MARK ALMOND: Worrying echoes of Germany in the 1930s… with added deep resentment over mass migration

Once it was the slogan of East Germans rejecting Communism. But as crowds chanted, ‘We are the people,’ at Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday, it was the sound of an enraged nation that could be on the brink of ditching democracy.

The German leader was in Magdeburg to lay flowers and pay his respects to the five people, including a nine-year-old boy, killed when a deranged Saudi doctor ploughed his car into crowds at the Christmas market. More than 200 people were hurt, dozens with critical injuries.

When Germany’s politicians are barracked and threatened by a populist mob that despises everything the establishment stands for, comparisons to the early 1930s are inevitable. Adolf Hitler, the leader of a fringe party consisting of thugs and extremists, rose to power on just such a wave of anger.

And when German protesters take to the streets shouting, ‘We are the people,’ the whole of Europe should shudder. The democratic Weimar Republic, which ruled Deutschland after the First World War, was hated because the populace felt they were made to pay far too high a price for peace and democracy in terms of inflation and unemployment after 1918. People from all points on the political spectrum were united by a shared sense of injustice.

The same is becoming true today, with added deep resentment over mass immigration. Figures published this year show more than 20million people in Germany are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, with more than a third of them arrivals within the past decade.

At the same time, a survey of company managers shows business confidence is almost as low as it was during Covid and at the worst of the banking crisis in 2008.

Volkswagen, the symbol of German economic renaissance after the Second World War, plans to axe 35,000 jobs over the next five years, with other major manufacturers such as BMW and Mercedes also warning of massive cuts.

More than any other European country, Germany has been punished by the Ukraine war and Western sanctions against Russia. National prosperity has been reliant on cheap energy from the old Soviet Union. When former Chancellor Angela Merkel was a young Communist agitator in East Germany, she organised students to help build the pipelines from the USSR, and decades later she based her economic policy on them.

The German Chancellor visited the site where a car drove into a crowd of a Christmas market

The Right-wing Alternative For Germany [AfD] party and co-leader Alice Weidel (pictured) are gaining ground across the whole country

Now, without low-cost fuel from Russia, the country is forced to import it at crippling premiums, driving Germany towards a full-blown recession.

This is still very much a divided nation, 35 years on from reunification. Germany is a country without a long history of democracy. Its model ensures governments rely on fractious alliances between political opponents, thanks to a system of proportional representation that ensures majority rule for any one party is almost impossible.

The Right-wing Alternative For Germany [AfD] party has strong support in former East German territory, and is gaining ground across the whole country. The combination of economic anxiety and widespread fear over immigration and terrorism is an explosive mixture as elections approach on February 23.

It’s likely that there will be no clear path to a coalition then, if AfD gains votes in some areas while others vote for the socialist group led by Sahra Wagenknecht, who is also anti-immigration. With the more moderate vote split between the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Liberals, Germany could soon be in a state of political paralysis – just as it was after 1930, when the Weimar Republic lost public confidence.

Not long ago, the rise of another Fascist popular leader to power in Berlin seemed unthinkable.

But the Germans have a word for just such a reversal in psychology: Gestalt-switch.

It means an overnight change in the way people think. Germans had one for the good after 1945, but if they switch back now, all Europe will be plunged into chaos. 

Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute in Oxford