We have had five years of nonstop political panic in Germany – over Covid, Russia and now Alternative für Deutschland. What will we panic over next?

Since 2020, serial media-driven panic has characterised the government of Germany. First there was the original panic, namely the great Covid hysteria. As the vaccines failed, a new panic over the Russian invasion of Ukraine took centre stage, and when Ukraine’s prospects soured with the failed counteroffensive in 2023, we had still a third panic – this one over Alternative für Deutschland and the alleged political menace of “the extreme right.” The steady parade of panics feels almost systematic. It’s like we can’t get rid of one panic, however defunct and unproductive it has become, until another panic has edged it out.

Prior to 2020, specific panics were mostly alien to the politics of the Federal Republic. Our governments generally emphasised stability and routine functions even in the face of crisis. For some reason, we cannot find our way back to that world. Perhaps our politicians have embraced panic as a useful principle of rulership, or perhaps panic generation has simply become an immanent property of the managerial system and its journalist collaborators.

Either way, these panics have various highly curious characteristics. Understanding how panic has worked in the recent past promises to help us understand how it may continue to work in the near future.