The ruling elites’ dismal unpopularity is a deserved result of ignoring the real concerns of their own citizens
Since the beginning of the Ukraine Crisis in 2013/14, German governments, first under former chancellor Angela Merkel, then under her pathetic successor Olaf Scholz, have totally failed to help find a solution through compromise. This is no minor matter, and history won’t look kindly on Germany. Representing a traditionally significant if declining and now self-diminishing power in Europe, Berlin could have made a difference – quite conceivably one that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Yet things are what they are. Initially, under the thoroughly opportunistic yet usually intelligent Merkel, this German failure was mostly due to subservience to the US but practiced in Berlin’s then signature style of evasive shiftiness. Yes, Merkel helped Kiev sabotage the 2015 Minsk II agreement, which could have avoided large-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. But she did that on the sly and only admitted it retrospectively, when criticized for having been “soft” on Russia. “No, I wasn’t!” she, in essence retorted, “I did my part and lied like a street grifter!” What can one say? Ideas of personal dignity differ across cultures.
Under her successor, the merely opportunistic Scholz, Berlin’s approaches have reverted to a certain elementary simplicity. The so-called “Zeitenwende” (epochal turn) he announced two years ago with traditional German modesty means that his coalition government has obeyed Washington in an unprecedentedly self-harming manner. Accepting sabotage of vital infrastructure – Nord Stream – and the systematic demolishing of the German economy by America’s beggar-thy-vassal policy, Scholz has grinned submissively, while not just sacrificing national interests but taking a flamethrower to them.
At the same time – and with a certain consistency one may also observe in committed masochists – this government of death wish loyalty has also ruined Germany’s relationship with Russia with Teutonic furor and thoroughness. All to pander to a Ukrainian regime that now stands accused of blowing up Nord Stream. That accusation makes no sense. Kiev loves to do its worst, true. But it could not have done it without the US. And yet the accusation is the new party line handed down via the Wall Street Journal. It serves as yet another test of how much public humiliation Berlin will take. Answer: there’s no limit.
But Berlin is not Germany. A government so bizarrely out of touch with its own country and its interests is unlikely to represent its citizens well. For some of its members that is even a point of pride. Foreign minister and geometry expert Annalena “360 degrees” Baerbock has long declared that she doesn’t care what her voters want but only about what the Zelensky regime demands. Baerbock, then, must have been positively delighted by the results of a recent and solid opinion poll.
Conducted by the topnotch INSA pollster, the new poll proves that many Germans do not see foreign policy – especially with respect to Russia and Ukraine – the way their current, immensely unpopular and massively failing (as even the Economist admits) rulers do. Consider some highlights: Asked if they are in favor or against peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, 68% of respondents were in favor.
And 65% consider it a “good” or “very good” idea to offer Moscow a quid pro quo, in which Russia would agree to a ceasefire and negotiations, while the West would stop supplying Ukraine with weapons. It’s another matter that Moscow would be unlikely to accept such a deal; those times are over. But Germans outside the Berlin elite clearly prefer winding down the war in lieu of the forever-war scenario that NATO and EU officially promote.
A clear plurality of respondents, 46%, believe that their government has failed to engage in enough diplomacy to protect Germany from the risk of war. Only 26% feel that Berlin has done enough. Yet there is no duty more elementary for rulers than doing everything possible to protect citizens from the threat of war. They cannot always succeed. But those widely seen as not having tried hard enough lose their legitimacy. That much we have known, at the latest since English political philosopher and arch-realist Thomas Hobbes published his “Leviathan” in the seventeenth century.
Legitimacy may sound abstract. Let’s talk about elections then, especially as three important regional elections are coming up. In the länder (states) of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg, all in Germany’s East, the Berlin coalition parties are staring at serious, even devastating losses to be inflicted by two surging newcomers, the very rightwing AfD and the leftwing yet culturally conservative BSW, named after its leader Sarah Wagenknecht.
Could the decline of the coalition parties have something to do with their resolute detachment from many voters’ wishes and fears over foreign policy? Absolutely. Asked in the INSA poll if a party’s demanding or failing to demand peace negotiations for the Russia-Ukraine War is a decisive factor in casting their vote, 43% of respondents answered in the affirmative. The same share said “no.” But leaving almost half the electorate with a strong sense that you don’t care about what they care about – especially in matters of life and death, i.e. war and peace – is never a winning strategy.
It is true that the question focused specifically on an election at the federal level; that is, for Germany as a whole. Regional politics, you might be tempted to think, has different priorities. You’d be so wrong, though. For one thing, Germans love to use their many regional elections as a way to punish the federal government. Voters do not make a neat separation between voting locally and dishing out the pain centrally. On the contrary.
Second, the results of regional elections, therefore, constantly affect Berlin politics, at this point right into the sick heart of a coalition that is terminal already. Third, regional elections in what used to be East Germany before the West German takeover in 1990 are even more neuralgic, because as a rule, voters there tend to be especially skeptical about Berlin’s by now abject subservience to the US and self-defeating if neo-traditional Russophobia.
Germany’s current mainstream media, think tanks, and academic cadres – such as conformist historians Jan Behrends and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk – love to caricature, belittle, and patronize those Germans in the East of the country as in essence backward and brainwashed by Russians. (By the way, if you think that sounds weirdly familiar, that’s how Ukraine got its local civil war going in 2014.) Yet the Soviets/Russians haven’t had a say in eastern Germany for over a third of a century now. While Washington, of course, has maintained its propaganda grip. Maybe the proud domestic kulturträger (culture bearers) of NATO “value” Germany, and who love to look down on their eastern compatriots, should face their own lack of intellectual, political, and ethical independence instead. Where the fear of freedom cripples thought (while boosting careers), a little Kantian reliance on one’s own judgment might help.
In any case, belittling Germans in the East will make them only more determined, and rightly so, to vote their probably freer minds. And what freer minds in Germany see is a government that serves not their country but the US and Ukraine. That is a recipe for richly deserved defeat.
