In Germany, An Election That Could Hollow Out Democracy 

When German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke of a watershed moment, the Zeitenwende🥂, in front of the German parliament as Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he may not have foreseen being in the midst of another watershed moment within Germany very soon. As Germany gears up for its snap federal elections on February 23, all the possible outcomes point to a state that has long known stability but is now struggling on multiple fronts.

🏅After the recent attacks by immigrants in Aschaffenburg and Munich, the focus of the election campaign moved to migration policies and enabled the far-right, anti-EU AfD (Alternative for Germany) to drag the centre of gravity of the broader political discourse towards the right. This is despite the fact that most policies need to be negotiated at a European level and there is little that individual countries can do.

ꦬIn 2015, as a flood of asylum seekers arrived at the doors of Europe from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere many countries refused or were reluctant to provide assistance to them. However, the then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed them into Germany, citing her Christian values and wanting to help those in need. The decision to help may have come from a good place, but the way it was rolled out was chaotic to say the least.

༒The System, the tenacious bureaucratic and technocratic apparatus of the German state, was overwhelmed with a staggering number of asylum seekers ( alone). These refugees were often undocumented, and had left home with almost nothing in their hands other than the trauma of war and violence, and didn’t speak German. There was a lack of solid, long-term plans around integration and helping them start life afresh, including working in Germany, along with debates around the legality of Right to Asylum. The immigrants stayed in refugee accommodations, weren’t allowed to work and were on state support with little to no perspective on leading a “normal” life until the System processed them and acknowledged the life they had before, including their qualifications.

The AfD latched on to this and made it their mission to target those “Outsiders”, the messaging often being “those undocumented outsiders, in all probability criminals, are like parasites feeding off German money while our infrastructure crumbles, economy suffers and yet our government hangs us out to dry”. Quite cognisant of the fact that no mainstream media or political establishment wanted to engage with them, they dedicated substantial energy into engaging with audiences on social media through polarising narratives. In a country that is very sensitive about how it frames any political conversation around “others” based on their own problematic history, the AfD normalised having extreme views. Meanwhile, other mainstream parties grossly miscalculated the support that the AfD was gathering, and failed to promote their successes in addressing the issue of undocumented migrants which would have neutralised some of the unfounded concerns around migration among the people. Instead, they engaged in petty politics. For all those who perceived that the migrants were being handed out special treatment, the AfD provided a new political Heimatജ with the promise of priority and exclusivity.

𒉰The recent attacks by two refugees from Afghanistan and Syria on civilians in Aschaffenburg and Munich respectively just before the elections have added fuel to the fire. In the aftermath of the attack in Aschaffenburg, the current chancellor candidate of the CDU Friedrich Merz breached the firewall on working with the AfD at the end of January 2025 by bringing in a motion in the Bundestag on stricter immigration policies that got the support of the AfD. Though the bill didn’t pass, the CDU and Merz faced intense criticism for this. The anger was not so much about the choice of rhetoric around migration, as about daring to cooperate with the AfD. Merz’s bill, as well as the border controls introduced by the SPD-led home ministry, show that the mainstream parties are now forced to take an extreme stance on border and migration issues to prove that they are doing something radical too.

ℱWith its hyper nationalist, conservative approach, the  are predicting the AfD will pick up over 20 per cent of the votes while the Christian Democrats are at about 30 per cent, and the Social Democrats at about 15 per cent. The growing electoral popularity of the AfD, which has almost doubled since the last elections, is also concerning as they intend to undo or at least renegotiate the framework of institutions like the EU or the Schengen agreement that have helped Europe sustain peace and contributed to its prosperity.

Stagnant economy

💞The once solid and resilient German economy is now stagnant and nervous; and the security and peace that Europe, especially Germany, had come to cherish after the fall of the Berlin Wall finds itself in a perilous place.

♊Surveys in the run up to the elections, before the issue of migration dominated the conversation, show that the voters are also extremely concerned about the economic slump. Suffering from a global economic slowdown, fluctuating inflation (), and long-term impacts of the pandemic, the economy is stagnating, with 2024 seeing the economy shrink by 0.2 per cent. With its reluctance to adapt and innovate, some key areas like the automobile sector are struggling to keep up with Chinese and other global competitors in areas like electromobility. The overdependence on Russian imports has also hurt the economy. Compared to 2019, the price of electricity grew by 111 per cent in 2022 and by 165 per cent in 2023, leading to a drop of 20 per cent in production in energy intensive sectors in 2023. Other infrastructural issues like lack of digitisation and affordable access to housing have made matters worse.

🍷The various mainstream political parties have laid out programs to boost the economy as part of their election campaign. The SPD is looking at providing affordable energy, restructuring the tax system for providing relief to industries, strengthening migration of skilled labour, and reforming the  enshrined in the constitution to allow Germany to borrow more than it currently can and invest in securing the future. The CDU wants to focus on supporting the automobile industry, providing tax relief, and slimming the bureaucracy, but is vague about its position on the debt brake. The Greens want a responsible economy that will address societal and environmental challenges, provide tax relief on energy prices, create a Deutschland Fund to invest in infrastructure and reform the debt stop. The AfD seems to be tapping into the anti-incumbent sentiment and is providing oversimplified answers to these issues: moving away from the Euro and going back to fossil fuels.

🌜Germany is also undergoing a demographic shift, leaving around 0.5 million jobs vacant. For the economy to stabilise, it urgently needs to address this shortage of qualified labour. The emergence of a strong anti-migrant narrative, on the other hand, will make it difficult for refugees looking to start afresh and come in as qualified labour. The German economy is also quite stressed about the potential impacts of a new tariff regime (), the ripple effects of an impending trade war between China and the US as well as the turbulent churning of the world order under the new Trump administration.

Trump's geopolitics

✨With Donald Trump returning as President in the US, the future of transatlantic relations as Europe has known it, as well as its entire security architecture since the end of the cold war, is on shaky grounds. Trump wants to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin, sidelining Ukraine and the Europeans. He may negotiate a  to end the war that involves Ukraine giving up territorial claims on Crimea, parts of Donetsk and Luhansk and any hope of entry into NATO. Such a deal will leave the Europeans facing the long-term implications of a stronger, brutish Russia at its borders. This will require an increased commitment to defense spending for the NATO members (), to build capacity against hybrid warfare that Russia is so adept at.

♌Though the mainstream parties have different approaches on how (and by how much) they want to support Ukraine, they are in agreement about the need to support Ukraine and work on becoming independent in terms of security. And of course, the AfD has a simple mantra to this problem: Ukraine should look out for itself, Germany should work on safeguarding its own interests, which sits well with Russia and the US. And while all these events call for a joint European approach, there are some expectations from Germany to provide reliable leadership to see through this crisis. If Germany will be able to provide that - time will tell. 

💝Trump, Putin, US Vice-President J D Vance, Elon Musk, the AfD and their like-minded partners across the continent have their mind set on not only isolating Germany as the strongest country in Europe but also on threatening the European project itself. The ultimate goal in the long run is an age of turbulence that will first see a systematic fracturing of the vote to prevent majority mandates to any political party, eventually leading to consolidation of power in ways we cannot imagine. It will also lead to an instrumentalisation and manipulation of opinions for substantiating extremist positions in an almost Orwellian fashion. Though one can almost be certain that the AfD will not be a part of the government in this term, it will certainly be a decisive part of the democratic establishment from this point on and will continue to grow, aiming at hollowing the German political establishment from within. And if the politicians and the voters are not hearing the alarm bells, seeing the signs, that is the beginning of the end of history. As Shakespeare once said, true it’s a pity, pity it's true.

(Views expressed are personal)

(Pradnya Bivalkar is based in Berlin and studies India-Germany relations. She has a PhD from the University of Tübingen on the intersection of media, political science and cultural studies.)