Episode 60: Emergency Episode: The German Elections

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, today we are talking about a whole new set of conservative freaks over in Germany because we are debriefing the recent German elections from this weekend.

I think there's been a lot of attention paid to this election compared to other German elections.

People tend to,

well, interest in them tends to spike as the numbers for the Nazis tend to spike for reasons that are not actually that hard to fathom.

But this was a particularly, I thought, like closely watched one.

I noticed that, you know, the New York Times had a sort of explainers, had, you know, had sort of like five lessons from the German election, like the way you might almost treat, the way they're going to treat the Virginia elections later this year, I would think.

Like it really got a kind of treatment that I don't remember it getting in the last, you know, in 2021 when the last one was.

I should say that we're joined today by a wonderful guest who

I've been on podcasts with before, but

the first time, first time guest to Embed with the Right, Anika Broksmid, who I should mention is a German journalist who specializes actually in US conservatism and who sat out the recent election or while it was happening were you on the plane?

Is that what happened?

Yeah, I was.

It was dark.

I unfortunately had

Wi-Fi because I had to finish an article, but it was it was pretty dark

because I made some questionable life choices because I was not in fact in Germany.

Can you tell our listeners where you were?

Yeah, I was in the US

at a tiny little conference at a place called National Harbor in Maryland, in fact,

at a national conference called CPAC.

The one place darker.

Yeah.

I think I've heard of it.

Yeah.

You found the one place darker.

I found it.

A lot of influence of Germany, maybe like mid-century Germany at CPAC.

I mean, you know, you could say that my spidey senses didn't just tingle, they were on like full vibrate the whole time, which

yeah, it was um it was pretty dark.

Had a moment where a well, let's not call him a journalist, uh, a media person from the Epoch Times tried to argue with me that the Nazis were in fact leftists, so that was fun.

Epoch Times is that

the cult, yeah.

That's the Falun Gong.

I mean, I was like, was it the Moonies or is it the Falun Gong?

It's the same people who do that Shen Yun dance exhibition.

Yeah, China before communism.

Now we're sidetracked.

First of all, we should clarify.

Any resonances with mid-century Germany you saw, it's the Roman salute, which is infinitely better because Italian fascism is just breezy, you know.

But even that is fitting because I don't know, did you guys see the one picture of one of the placards at CPAC that was like a Trump head, like an AI version of Trump?

So that was real.

I was wondering about that.

No, that was real.

That was real.

Wait, what?

What was the was it sorry go on it's called the third term project and you know I don't know if Steve Bannon is affiliated with it because he teased it basically as an idea Trump 2028 and it's Trump is an AI generated

version of Trump as a Roman emperor like as a marble white statue with a laurel wreath a little

pretty mid-century German eagle on top of him so he wants it he wants a kind of of a Reich, but third kind.

So that's not alarming, which is good.

Well,

we should leave our creeps for a moment, though.

We'll get back to them, dear listeners, because this is a fairly international election that just happened in Germany.

But I think

we're going to need to walk our listeners, and I think, Maura, we might need to walk you a little bit through what happened.

Yeah.

I was telling these guys before we started recording that I am kind of the vulgar American here, because if you're an American and you,

even if you cover American politics, as I do for my job, it's very easy to like not know that much about like, particularly like European politics.

And it's very easy to understand European politics in terms of like analogies or proxies for American political interests, right?

So like, you know, you hear like, okay, Angela Merkel,

she was kind of like a Hillary Clinton figure, you know, like that's the way Americans think of it.

Like they got got theirs in.

The Germans are wagging their head.

They're like, man.

I'm not saying this is accurate.

I'm saying this is how I understand it when I'm at the baseball game putting a hot dog in my face.

But like what was really sort of the buzz around this election

was Elon Musk's throwing his support behind the AFD.

And like, is his, the question was, is his backing of the Nazis going to work in Germany the way it had worked with phenomenal success for him in the U.S.

And the results seem to have been like fair to mixed for Musk in Germany, but I don't really know what all of this means.

So, I'm interested in what you guys have to say about it.

So, I think that's that's great framing.

So, you know, just I mean, maybe let's just do the basics.

So, the election happened on Sunday, February 23rd.

And we're going to be talking about, I think the fact that you're bringing up Musk is kind of telling.

Like, I think ultimately, Musk's role in

election is more complicated than right than even he probably knows.

Like there were other parties vying for his attention.

Vying for his attention.

This was prominent German politicians of, I'm sure we'll go through the parties in a second, but of the CDU and the FDP.

So non-AFD parties is the relevant point.

openly like trying to trying to flatter Musk.

They were sliding into his DMs.

They were sliding and sliding into his replies.

Yeah, but instead of doing that, which would have been even more, at least somewhat more dignified, they just posted at him publicly.

Being like, oh,

you're supporting the AFD.

You must be misinformed.

They're right-wingers.

And everybody who has spent a second scrolling through Elon Musk's timeline would have gone, he knows that.

That's why he's supporting them.

That's precisely the reason.

I know a little bit about the CDU and their

attempt to shift to the right over this past election to try and capture some of the voters that they lost to the AFD.

Tell me a little bit about the FDP because I don't know about as much about them at all.

So maybe it makes sense to kind of walk through the parties in general because there are by now a whole lot of them.

And Anika, I thought maybe you and I want to take turns going through these.

So maybe I'll talk a little bit about the current government.

So the current government dissolved, and this will already get us to the FDP.

The current government consisted of the SPD, which is a social democratic party that under its current, well, no longer current boss and no longer current chancellor, Olaf Schulz, has sort of migrated to the right.

Everyone has migrated to the right, basically, with one prominent exception.

And kind of occupies a position that I would think is sort of centrist democrat, right?

Like

with a couple of things that centrist democrats don't tend to believe.

So the SPD was leading this motley coalition that kind of didn't want to govern together, but

there were no alternatives when the government was formed.

That does sound like the Democrats.

Sorry.

Yeah.

The second party in that group, the second biggest party in that coalition

is the Green Party,

which

kind of comes out of the 1960s student movement, comes out of sort of

alternative forms of politics, but it has become heavily professionalized under

Robert Habeck, who

I don't know how to describe Robert Habeck.

I was going to say, I'm so curious to see

how you're going to describe him.

Sincerity.

He seems very sincere.

He was a politician who very early on took to Instagram and doing these videos that are just very earnest, straight to camera.

Like straight to camera.

But not, for example, not in the way that you would think of like the way that an AOC does.

It's a very different, it's very quite produced and it feels, to me, it feels put on.

It's a bit too much.

It's like I'm being reminded of Jonathan Saffron Fohr.

Is it like if Jonathan Saffron Fohr was a German politician?

It's no, it's if your social studies teacher who's true

who's like who like

was cool and with it like 15 years ago, but still is like like trying to sort of be buddies with you.

He's the kind of guy who would in a in a movie about the cool teacher He would turn the chair around and then you know push up his sleeves

That's the vibe

Okay, so he's patronizing and corny.

Oh, yeah, he's a deeply corny man and and of course one should say the the part of the Green Party right it came out of out of opposition to third quarter of the 20th century style German politics and it was sort of the professionally young party it it part of its like its first um deputies in the parliament would show up in sweaters Yeah, they would like knit, they would bring like potted plants into parliament.

So they like broke with decorum rules.

It sounds like the legacy of the new left.

Adrian and I are in California, which is the paradigmatic

example of how the new left turned reactionary in this like late 20th century curdling effect.

Did that happen with the Green Party or have they stayed more on the left but just gotten kind of like annoying?

I would say they have a very broad spectrum of people who vote for them.

So it very much also depends on, which is why the federal election becomes so interesting, because

in state politics, it very much depends where you are, in which state you are, what kind of Green Party you're going to get.

So for example, the Green Party in the South, in Baden-Büttemberg, that's not Bavaria, that's the other one.

Where I'm from.

But the other big state in the south, is basically,

let's say, slightly more liberal version of the CDU, I would say, the Green Party there.

They're very, like, depending on where they are, they can be quite, you know,

car manufacturer friendly, that is the Baden Buchenberg example.

And they essentially are made up out of two wings.

One is the sort of more in the legacy of the origins of the party that

clashed in this election, for example, with the party leadership under Robert Habeck because he thought it was a great idea to, you know, get some of that anti-migration sentiment, maybe, in the polls.

We're going to see how that worked out.

Not well, surprise.

Yeah, so there are these two wings, and Anika's right, it's extremely regional.

I would say that in the big cities,

they tended to clean up in the big cities.

They really, like, the number of mayors that are Greens or were Greens that have been the last five years is staggering.

But

in the states where they are successful beyond that, they have a more right-wing profile.

And part of that,

as Moira knows from some of our other episodes, has to do with the fact that there is a right-wing, eco-friendly contingent in Germany, which in the United States has become this kind of impossibility.

But there are these people who are like, we must protect our natural habitats from, you know,

from,

you know, car emissions nuclear power and immigrants you know wait oh that's that's RFK Jr.

dude that's like yeah it's make America healthy again it's a it's the crunchy reactionary eco-fascism we have we do have it here it's just it's not as it's not as prominent yeah although I think eco-fascist an eco-fascist for that wing is probably putting it too strongly

I would I would say reactionary is more fitting for them

because

and I feel like there was a moment a couple of years ago, you know, when Fridays for Future started here,

where a lot of the

younger leaders of that mass protest movement

then

started political careers in, if not in the Green Party, then within their like,

let's say, think tank.

surrounding area.

So for a while I think,

and I think we're going to see this when we look at, you know, where do voters go, how do voters switch between parties, that we are now at a moment where a lot of young voters who used to vote for the Green Party because they thought they might be a

climate conscious alternative of a left-leaning party to, you know, the Social Democrats are big into coal because of their whole legacy as the

Union Party.

So they're very,

climate is tricky for them.

So

but also people who were not happy with D-Linke, maybe didn't like their foreign policy.

So these were also young voters who used to vote for the Green Party.

But I think

we could see, and we could see this also in the results, that there were a lot of people who were not happy with how flexible the Greens proved to be in government because

we were talking about the cur well not current sorry so getting used to it the former the former government one one other point more that's important i think maybe for also for our listeners in terms of the um

uh the way these coalitions work right you basically they get together and they divvy up the different ministries and basically the more you bring to the table in terms of percentages in parliament the better um you you're you know there are ministries no one wants like international development and then there are ones that are like where you always look awesome, defense, right?

Where everyone loves the Secretary of Defense for some fucking reason.

Is that a German thing, by the way?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, let's not delve too deeply into that.

Oh, boy.

But I think there is an element of, right?

So the Greens became kind of victims of their own success in the last election in the sense that they wound up with a foreign ministry, which tends to be quite powerful, and the ministry for basically the finance and the economy,

which meant that they had to kind of make these deals with industry on climate, which like a lot of voters were like, Well, why did the fuck did I vote for a green party?

If they're like, Yeah, we have to make sure that you know we can still build gas-burning cars in like 40 years.

Like, well, great, but maybe we should build boats, you guys, because it seems like we're gonna need boats.

And then, the and then in the foreign ministry, right, Anarina Baerbook

very much carried the

course, the German course

on Israel-Palestine under the

Under the banner of feminist foreign policy.

Right.

Meaning,

these were two things where the party leadership and young voters, I think, were very seriously out of status.

So I understand that the Greens lost because of these, like in part because of these contradictions within the coalition.

Or they lost ground in these most recent elections.

Lost ground, but respectably.

Minus 3%, if you're the junior party in a coalition, you always lose if you're a junior partner.

It's not too bad.

Yeah, that's not too bad.

So that was within the scope of what was to be expected.

Considering that Robert Habeck thought he could be chancellor, that's a different thing, but I think that might be a Robert Habeck thing.

A little embarrassing.

But definitely not.

Like the SPD lost, was it 9%?

I mean, absolutely.

Shellacking.

Yeah.

Horrible result.

Yeah.

And speaking of shellackings, the FPP.

Ooh, boy.

Strap it.

See, this is the part of the podcast that makes me happy.

Yes.

So it's not all bad news.

We're going to get to the really bad news later, but

this is the funny news.

The FTP was the

junior, the junior, junior partner.

They brought the fewest amount of votes into this coalition.

They didn't really want to join this government because they don't like governing so much as like running populist campaigns where they're like, oh, would you like to pay less taxes and also get more stuff?

And then people are like, how are you going to do that?

And they're like, ah, don't worry about that.

Are they like a right?

they're a right-wing populist party?

They're a libertarian kind of pro-business.

I find them quite interesting because the FDP used to have

in

the before times, long, long ago,

they used to have a sort of social, more socially inclined liberal wing.

That is long, long gone.

Very long gone.

And

in fact,

one of the big Whigs of the FDP, who I believe was one of their founding members, if I remember correctly, died a couple of days ago

before his death, gave basically an interview saying, I don't, don't, don't know what that party is, doesn't have anything to do with me anymore.

So they made a hard

right-wing populist/slash libertarian turn under

well, former head now, sorry, Christian Lindner.

Feels good just to say that, doesn't it?

How do you best describe Christian Lindner?

So Christian Lindner.

On my sub stack, I said he's the human answer to your question,

what if a meme coin fucked a ski instructor?

That's a really evocative type of guy description.

Every FTP politician looks like the guy who

is

selling you a mortgage and you kind of think you're getting worked, but you don't know enough to know how.

Or like a timeshare.

Yeah, yeah.

Like they're all they're all like, they're dressed very natally.

They are sort of like, they look younger than they are, right?

They have a kind of youthfulness, but the kind of youthfulness that like does well on public television, you know, like the kind of person who like is professionally young, but you're like, numerically not, right?

Like you're actually ancient.

Carson Daly.

And so they so they joined this government and then proceeded to basically campaign against the government while being in it.

There's a very funny moment where these right-wing farmers blockaded a road in Berlin.

That was our version of the trucker protest.

Lindna shows up as the cognizant minister, right?

He's in charge.

He's like, somebody should really do something about this.

Like, you're grieving.

Yeah.

He's like, fuck this government.

Like, I'm with you.

And everyone's like, what do you mean?

I don't know how to put this.

You're management.

I love it when they do that.

And he got booed.

He got booed.

He still got booed.

Right?

So he's like, it's, it all, it's, it's these like two clever by half schemes so they they're they're the masters of these yeah the clever ploy that ends up with a bunch of shit on their face for some weird reason you're like well that didn't work uh speaking of which that's how the government dissolved

so it bec so they basically

clearly wanted out they were unhappy in this government even though the this government gave them everything they wanted frankly uh so they basically conned olaf scholz into into shit canning Christian Littner and throwing the FTP out of the government.

Which was funny.

I'm sorry, that was very funny.

It was very, very funny.

He got publicly fired.

I did not know, maybe I just had never paid attention to that part of German politics.

I just couldn't remember the last time a minister got shit canned.

So they didn't be like, I'm leaving to go be president of this university.

They're like, hey, no, we're firing you.

We're going to...

It's like, because normally when a politician gets pushed out, they allow them to save face in some way.

And he made a very public break.

He had essentially managed to push a politician that seems not capable of human emotion, Olaf Schulz, so much to the breaking point that he not only held what was his equivalent of an angry rant live on television and then proceeded to fire him, but he actually

provoked him into that reaction and then played victim.

I was unceremoniously fired.

Well, and so like with many of their schemes, this one totally backfired.

This is like desperate housewives.

It is.

It is.

With the exception that the desperate housewives would not be stupid enough to write about how they're going to calm the government into firing them and breaking the coalition.

Wait.

So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

He tried, he like, he...

He manipulated his own firing so that he could play the righteous victim.

But then he like, he, like, took notes on this conspiracy.

He like put it all.

He's like, I'm doing this on purpose, by the way.

Yeah,

behind the scenes, I think that there are still some serious people in that party and they were pissed as hell at him.

There are some people who actually quit the party and stayed in government and were like, no, I'm doing my job.

What the hell?

Right.

But it's very clear that he had shared these emails far too widely and these memos,

which also used the word D-Day, and everyone was like, that feels real inappropriate, dude.

Yeah.

And so, and so that was that kind of came out right after he was like, oh, I'm the victim here.

Like, I'm the, I'm, I'm ideologically pure, pure, et cetera, et cetera.

And

I think the party just never recovered from it.

He then made the choice.

This party generally loves a kind of a meme campaign.

And so his new meme was, he's like, oh,

Germany needs more Musk and more Millais.

So Javier Millais of Argentina, right?

This was...

right before

Elon Musk basically, you know, started just doing Hitler salutes every chance you give him, right?

About two weeks before.

Excellent timing.

It was also

right before Elon Musk endorsed a party that was very much not the FTP.

Not the FTP.

I got to say, like,

the American caricature of Germany is that it's composed of very serious, disciplined, intelligent people.

And I love being surprised by the emergence of German idiots.

It's like, wait a minute.

Yeah, German idiots

will be the name of his biography one day.

To be fair, I can't believe I'm even saying that.

To be fair to Christian Lindner, he wasn't the only one who was vying for Elon Musk's attention.

We also had

Kasten Lineman,

who is the, how do you translate General Sekritier?

Oh, Secretary General.

Secretary General.

Yeah, I don't think they have that.

Something like that.

So pretty high up in leadership of the CDU said,

and I love how German this is all sounding, at a campaign event in Wolfenbüttel right before Christmas that we really need a German version of Doge,

preferably led by a private businessman, you know, somebody who's who knows how to run an enterprise, somebody like Elon Musk.

So like, what do this might be a little bit of a tangent, but what do German politicians think they're going to get from Musk beyond just like funding for their campaigns german campaign finance law is more narrowly yeah it's a little more same yeah like pre-citizens united basically and so like very hard to imagine i mean getting free publicity from elon musk obviously doesn't hurt on x for instance on the other hand i really think

right this is a country that still has nominally to whatever extent a sense that it probably shouldn't vote for a strong man again and you know plunge the world into yet another fascist dictatorship Don't worry.

We're doing that for you.

Don't worry about it, guys.

But what these right-wing parties have discovered is basically the thing that we also see in the United States, that

being like, oh, I'm not the fuhrer, I'm a CEO, right?

I'm actually the leader of this.

I'm going to treat the government like a company where I can hire and fire anyone.

It's like, so a dictator.

No, no, no, like a CEO.

Well, but kind of like a dictator CEO, right?

No, no, no, no, no.

How crazy.

It's all about economic liberalization.

It's like, it kind of sounds like you're describing a strong man except that you're using the language of business where frankly we've been far too inured and accepting of strong hierarchies and personal rule to make a point about broader politics so i think that's why they're doing it they they they say they say musk because they're not allowed to say hitler I think is what it is, right?

Like, they're like,

we need a strong leader figure to clean up, but like, not in a Hitler way, in a Musk way.

But so, just to, you know, in terms of the, the FTP, FDP,

in the end, was probably the biggest loser of the evening on Sunday, and this did not work out.

In fact, they came just short of 5%, which is a pretty important number in German politics, because

if you garner less than 5% of the vote,

you can't be in parliament, basically.

Well, there are some exceptions, but those were not going to apply to them.

So they were out.

Which is essentially a lesson learned from the Weimar period to prevent

having an inordinate amount of teeny tiny splinter parties and very unstable coalitions that keep changing.

So that's why the 5% hurdle is in place.

And the FDP

did not meet it.

So is

one of these lessons because it sounds like a lot of these people have both tried to pivot towards Musk and to pivot right more generally.

And that that seems to be broadly failing for everybody except the AFD and the CDU.

So that's the question.

Did it work for the CDU or not?

That's sort of the million-dollar question.

And unfortunately, the problem is

there's an opinion that I'm guessing Annika and I have, which is it didn't work.

But the problem is they might have a different opinion, right?

There is enough evidence to sustain the opposite reading.

So maybe, Annika, do you want to walk us through the, what's the CDU's whole deal?

So the CDU.

In order to understand where the CDU currently is, so the CDU that is short for

Kristdemokratische Union, so that means Christian Democratic Union, that's because the CDU is not just one party, but technically maybe like one and a half, because it also has

Bavarian,

I don't know, sister party, Carada party, that kind of belong.

It doesn't make any sense, but it's there.

So, and after

a very, very long time of Angela Merke, at the head of the CDU, it was 60 years,

they essentially were in limbo for a while because Merkel, as Adrienne already said, basically had steered the CDU.

It was still a conservative party,

but it was more

of a

centrist

with conservative tendencies, but more centrist-leaning than leaning towards the hard right.

So I would say, under Merke, at least she signaled there isn't an open right-wing flank that we're tolerating.

That is closed.

Even though, of course, it's, you know, the people who are now rejoicing, part of them were already there.

But you had this

movement within the party in Merke's later years with, you know, anti-immigrant sentiment rising, with the AFD

gaining more votes that basically blamed the rise of the AFD on Merkel's poll migration poll,

on Merkel's policies of 2015, where she said,

of course we're going to let refugees in.

That's what asylum law is for.

And this is the whole Wirschaffen das.

We're going to make this work moment.

And so the right wing of the CDU had essentially been like chomping at the bit for a while to finally get her out of the way.

And there was a tussle in leadership, various figures that, for various reasons,

lack of political talent, lack of charisma.

Although, I mean, talking about Friedrich Merz, that man is a lot of things, but not charismatic.

Didn't work out.

And so that, in effect, enabled the rise of, at least I think he would see himself as that, a man who considers himself to be Angela Merkel's arch nemesis within the party.

With all the gendered implications of that, one should say, right?

There is also a kind of

like the whole daddy's back thing that you get from people like J.D.

Vance in the United States.

There is some of that here.

Yeah, the restoration of masculine leadership as part of a pivot to the right in the party, as well as, yeah.

Which is all about him and not about her, one should say.

Like,

sure, Merkel's leadership style, like, she did mobilize her own femininity in certain ways, right?

The muti thing, the kind of motherhood thing she would sometimes do.

Um, on the other hand,

this is just kind of how the CDU runs.

The CDU for a long time has had chancellors that have just basically been in office forever.

And just anytime someone else is talented or at all popular, they kick him out.

Basically, like, I don't, I can't, I can't have any, any, um,

uh, I can't have any rivals within my party.

This is what Hamoud Kuhl did in the 80s and early 90s.

Um, and it's what the it's what Mako did during her 16 years in office.

But it's clear that Matz understood it as a gendered attack.

He understood it as like, you know, this, this woman.

Like as a personal slight, this woman took the job that I am entitled to, even though I never have won an election ever.

Well, I guess

Sunday now.

Sunday.

First time, first time for everything.

How old is the man now?

70?

I don't know.

He's one of,

I think he looks older than he is.

69.

He's 69 years old.

Nice.

Yeah, and so

there are a whole bunch of cultural things that we could get into where he really sort of is her anti-pode.

He sort of thinks that the core of the CDU really is not

anything centrist.

It has to be sort sort of its right flank, which had been indeed marginalized during the American years.

He is regionally, right?

He's from West Germany.

Zawaland.

He's in Zawaland.

He's Catholic.

She's the Protestant minister's daughter, I believe.

So, like,

those are distinctions that still do matter for, well, not for me, but for the kinds of people who vote for this party, they can matter.

There is a certain type of

hard, right Catholic boys club thing.

Yeah, we have one of those.

That is a factor here.

The CDU used to have a very strong metropolitan wing, and I think Merkel was able to revive that to some extent.

But really, both Merkel and Matz represent a kind of rural wing of the party, I would say.

Like there's an infamous thing where he sort of went to some Bavarian festival in a place, I don't even know where that is, to be honest.

And he's like, well, this is real Germany, not like...

And then he picked on a largely immigrant uh neighborhood in Berlin and you're like so basically they're they're very very clear on like where the real Germany is and it is occupied by the 25% of people who vote for them basically everyone else is just not a real German so you know stop me if you've heard this one before

he's also a former blackrock guy who owns a private plane but refers to himself as middle class

but but this is kind of matz's whole deal this he is a kind of leader for this moment where right you have all the power.

People like you've had all the power all along, but you still are able to see yourself as an outsider, as somehow wronged by even the fact that there was like a lady in charge for like a hot minute there.

You're like, you know,

I will now destroy everything.

And his current grievance is

that there have been protests against this lurch to the right, not just with the CDU, but there were also protests.

So, there have been protests for about

over a year, mass protests in Germany against this right-wing move of parties of the democratic spectrum when it comes to migration policy.

However, Friedrich Merz, I think it was, was it two weeks before the election?

So just to be clear, from a strategic,

not even from a moral standpoint, from a strategic standpoint,

the one big criticism that you get that might lose you voters is that people think

you're like signaling too close to the AFD.

You have, as Friedrich Merz has, he had previously a couple of years ago said for example if any

elected CDU politician even if it's on a just on a local level if they pass anything with AFD votes so if and if something can only pass if the AFD votes with you the next morning they're going to be expelled from this party that used to be the position a couple of years ago now if Friedrich Mertz were to care about stuff he said a couple of years ago, he would have had to kick himself out of his own party because

I think it was two or two and a half weeks before the election

he and the CDU decided

to break a post-1945 taboo.

It's always a great sentence to start with

in German parliament, which is that you don't vote with fascists on anything.

And the thing that made this so absolutely batched,

just not even from a historical perspective, all of that's clear.

Don't need to, I didn't need to go into that.

But from a strategic perspective is that this wasn't a vote that was going to lead to anything.

It was clear that it wouldn't pass.

It was merely a signaling of vibes.

The purpose was to break the taboo.

The purpose was to invite further collaborations with the Nazis.

Yeah.

And one should say that as these protests then heated up, he

basically called for and is now apparently pursuing investigations into NGOs that he thinks are running this, which, I mean, this is something that's recognizable, which is something that I think maybe to American listeners is not as clear.

That's what, that's how Viktor Alban consolidated power in Hungary.

So he's very, very clearly, this is how the peace government in Poland operated.

He is signaling already, basically, he's cribbing from the playbook not of center-right parties, which still do exist across Europe, but from far-right autocrats in Europe.

When you look at the religious landscape in Germany, when you look at how churches are organized, it's a lot more hierarchical and a lot more structured than in the US.

So there's

essentially there's structures that are called Landeskirchen for Catholics and Protestants.

So there's not much out.

There are some,

you know, Freikirchen.

There are some.

Evangelical churches.

Evangelical, but I think they would be more seen like sects here because they're fairly small, just regarding size.

So it's fairly ordered.

And the CDU, it literally has the C in the name.

The Christian is in the name.

And so when Merz announced his hardcore anti-migration policies, actually the official Landeskirchen, so both Protestants and Catholics, spoke out against it, which interestingly led to both leading figures of the CDU and the CSU to threaten churches.

Markus Zürt had a, there's a prominent CSU guy,

Marcus Züda did an event where he said, now you really should

be concerning yourself with Christian topics, you know, stuff like

saving unborn life and stuff like that, because it would be pretty bad for you, wouldn't it, if you had no one by your side, if people came for you.

So it was a very clear case of nice church you have there, would be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Which then led to several, to be fair, local, but several local CDU politicians saying, oh, I've stopped going to my like Protestant Catholic church.

I'm now going to the evangelical Freikirchen.

A question I have as an outside observer is: how is the CDU differentiating itself from the AFD, who are nominally still their competitors?

Are they just trying to seem as identical as possible?

Are they trying to be more palatable to a mainstream in any way?

Like,

what's the meaningful difference?

Part of it is it's hard to know how much they mean, but like certainly their rhetoric is very copy-paste.

And so,

I think maybe what we should tell our listeners, right?

Like, so this is the party that won this election after a fashion, right?

So that's 28.6%.

And everything, I think, in the coming weeks and months and maybe even years will hinge on how that party interprets

that number.

I mean, we already have Friedrich Merz saying that he thinks that they weren't right-wing enough on immigration stuff.

Exactly.

So there is that reading, right?

Like

they didn't shrink the AFD enough.

Well, they doubled them to be exact, but to their mind, if they had tacked harder to the right, the AFD would not have made it to 20%,

right?

But as any political scientist will tell you, that you know, this has never worked all across Europe, ceding ground to the far right strengthens the far right.

And one should say, you know, the government that Rodolf Schulz was leading was spectacularly unpopular.

He was spectacularly unpopular.

Every, I mean, the FTP was subterranean in its popularity, right?

Meaning, gaining 4% on your previous result where you were just getting completely clobbered is really not that impressive at all.

And I think,

you know, everyone was kind of looking for a number north of 30 at the least, I think, in order to say, like, yeah.

And that's not what happened.

So it's very interesting.

And there are, one should say, mostly retired politicians.

Angela Merkel came out even before the election saying that this was a mistake.

But there are other former allies of her, including a former president, who said, look, the numbers don't bear this out.

We made a mistake tacking that far to the right.

What are you talking about?

28% is abysmal.

We have to course correct.

But these are all people who are retired, all people who no longer really matter for the party.

So it's a little bit like these Never Trump Republicans who

find their voice and

even them pretty they're pretty quiet lately because a lot of them are getting, you know, various threats to their funding or livelihood.

You You know, so a lot of them aren't even really

speaking out.

They're just going off into the night.

Where should we go next in terms of looking at the parties?

Maybe we should talk briefly before we get to the AFD, which obviously is the big winner of this election, the big show.

Maybe we should talk about the Bundes Zara Wagenknecht, because this is a really fascinating and another kind of

a story that I think we might have to devote an entire episode on at some point.

Because Zara Wagenicht was,

what was her actual position in the Link?

Linkers?

She was part of the Linkspati, the left party,

sort of post-communist.

She had the role of being on talk shows, as best as I could tell.

She was a talk show.

She was the public face of the Linkspatrai

in every

god-awful talk show that is on German television.

She's married to, I think she's still married to, right, a former SPD politician who left that party over sort of its neoliberalization and founded this left alternative.

She was sort of like, I don't know, she was the media darling.

The Linkspatai has a lot of very good people in terms of TV appearances.

Like they're entertaining.

They are left populists, so they can be scabbarous.

Was she good on TV?

She's quite quick.

She's quite quick.

She's brilliant, clearly.

Witty, very,

very good orator.

She's charismatic.

And her whole thing, I think she sort of made herself into a brand before that was really a thing for politicians.

So she kind of does

what I can only describe as Rosa Luxemburg cosplay, kind of.

Okay, yeah.

Like just the hair and the chokers.

So that is the image that she's always tried to evoke, which I always found very interesting.

So she always was this sort of firebrand

leftist politician that would go into all of these talk shows where you usually have like white-haired men of the age of 60 and sort of give them help.

That was sort of her starting point.

She's probably kind of sexy, she's probably funny, a little irreverent, maybe.

She's not unattractive.

She's charismatic, but she never traded on any of that.

Yes, if you Google

Rosa Luxemburg, the hair, she has sort of almost like matronly hair.

It's kind of this braid and that it's tucked.

So, the important thing about her over the last couple of years, though, is that she's become more important as sort of like an intellectual figurehead than she ever was in organizing that party.

And the people I know in that party were frustrated with her for years because she's very good at sort of getting conversations started.

And then her follow-through appeared to be pretty bad.

Now, the funny thing was that she kind of carved out a space that Moira, you will recognize immediately, which was she would go on TV and mostly criticize her own party.

And people were like, Okay, so you're the most visible member of our party, and then you keep shitting on us.

Do we think this is a good strategy?

Anyway, that was her thing, right?

She would always go about like the left.

And I think that had two parts of it.

One was she was very clearly kind of starting to stake out a position that she thought of as other and others thought of as like akin to like the Danish social democrats, right?

Right-wing on social issues, but lefty lefty on economic issues, right?

Yeah, it's very popular now, yes.

Um, and so she tried to stake that out, and then the other thing she did was basically this kind of anti-wokstick, right?

She was like, My party's gotten too woke, like, there's too much about gender in this.

Yes, a lot of anti-trans stuff, anti-trans stuff, yeah.

Yeah, so they frame it differently than the AFD.

If you go into the party program,

you see similar anti-trans policies, only that

the Bundesagrabanknecht frames it as a women's rights issue oh yeah yeah it's more a british turf version than uh than a classically like uh it's it's turf stuff yeah yeah

yeah so she's basically i mean what would you call that she's the diagonalist she's like a she's like a classical diagonalist in that she she's combining the figure of the realignment yeah she's making common cause with the right wing on a bunch of things and weirdly enough kind of under started really underselling her own class politics right which she has i mean but like she just didn't hit that as much anymore right they completely forgot about it and essentially only focused in the campaign on these two things on anti-immigrant uh sentiment so so it's kind of a this this mix of reactionary uh little bit left-wing but mostly also nationalist it's a kind of lefty

coated version of reactionary nationalism.

Yeah, like a nationalism that's also socialist.

I mean, what could go wrong?

The important thing here is that the Bundesalwagnecht ended up with 4.97% of the vote.

Remember what we said about the 5%.

So that was the second funny thing of the night.

This is fucking funny.

My heart would break for her if she wasn't such a piece of shit, but like it is very funny that she was short like a thousand votes.

So she is, she had this huge breakup with her party and everyone's like, well, they're toast now.

Like this one, this one person who like had all the charisma and all the energy behind her now left.

They're just going to get eaten alive.

Well, funny thing happened.

The other side definitely won that breakup in the sense that Di Linke doubled its result to almost 9%.

Very respectable.

To give you an idea.

There were three sort of senior members of that party that were touring Germany, just trying to retain their direct mandates.

In Germany, you both vote for a party and for a candidate.

This is a desperate way to get into parliament on a technicality.

So, this party, as little as a month ago, were like, shit, this is probably the only way we can do this.

They didn't need any of that.

I mean, they were polling at 3% to 4%

consistently.

So, everybody expected maybe they're going to get in on this technicality via those three sort of old guard politicians that might win their districts, but no way they're going to get in.

Who did?

But they didn't need it.

Yeah.

So, it turned out that

they they got a full glow-up out of the breakup and a ton of new voters, a lot of new people joining it.

And

from the way the

voter migration statistics seem to shake out, a lot of it disaffected Greens and SPD members.

So

not drawing a lot of people away from the AFD, but then again, no one was drawing a lot of people away from the AFD.

We should mention, by the way, that the Bundesauer Wagnericht, which she had sort of positioned as like, I can draw some of these people back from the AFD that we've lost to them over the years,

appears to have drawn 60,000 voters away from the AFD.

So nothing, absolutely nothing.

So turns out, guys, that also doesn't work.

So anyway, so now unfortunately we have to talk about the 20.4% elephant in the room, which is the AFC.

The Nazis.

I hate those guys.

Oh, and just in case we have German listeners, First Amendment bitches, we can call them Nazis all we want.

Wait, you can't you can't call them Nazis in Germany to explain that?

You can call them fascist, I believe.

No, you can call Hooker fascist.

That

is court-sanctioned, which is telling you something about how fascist he is if a German court under German libel law says you can definitely call that guy a fascist because that is fascist stuff, he says.

The raised right arm really was a first clue.

I'm not interested in, I mean, maybe I'll get sued, but I'm not particularly interested in not calling Nazis Nazis.

Like, it's just

the pulley test, the technicalities, these are morally offensive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll, just in case, just so that Anika doesn't get sued, um, they give real bad guys in the first and third Indiana Jones movie.

That's all we'll say.

One of the comparisons that is easy to make is obviously the R'smble Mont Nationale, which also sort of keeps coming back year after year in France.

And this is Marie Le Pen's party for those who don't follow the French tragedy.

Basically, come back year after year a little bit stronger and just eating away at the French basic political establishment and frankly at the foundations of that particular republic.

But

one of the things is about the rassemblement is that Marine Le Pen has been very consistent in basically

she doesn't move the party to the left but she head fakes towards moderation each time.

right i would say she tries to sort of like right like she she threw out her own dad right like she she kind of um uh the whole holocaust right like

she does clean house from time to time.

We should say that the AFD, if anything, has undergone a opposite development.

The AFD started really where the FDP is today.

It was a professor's party.

It was a bunch of people.

They still, I think, have the highest number of PhDs

in their ranks in parliament.

It's a bunch of dudes in

bow ties basically explaining to you how like Javier Millet has some good ideas.

Like that was the beginning.

It was your econ prof.

Yeah.

It was anti-anti-Euro reactionary

econ prof.

We also didn't care for immigrants, but that was sort of the, that was secondary, right?

Yeah.

And in the last, they were founded, what, in 2013?

In the last 12 years,

they have, if anything, radicalized with every single election.

Or if we want to keep with the Marine Le Pen analogy, we'd say the veneer has come off with every single, more, with every single election.

They're trying to hide it less and less right like whether or not there's a genuine change here or whether or not it's just like there was a time when they hid these people now

yeah

they don't now alice weidel is is signaling to hucker that's the guy you're legally allowed to call a fascist um in germany uh signaling him that his his wing of the party which is the the furkish wing you know

just uh

that you know they're not just welcome but they have a bright work.

I'm sorry to depress our listeners so much.

But like, basically, the AFD gained 20.4% of the vote.

One in five German voters voted for these guys.

They have 152 seats in parliament.

There are a bunch of things that come with that

is really important.

But in some way,

the regional profile is even more dire.

That is to say, it is, Annika's right, it's the first time that a far-right party or a post-fascist party has come in second in a national election.

They used to not make it into parliament at all, as little as 20 years ago.

They have also, they are the strongest party in several of

the states.

I don't think like by a lot, but by, but

it's not significantly enough.

Significantly enough.

Now, if you look at the map, everyone, when the New York Times explains this, they're going to be like, well, here's East Germany, and there you can see how strong the AFD is in East Germany.

They are perfectly strong in East Germany.

This is true.

At the same time, I think this is one of those phantom debates that Germans love having and that, frankly, people love having about

Germany.

They did extremely well in the West as well.

They got a direct mandate in the Wu region, which is old SPD territory.

It's the former coal mining area.

Yes.

Yeah.

Coal mining.

Where my grandparents are from, Nikaisa Slauten, they did extremely well.

These towns, like they,

what is definitely true is that cities they tend to do poorly, though there are some exceptions.

But they're definitely making inroads.

And they seem to be running up the score, as far as I can tell, sort of in small cities, sort of like 40 to 80,000

people.

It's a small city

with

a larger town with like, you you know, you're, I don't know, Altuna, Pennsylvania kind of thing, with like a,

with, often dependent on a couple of industries that are, that are faltering, often, frankly, with a pretty abysmal age profile.

My grandparents lived in a city kind of like this, and

people, and they tend to be quite old.

Young people tend to leave, and I think there's also by now a gender component to this, which is to say young women tend to leave at much higher rates than young men.

And there is a, one should say, a extreme gender gap that has opened up.

The left, the Linkspatai cleaned up among women under age 30, I think, and like the AFD did extremely well with

men under that age.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which at this point is also probably a like it's gender sorting, but it's also geographic sorting.

My impression is that these young women are not living next door to those young men.

Is it a similar issue to the United States where more women are enrolling in college, or is that not happening as much?

I think there might be some of that.

I think there is,

I mean, some of it has to do with,

right,

the kinds of jobs people still go into in Germany, right?

I think that there are sort of traditional crafts that are heavily male-dominated, and that's why people stay in these areas.

But I don't entirely know.

It's honestly something that political journalism in Germany doesn't tend to talk about that much because they're totally fixated on kind of like on East-West, right?

The East-West thing.

The tale is basically the AF, so the

common narrative is the AFD is so strong in the East because, you know, those were the people living in the GDR and they never learned democracy is sort of the

usual

take on that.

Pumpkins from East Germany.

Yeah, exactly.

Who got their

minds broken by communism?

Now, we should say, for those playing along at home, right,

the Berlin Wall fell, what is it, 36 years ago?

1989, 1989, 36 years ago, right?

Meaning for you to have been meaningfully socialized in that area,

you have to be older than 46 years old, right?

I don't know, you can't stop.

So it's really,

it does seem very strange to kind of point to that.

That's not to say that there aren't differences like there is you know this was a place you know like sort of like your coal country in pennsylvania was a place that was hit by neoliberal disinvestment yeah um from

most of their heavy industries before the west was hit um so there might well be a kind of time delay going on here it's not to say that there aren't significant differences also it is an area that is just factually depopulated, which is frankly also true for parts of Rhineland-Palatinate.

It's true for parts of North Rhine-Astphalia.

it's part of true for Lower Saxony.

People are just urbanizing to a greater extent and there's a different kind of economy that goes along with it.

So

none of this is to say like, oh, it's completely made up.

But you'd be like, oh, it's post-communism.

It's like, no, not really.

It's post-neoliberalism, really, is what probably we're looking at here.

Do you know what I found interesting, and Adrian, I'm wondering what your take on this is, and Maura, yours as as well.

It's because I pulled up, have in front of me

the

polls according to sex.

So who do men vote for?

Who do women vote for?

This is not

sectioned after age, which I think would show us very different results

if you go for age and gender.

However,

so if you click on the this is Invertes DMAP, so via the Tageshaw.

So you see women, the majority of women voted for the CDU,

27%.

Second place is shared by AFD and SPD with 18%.

With the greens coming in

after at 13.

Then Linker at 11, which I find quite interesting because

if you click then on men, you see, yes, there's a high percentage.

Again, this is all ages, which I think makes a difference.

So you have a high percentage of men who vote for the CDU, it's three percentage points more, and it's, I can't do math, but six percentage points more for the CDU.

It's tricky that they never resolve for age and

yes,

that is true.

It's always hard to say.

This is something that's that's kind of interesting, right?

Like, when I was born, Germany had four political parties, and one didn't even really count.

Like, when my parents for all my parents until my parents turned 40 they had three parties to choose from today we have i mean we we aren't even down the list yet right yeah and there are a bunch of like other weirdos i'm not even going to talk about right um

meaning older voters tend to vote right the the the large number for the cdu there is older women almost certainly just because older people stuck with their parties right part of the reason why young people have gone on for the afd in for the afd more is actually not so much about it might be about radicalization but it's also that they're not sort of locked in there are just I know my parents I mean I hope they don't mind me saying this like have voted SPD all their life they're gonna keep doing that right there this is what their friends vote this is they you know they have parties together they

you know, they watch the results come in.

A lot of guys sort of through unions are like, or if you're a CDU voter, through your church, everyone votes for the CDU, and then you go eat dinner and wait for the results to come in, right?

Like that is not the case for young people anymore, meaning that in some way, the sex or age kind of gets it wrong.

And so, what I did find is

young women in cities and old men in the countryside as sort of

comparisons.

And that looks very different.

I think younger women refers to everybody under 35, if I'm reading this correctly.

So, younger women in cities,

35% delinker,

as opposed to 4% of, I think, men over 60 in the countryside.

And if you then look at, if you control for age, this is the only one that I found that does that.

And then if you control for, if you look at the AFD, you have younger women in cities 10%

for the AFD and 9% for the CDU.

So that does look very different once you control.

And just to give a sense of what that looks like with these locked-in voters, on the same site that you shared, you can see what people 70 and over voted for, right?

SPD, 25%.

CDU, 43%.

Greens, FTP, AFD, left, all sort of between 4% and 7%.

This is what we mean.

This is still a voter bloc.

It's not a voter block that's not receptive.

to the AFD, it's just that they're going to vote.

They have a very different relationship to voting and to party.

And that is very clearly

not true of the younger generation, meaning the younger generation tends to switch,

including this time a lot of people from the Greens to the left, from the left to the AFD, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's just a lot more dynamism.

And the two, what used to be the two big parties, not anymore,

really are still relying.

on

this

on these sort of voters that are going to pull the lever for them or make their X for them until the day they die.

But the problem is that's, of course, a losing proposition.

Because those people will die.

Yeah.

These people will die.

I mean, I'm sorry to say it because, like, ultimately, they're right now a fairly stabilizing influence, very clearly.

Yeah.

But

if you look at sort of like, you know, people between 45 and 59, which is another big group, like, it's, it looks, it looks dark, man.

Like, as these people age, we're going to get,

you know, the AFD thinks time is on their side, and it's hard to look at these results and not think that they're at least somewhat right.

This is, I mean, this is something that's happening in a smaller way in the U.S.

as well, like the aging of the liberal class, right?

The liberal voters are now people who are, you know, in retirement age, and the youth and energy seems to be going right-wing among a lot of our voters as well.

So it's not just that, you know, the

the constitutional order is being sort of like rapidly attacked and degraded by this ascendant right wing we have in the U.S.

It's also that the constituency for like a liberal constitutionalism is just like aging out of relevance and into smaller and smaller size.

Yeah, I think populism versus institutionalism is probably better framing than liberal versus not.

Yeah.

Because in the end, I think the left is also going to is also going to be able to benefit from this.

What this is, is, I mean, think of, I mean, Zara Wagner didn't end up doing very well here, but this kind of the meme candidate, right?

Like

your voter is no longer someone who goes to church and votes with everyone, right?

Who is also at church.

It's someone who makes up their mind based on a bunch of weird information, maybe a thing they saw online, maybe on how they feel about inflation.

They make their mind up late.

They are very activatable by like anecdotes, by personalities, et cetera, et cetera.

That didn't used to be, that didn't used to be the German way.

My parents would have, frankly, voted for the SPD if it turned out the

candidate was a rotted pumpkin.

Yeah.

who cares yeah

you were subscribed

right

vote for party because that's what you're saying you're voting for

there's a very good chance that that person doesn't even make it into parliament so like you were voting for a group of people that you thought largely reflected your valley values that is no longer the case um and it has become

you know it it it as that falls away um there is a real kind of um yeah there is a kind kind of populist energy that can come along with it.

That's not to say that the left can't harness that.

That's not to say that it all is going right wing but it does create a kind of volatility that the German system at least didn't used to have.

It used to have you know about 75% of voters were just or 70% of voters were just off the table because they were gonna

just check their box for one of those two big parties and the re and everyone else was playing for table scraps.

That's no longer the case.

Exactly.

And I think what you can really see that

in a way how that can work for left-leaning parties, in that I think a big part,

or at least an additional part to disappointment with the rightward lurge of other democratic parties that the Linker was able to harness is that with Heidi Reichinik, they had someone

who

is not just someone who

this is going to sound very basic but who can give a good speech which is not a typical thing that German politicians know how to do well

so the stereotype of the dry German politician I think a former colleague of mine once said Olaf Scholz was Teflon made human

which

yeah

I so I worked for the TDF for a while and always dreaded having to get sound bites from him because it didn't matter what question you would ask him.

It would just...

That's where Teflon Mann came from.

Anyway,

but I think the SPD really ceded some of the ground that they historically have so they could claim

historically the mantle of anti-fascism.

You know, they were amongst the first victims of the Nazis after the communists

that the Nazis turned against.

They were amongst those who didn't vote for the MSTI Kongskex.

So they, the enabling laws, yeah.

So they would have a historical point to make here.

But with Olaf Scholz, you really have,

again,

like a

that the man is the opposite of not just charismatic, but also in a in a time where so much of politics trafficks in emotion,

he does not

offer

what I think a lot of people thought Heidi Reichenig was offering, namely that there was an anger and a righteousness in the opposition to the AFD, which again would be a very easy play

for the SPD.

It's baffling and it's kind of the upshot of a lot of

what's gone wrong with, I think, in German politics over the last couple of years, which is that a lot of even nominally left parties

do not,

they're starting to make distinctions between who counts as German and who doesn't.

There are a lot of voters who are just being left homeless by being declared part of the problem by politicians that are supposed to represent them.

I mean, this is something that isn't shocking to Americans who have to deal with the Democrats, that you're like, you know, after

every election, you basically, you're the scapegoat.

It's very clear that they say asylum seekers, they say immigrants, but really they mean your family.

And at the same time, you're being told that like if a Nazi runs after you and threatens to punch you in the face, really what the job of a politician is is to take that guy's fears seriously, not your fear for your fucking life.

And I think this is the real problem.

The German political class, but frankly also the German media class no longer looks demographically like the country looks.

It's also the fact that because of EU liberalization of citizenship laws, there are just a lot of people living in Germany who cannot vote, right?

Because they're citizens of other EU countries, for instance.

Meaning,

the country's elite no longer has to represent everyone.

It doesn't feel responsible to

everyone who lives in a place like Berlin.

They feel responsible to a place like where my grandparents live because

no one is going to move there in their right mind.

Sorry, it's actually a lovely place.

But still, there's this big disconnect between, frankly, Germans who look like me and Annika and what most Germans look like now.

And I think that

this is going to be the demographic shift and this is going to be the demographic disconnect that might well

undo German democracy in the end.

It certainly seems like it's going that way because,

you know, one might have thought that after such a historically terrifying election result,

there would be, you know, it's always

a good way to measure where German media discourse is, is to watch German political talk shows, although nobody, I believe in their right mind, can listen to more than they do suck.

But one could think that, oh, maybe this will be the new focus point.

We're now going to do some shows on where the topic is,

oh god, how could this happen?

What are we doing?

Oh, more, more special shows about migration.

Migration, were we right-wing enough about migration?

Maybe we weren't right-wing enough.

There was a book,

I think you dropped it in the preparation notes, Adrian.

Help me, what was it called again?

About the crisis of the world.

Right parties.

Thomas Bieblich's book.

Yes.

It doesn't exist in English yet, I believe.

It's very, very interesting.

If it ever comes out in English, I would definitely have to do an episode on him.

It's about

the crisis of these

Christian democratic parties that existed in every single post-war society and that seem to have eroded sort of starting at the moment when communism and anti-communism lost its focalizing possibility.

So, this would be the old Tories before they went all Brexit crazy.

This would be the Partido Popular in Spain.

This would be the Neo-Democratia in Greece,

the Christian Democrats in Italy, the UFAUP

in Austria, etc., etc.

And, you know, after 89, we do get a lot of sort of social democratic and socialist parties slowly falling apart.

But Dibus's point is like the same happens to the center-right.

They needed this foil.

And frankly, they had a lot of sort of pluralistic headfakes in order to be effective anti-communists.

Like, oh yeah, we were kind of pro-union.

And the moment the Soviets are gone, you're like, fuck it.

We're going to,

We're getting out of chainsaw and we're going bug nuts insane over here, right?

Exactly.

Fuck the unions, yeah.

And what I found really interesting is that he kind of points out that just ideologically, these center-right parties put themselves in a really tough position because it then

is about, you know, because conservatives defend the status quo and then you get into

a moment where the status quo,

in their view, isn't worth defending anymore, which then opens up the possibility of an almost sort of potentially revolutionary right-wing element in this kind of politics.

I had an interesting moment about that when I was researching my last book, which was about the history of the

of the GOP, and I

managed via colleague to get an interview with the host of all people.

And I expected, because, you know, I was like, okay, I'm going to ask him, do you think this is conservatism or a form of conservatism, what we're seeing from the GOP?

And I sort of expected the,

you know, the sort of, oh, these are not real Christians, but for conservatives kind of shtick.

And I think I might have caught him at a moment where he was disillusioned enough

or maybe

felt guilty enough about his own culpability in bringing the GOP to where it is now that he said well

not sure if it is conservatism but if that is what it is and at that at some point in time

if all of these people say they are conservatives then I can't any longer call myself a conservative which is why I think he is going for

the the old liberal now as as his, what he calls himself.

And I think that's also something that this book sort of tackles because it looks at how

these center-right parties are dependent on sort of an amorphous enemy figure that they can sort of identify against.

And I think that's what you're seeing with the CDU at the moment.

And they've, you know, they've now discovered NGOs.

Whether that's because they listened to Orban or whether Friedrich Maz has watched a bit too much Elon Musk.

You You guys have any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

I mean one takeaway is definitely that it doesn't look like anyone got hurt by taking a strong stance against the rightward drift in society.

I think that

the people who were most consistent and decisive in defending multiculturalism,

an open society, and just a kind of a baseline liberality, not even liberalism itself,

you know, were not supposed to win and did really, really well.

There are constituents for this and they don't feel represented, right?

They're told that they don't matter.

They're kind of taken for granted.

And to give people an anti-fascist alternative turns out to be something that left-wing parties or nominally left parties across the globe might want to look into.

It's useful and it might even be helpful for you.

Crazy idea, Adrian.

Actually stand up to the fascist drift?

That's nuts.

That's crazy talk.

I mean, I heard that James Carville told us to play dead, so let's do that instead.

He seems so wise.

Yeah.

Very wise.

He won an election once.

Yeah, about 30 years ago, and he won't have a second thought.

It's like,

we are ruled by people incapable of having a second thought.

Annika, it was so wonderful to hear from you.

I feel like I am much better equipped to understand Germany now, so I really appreciate it.

Well, it was an absolute joy to be on your podcast.

I am a

I am a,

I was going to say extreme listener, but that sounds wrong.

I love it.

I'm an extreme listener.

I'm a hardcore listener.

First time attendee.

We are honored to have you and we're honored to have you as a listener and we're honored to have all of you as listeners.

And thank you for coming with us on this long and insane trip.

But I hope it's clarified some stuff.

Thank you, Annika, and thank you to all our listeners.

We'll see you next time.

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Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.