Germany: The Land of Stuck Politics

Germany is the land of stuck politics.

To live in the Federal Republic is to look out on the broader world and see shifts, reversals and novelties everywhere but home. We were one of the last countries to raise mask mandates and relax about the world’s most overhyped respiratory virus, and we will also be one of the last countries to abandon the retarded and naive globaloid politics that developed after the Berlin Wall came down. We will cling like grim death to the naive and insane ideological edifice of this 27-year period, when everybody assumed history had ended and that the future would be nothing but an ever-advancing, ever self-perfecting Anglophone liberalism for all time.

Soon, Donald Trump will begin serving his second term as President of the United States, Justin Trudeau will resign in Canada and the right-populist Freedom Party under Herbert Kickl will form a government in Austria. Here in the Federal Republic, however, everything will continue much as before – in the near term at least. We will address mass migration only in cosmetic ways, we will probably be the last country on earth still sending weapons to Ukraine, and perhaps even in two decades, after climatism has decayed to a ritualised pseudoreligious husk of its former self, we will still be cutting down forests to clear space for more windmills. That’s my pessimism speaking of course, but you must agree that it’s not inconceivable. We will do all of this to set an example for others, to feel good about ourselves and to believe that we are on the Right Side of History.

Stuck politics in Germany will become an increasingly glaring and bizarre phenomenon as the progressive liberal consensus withers away everywhere else. Still worse, stuck politics render German politicians incapable of responding to contingencies, of perceiving the changing world as it is and of appeasing their increasingly restive citizens. The resources spent on keeping politics stuck – because stuck politics is a deliberate choice of our elite and not some bizarre Twilight Zone problem they’ve stumbled into – also mean that Germany will face ever poorer domestic circumstances and shittier governance. It is worth asking how German politics got stuck like this, and whether they can ever be unstuck.