Higher taxes, more political repression, no solutions: Germany's next government will be from hell
The Federal Republic has boarded an express train to Green socialist purgatory. There is no other way to describe what is happening here.
First, we had the shocking debt brake overhaul, via which the CDU and the SPD signaled their bizarre wish to reprise the hated politics of the traffic light, only in more extreme form. Among other things, this overhaul involved amending the constitution to include the goal of “climate neutrality” by 2045. Leading Greens are now hoping this amendment will open the way for litigious environmentalists to compel the further deindustrialisation of Germany over the coming two decades.
Then, as if to confirm the ongoing DDRification of the Federal Republic, the alleged Stasi collaborator and former leader of the Socialist Unity Party, Gregor Grysi, delivered the inaugural address to the twenty-first Bundestag.
Now the preliminary results of the coalition negotiations between the CDU, the Bavarian CSU and the Social Democrats are making their way into the press, and they are really a thing to behold.
In the run-up to the elections, all kinds of people told me that the CDU would take charge and we’d see a correction to the right. The worst abuses of the traffic light would be put to bed, Green politics would go on the back burner and the government would begin to emphasise economic policy and migration restriction. It wouldn’t be totally satisfying, these people told me, but things would get better.
It is now safe to say that these people were retards and that they were totally and laughably wrong. What awaits us is not a political correction but rather the traffic light on speed. We are going to get an absolute witch’s brew of tax hikes, deficit spending, industrial subsidies and political repression. If even half of these plans are realised, the coming government is going to make its predecessor look like a beacon of liberal freedom and fiscal responsibility. Here I can only provide a selection of all the proposals, as every five minutes a journalist stumbles upon another steaming turd.
To begin with, the various negotiating subcommittees are already aspiring to spend half a trillion Euros – the total value of the “special infrastructure fund” established by the debt brake overhaul last week. The grave political differences between the CDU and the SPD are to be papered over with vast quantities of money. It makes sense, then, that the SPD should be gearing up to push very hard to raise taxes on “the rich” – a group of people that in Social Democracy Land includes a great part of the middle class. The SPD want to raise the top tax rate from 42% to 47% and the capital gains tax from 25% to 30%. They want to introduce a confiscatory wealth tax and they want to broaden real-estate taxes. The Union parties will probably have to give in on a great part of this programme, because, while German politics have shifted right, it is the left that is in charge.
Both the SPD and the CDU have agreed that “we must invest more in defensive democracy,” and therefore they plan to continue funneling nearly 200 million Euros into the jungle of NGOs presently perverting German civic discourse. Among other things, the CDU and the SPD hope to steer some of these funds into the National Action Plan Against Racism, specifically to “fight against structural and institutional racism” – concepts adopted from the increasingly defunct Anglosphere discourse surrounding Critical Race Theory.
As always, the SPD have even more insane plans. They want to use state funds to promote “trustworthy media,” which is their term for politically aligned broadcasters and print publications. Germany already has one of the elaborate and expensive public media systems in the world, but that is not enough for the Social Democrats, who hope to use state funds to co-opt private media as well. There are constitutional hurdles to the SPD vision on this front, and the CDU have so far opposed their aspirations, but given the Social Democrat dominance of negotiations this could well end up on the agenda of the coming government.
Meanwhile, both parties have agreed that “The deliberate dissemination of false factual claims is not covered by freedom of expression,” and they hope to expand the prerogatives of media supervisory authorities so that these may “take action against information manipulation as well as hate and incitement.” They also want to increase regulatory scrutiny of “online platforms” and ensure that the Digital Services Act is “stringently implemented and further developed.”
Perhaps worst of all, the future coalition partners have agreed on a nefarious plan to deprive anyone with more than one conviction for the speech crime of “incitement” (“Volksverhetzung”) of the right to stand for election to public office. The German criminal statute on incitement has been widely abused in the present wave of political repression, and state prosecutors will surely use this new mechanism to criminalise the opposition by systematically bringing incitement prosecutions against AfD politicians.
In summary: We are going to get more heavy-handed interventions in the economy, the state is going to take more of our money and government enforcers are going redouble their efforts to prevent us from complaining about any of this.
What is happening ought to have been foreseeable. I didn’t quite foresee it, but I should have. The firewall against Alternative für Deutschland is confusing the feedback received by the German political establishment. The more the voting public demands a correction to the right, the more our politicians will double-down on crazy leftist policies. This cycle will continue until something breaks.
The mechanism is twofold:
1) As right-leaning voters and party members take their support elsewhere, the traditional parties find themselves sitting on smaller but more left-leaning constituencies. This phenomenon applies primarily to the CDU and the Bavarian CSU, but secondarily also to the SPD.
2) Ordinarily, we would expect these parties to chase after departing supporters, but in Germany the firewall skews incentives in a bizarre way. As the political mood moves rightwards and voters take their support to the wrong side of the firewall, they disappear from the arena of political acceptability. The remaining feedback available to the establishment actually points left. The resulting insanity then further increases voter defections to AfD, and establishment politics dive further leftwards.
Since 2017, when the AfD first entered the Bundestag, the strict terms of the firewall have created two parallel legislative entities. Back then, AfD won 94 of 709 seats, but the firewall prohibited any of the cartel parties from voting with the newcomers. Thus you could say that the formal parliament alone had 709 seats; the de facto “cartel parliament” – the formal parliament minus the AfD contingent – was smaller, having a mere 615 seats. Of course, the cartel parties could not ignore the formal parliament entirely. To pass laws, they still required a formal majority of 355 votes, which translates to a cartel supermajority of 58% of the seats. This was not a problem for Angela Merkel, who formed a government with the SPD in a typical “grand coalition” that commanded about 65% of the cartel parliament.
During the next elections in 2021, the CDU did poorly and the AfD also took a hit, winning only 83 of 733 seats. The cartel parliament thus grew from 615 to 650 members, the cartel supermajority necessary to pass legislation declined to a mere 56% of the cartel parliament, and Germany received the traffic light coalition – an absolute clown car of a government that oversaw a series of disasters and setbacks from which we have yet to recover.
Voters punished the parties of the traffic light accordingly and they made the AfD stronger than ever, awarding them 152 of 630 seats. You might think that would chasten the cartel parties, but the firewall has nearly reversed the voters’ message. In the cartel parliament of this new Bundestag, SPD, Greens and Die Linke have 56% of the seats. That is to say, they are collectively just as strong as they were in the cartel parliament of 2021! Meanwhile, the CDU and CSU control 44% of the seats in this shrunken cartel parliament, a position which explains the early arrogance of Friedrich Merz, who initially appeared unconcerned with the difficulties of coalition-building. In an establishment discourse that entirely ignores the AfD and treats the cartel parliament as if it were the real, formal parliament, it becomes easy to forget that niggling detail of the cartel supermajority necessary to pass legislation, which now stands at a staggering 66%.
We have before us the phenomenon that will sooner or later destroy the firewall. The latest YouGov poll has the CDU in collapse, with only 26% support, and the AfD in ascendancy, reaching a record high of 24%. It’s conceivable that in the coming weeks the AfD becomes the strongest-polling party in Germany and that the next elections land them at 30% or higher. Of course the establishment may well try to ban Germany’s only alternative. In the unlikely event they succeed, we would finally see that promised correction to the right, as some voters would return to the cartel parties, effectively destroying this system of perverse feedback.
Until then, it will be nothing but a forced march to DDR 2.0.
You could replace "Germany" in the title with just about any western country and it would be true.
Canada says hold my pint of beer.