of this bill, that's exactly what the CDU did. They welcomed the support of the AFD in passing this bill. This is where DeLinka comes back into our picture. Even after some members had departed to form the BSW, Die Linke still had a small number of representatives in the Bundestag in January of 2025. One of their leaders was a 36-year-old woman named Heidi Reichenick. She gave a fiery speech that condemned the CDU's collaboration with the AFD on the anti-immigrant bill, and she warned that fascists were now being allowed to participate in German governance for the first time since World War II. Heidi Reichenach did not look like a stereotypical German politician. Her short sleeves showed her tattoos. including a tattoo of Rosa Luxemburg, a German communist who was murdered by a right-wing militia during a revolutionary uprising in Berlin during the chaotic aftermath of World War I. The speech by the charismatic, red-haired Heidi Reichenach went viral in Germany. This attention failed to dampen the support for the CDU and the support for the AFD in the upcoming election. But what it did do was turn around the political fortunes of the seemingly doomed Die Linke Party. The German election was held on February 23rd, 2025. They have a very interesting system. They have something called the Wahlenmacht, which is developed by German political scientists, I believe with government support, where citizens can go in, answer a bunch of questions, and it matches them up with the political party that most matches their beliefs. The Volomat is available on a website and as a mobile phone app. Another key difference with Germany being a multi-party parliamentary system using proportional representation is that voters vote not only between the specific candidates in their district, they also cast a general vote for one of the major political parties in Germany. After all of the actual regional representatives are elected, the German system uses the overall results in these votes for the parties to bring in additional members off something called the party list in order to make sure that the Bundestag more accurately represents the views of the German general public. Let me try to explain this a little more clearly. Let's say that in the next U.S. congressional election, assuming that takes place, Let's say that the public gets fed up with the main two parties, the Republicans and the Democrats. And in every single congressional district across the nation, 10% of the voters support the Libertarian Party and 10% support the Green Party. That would result in exactly zero representatives in Congress from either of those parties. Because if you don't have the biggest plurality in any individual district, you don't get represented. It's a first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system. So unless the Greens or the Libertarians can actually come in first place in one of these districts, they aren't going to get any congressional representatives. However, under the German proportional representation system, if 10% of Americans cast their congressional vote for the Libertarian Party, then 10% of the members of Congress are going to be from the Libertarian Party. Now, you can probably see the appeal of this as a system that maybe more accurately reflects the political views of the public, but that's not the system the USA has. So after all this buildup, let's talk about what actually happened in the 2025 German elections. As expected, the CDU was the party that got the biggest chunk of the vote. They only got 29%, but that's a big chunk in a system with so many parties. Friedrich Merz... will be the next chancellor of Germany. Actually, he may be already. I'm not sure where they are in the coalition talks. There was a big concern I heard among some pundits that the AFD might do even better than expected in the polls. We've seen some of these right-wing populist movements and politicians be undercounted in polling, theoretically because some people don't want to admit that they're going to vote for the right-wing populist. We saw polling underestimate support for Brexit in the United Kingdom. We saw polling underestimate support for Donald Trump in U.S. presidential elections. It's happened all three times he's run. He's outperformed the polling. But the AFD in this case did not outperform their polling, at least not by much. They were estimated to get about 20%. They got 21%. Probably not enough that would in any way tempt the CDU to actually coalition with them. In third place, you have the formerly leading party, the SPD, getting only a little over 16% of the vote, one of their worst performances in history. I mentioned that Olaf Scholz, the incumbent SPD chancellor, was quite unpopular. You also saw the Green Party finish fourth, and the Greens saw a decline in their vote share. They only got 12%. They may not make it into the next coalition. In fourth place, with 9% of the vote, you have Die Linke, co-led by Jan van Aken and Heidi Reikeneck, who I mentioned before. In the back of the pack, we have Sarah Wagenknecht's BSW party and Christian Lindner's FDP. Both of these parties got above 4% of the vote, but below 5%. And that is a hugely significant number. Let me explain why. You have to get a minimum of 5% of the national vote to get seats within the Bundestag. So both the BSW and the FPD are out of the German parliament for this next cycle. In polls during 2024, it looked like the new left conservative hybrid BSW party would essentially take away part of the former DeLinca support, getting over the 5% threshold, while DeLinca was polling below 5%. But instead of BSW shutting DeLinca out of the government, it looks like the opposite happened. Allow me to explain why that might be. My big theory here, and I think it's backed up by the data evidence, is the departure of the BSW faction purged Die Linke of some of the elements that progressive-leaning people in West Germany found most objectionable about Die Linke. It purged people with views considered fringy, views sympathetic to Vladimir Putin's position in the current war in Ukraine. people with anti-vax views, and other populist anti-establishment views that are viewed as fringe or unscientific by people in the mainstream. The remaining portion of Delinka was socially progressive, including on issues like LGBT rights, feminism, and also campaigned on a strong platform of economic redistribution and taxing the rich. Unlike CDU, Delinka definitely did not promote a message of increasing defense spending and increasing military aid to Ukraine. Delinka is still fairly pacifist. They want to increase social spending, but not defense spending. But they purged the explicitly pro-Russia element from their party. Basically, a lot of left-leaning voters in West Germany who are fed up with the status quo, people who usually vote for the Social Democrats and the Greens, apparently were attracted to Delinka, which allowed Delinka to expand beyond its base in East Germany and make up for the ground lost by those voters who went toward the BSW. The most ironic election result may have been the decline of the Free Democrats, or FDP, who had triggered the breakup of the traffic light coalition by refusing to agree with the Greens and SPD on a budget. One assumes they thought forcing a new election would benefit them, but instead Christian Lindner's pro-business party did so poorly that they missed the 5% cutoff and are out of the Bundestag entirely after this election. Two more big things need to be discussed before we finally end this interminable episode. First of all, the new divides in the German electorate. So the older the people are, as they broke down the data from the exit polls, older people tended to be most likely to support the two major traditional parties, the Social Democrats and the CDU. Young people are really turning away from those traditional parties. The other big thing, which is definitely concerning, is polarization between men and women, particularly between young men and young women. And you may have heard this story about voting patterns in the USA, including the last presidential election. You have young men increasingly drawn to the far right in the German case toward the AFD, and you have young women increasingly drawn toward the far left in this particular German election, increasingly toward Die Linke. So if these trends continue, if these voting patterns continue as those young people get older, we're going to see a much more extreme German politics. And that's a concern. And I say this not just to defend moderation for moderation's sake. Not all of my views are moderate. But to say that when you look at history during the Great Depression, you had German politics have support for the center parties completely collapse and everything go toward the extreme. This is when you had communists and Nazis fighting in the streets led to a really bad place for Germany and for the whole world. For more information on that, I would recommend Richard J. Evans' book. He's a British historian. He's very well regarded. His book, The Coming of the Third Reich, covers this period and will include a reading list on the Patreon. The last thing I want to talk about is the future of Europe. The endorsement of J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and Elon Musk of the AFD, which is seen by probably the majority of Germans as an extreme and somewhat scary neo-fascist party, really has shaken the confidence that they can continue in their traditional relationship with the United States as sort of their de facto military protector under NATO. And the biggest shock after the election was Friedrich Merz coming out and saying he wants Germany to try to become basically independent of depending on the USA for military support. So you're going to see a big increase in German military spending. One other thing I should mention is what the upcoming coalition government will actually look like. Despite the fact that the CDU partnered with AFD on that one bill, the CDU has said there is absolutely no chance that they would consider actually going into a coalition partnership with the AFD. They're considered most likely to partner with the Social Democrats. That will be a bit awkward, but it's happened before in German politics. When the two main parties joined together, they call that a grand coalition. So that's what we may see. But back to the whole issue of German defense spending, they've already taken actions under sort of the lame duck government to remove the debt break. Basically, in the German political system, they had put in something that made it very hard for them to go into debt. They have this very stereotypically German obsession with being fiscally prudent and balancing their budgets. They have a far lower percentage of government debt, for instance, than the United States government has. And they have limits on how much they can go into debt, but they're removing that so they can do more defense spending. So it'll be very interesting to see what happens to the relationship between the U.S. and Germany, whether we see continued divergence, what we see regarding these far-right movements in the future. So I apologize for this long episode, but I found this German election really fascinating. I hope you found it interesting as well. We'll go back to normal episodes with the normal production, the normal music, the normal scripted content next time. This episode was so different, I hope you reach out and let me know what you thought of it. Remember, it's boomertomillennialatoutlook.com. Just a little postscript update here. The Christian Democrats, or CDU, have indeed reached an agreement to form a government in coalition with the Social Democrats, also known as the SPD. Friedrich Merz is set to officially take over as Chancellor on May 6th of 2025. The German debt break hasn't been completely removed, but it has been quote-unquote eased to allow for more spending, much of which will be spent on national defense and support to Ukraine because the current American regime has indicated its intention to disinvest from European security. We hope you've enjoyed this Current Events related episode, and we'll meet you back in the USA of the 1960s in our next episode. Thank you so much for listening.