"Make Germany Great Again!" It was with this slogan that Friedrich Merz emerged as the main victor in last Sunday's general election in Germany.
Sounds familiar?
To be exact, the man who is set to become Germany's next chancellor borrowed the phrase made popular by President Donald Trump in the United States. The slogan Merz used was "Restore Germany's greatness and respect!", which expresses the same sentiment.
The German election put the twin center-right parties of Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union on top with their highest score since the golden days of Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard, the men who rebuilt post-war Germany as a robust democracy. The CDU/CSU also put the idea of Germany as a nation-state rather than as part of a globalist conglomeration at the center of the debate, pushing aside the 80-year trauma of seeing nationalism morph into a version of Nazism.
To be sure, the dramatic rise of the rightist party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which doubled its votes, is still used by those who wish to keep that trauma alive for a verity of reasons.
All in all, however, despite efforts by label-distributing circles, AfD isn't what the Nazi Party was in the 1930s, and could be seen as part of the radical right movement that led Britain to Brexit, brought Viktor Orbán to power in Hungary, made Giorgia Meloni prime minister of Italy and elevated Marine Le Pen's National Rally as France's largest political party.
The election also saw the rise of the radical left party Die Linke (The Left), which some analysts regard as a crypto-communist outfit with a support base in the former East Germany.
However, just as AfD isn't the Nazi Party, designating Die Linke as communist is an exaggeration.
In fact, both parties campaigned on issues such as illegal immigration, fear of mass unemployment and unease about loss of national authority to transnational bodies such as the European Union and NATO.
In other words, both those radical parties belong to the undeclared coalition of "Germany First" inspired by the Trumpist movement's "America First" shibboleth that has pushed the pendulum away from globalism.
The biggest losers in the elections were the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which survived in a truncated version, and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), which failed to gain entry into the Bundestag (parliament).
The Greens, also known as the Watermelon party because they are green outside and red -- that is to say anti-capitalist -- inside, also suffered defeat, especially losing a good many votes among younger electors who moved en masse to either Die Linke or AfD.
Regardless of party affiliations, the German electorate indicated that it believes that the politico-economic model developed since the 1950s is in deep crisis.
That model was based on five pillars.
The first was that Germany was covered by an American insurance policy for its national security, which enabled the nation to spend something around one percent of its GDP on defense. Many Germans now believe that those good old days are gone and support Merz's plan for a massive rise in military expenditure.
Trump's ambiguous attitude toward NATO and his criticism of Europeans as "freeloaders" has produced a sense of insecurity not known since the 1930s.
The second pillar was a healthy demography, initially energized by mass immigration to compensate for human losses sustained in World War II. Initially, the immigrants were ethnic Germans coming from Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and as far away as Romania and Bulgaria.
A large number of non-ethnic Germans also came from Turkey, which acted as the greatest exporter of manpower for Europe until the 1980s.
In the past three decades, however, a majority of new immigrants have come from war-torn nations such as former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa and, most dramatically, Syria.
These newcomers helped reduce Germany's demographic deficit, due to a declining birthrate, but also created huge cultural, religious and security problems that foment xenophobia. An immigrant who has fled a war-torn country isn't the same as one coming from a peaceful place with the hope of working and building a better life for himself and his loved ones in the old country.
The third pillar was stability, as Germany for the first time since its emergence as a nation-state in 1870 had passed through seven decades of development as a well-established democracy. But in the past few years that pillar, too, has appeared shaky with rising insecurity including countless knife attacks, assassinations of foreign political exiles, the emergence of extremist mini-groups and crises in intra-industrial dialogue, a hallmark of German democracy.
Built in the post-Soviet era, the fourth pillar was access to cheap oil and gas resources from Russia, which enabled Germany to reduce its dependence on the more expensive producers in the Middle East and Africa.
Finally, Germany enjoyed a fifth pillar, represented by almost unrestricted access to China's fast-growing market, making Germany the world's greatest exporting power in history. But that pillar, too, is proving shaky as the People's Republic enters a cycle of slowdown that nurtures economic nationalism and the cult of tariffs.
The election revealed some disturbing trends that, if accentuated, could threaten what has been an exemplary democracy highlighted by a massive 82.5% turnout in Sunday's elections, the highest in the European Union. Almost 60% of young voters, those aged 18 to 25, voted for radical left and right parties plus the "Watermelons".
By all accounts, Germany is heading for a bumpy road. Negotiating it is made more difficult because of the hybrid electoral system with partial proportional representation, which prevents the emergence of a majority consensus on tackling major challenges any nation could face. Endless coalition-building haggling and adoption of contradictory options consume much of the energy needed to govern a nation in crisis.
Is Merz up to the daunting task he faces at a time when the entire European Union is in crisis? The fact that he is the first businessman to assume the chancellorship and the most "American" in style may help.
He is also an avid reader of Nietzsche who believed that "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger." But who knows?
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.
Gatestone Institute would like to thank the author for his kind permission to reprint this article in slightly different form from Asharq Al-Awsat. He graciously serves as Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
