The Status Quo’s Last Stand

Germany’s new government will exacerbate social conflicts over wealth distribution, the climate crisis, and state repression.

In light of the global rise of the far right, the latest iteration of a grand coalition between the conservatives (CDU/CSU, or “the Union”) and Social Democrats (SPD) in Germany appears to be a last contingent for the preservation of the status quo. With both major parties combined barely representing no more than 45 percent of the votes cast, there is no longer anything “grand” about this coalition. In fact, one could not imagine a more dramatic loss of confidence.

Moreover, there is nothing to suggest that things could take a turn for the better in the coming legislative period. A stagnating economy and annual military spending most recently in the amount of 80 billion euro will increase the pressure on social spending. With what sort of programme does the new government wish to address the crisis? Which political developments must be reckoned with? And how should a Left focusing on social issues respond to them?

Back to the Past

If one wished to critically summarize the coalition agreement between the Union and SPD, they could do so in succinct terms: an economic “Back to the Past”, paired with an opportunistic racism and a massive arms build-up, both domestically and abroad.[1]

The agreement allows plenty of room for the first point in particular. The first 45 of a total 146 pages in the agreement revolve almost exclusively around the question of how German companies can be ensured the best possible investment and use conditions. As if there were no climate and environmental crises that will soon generate enormous economic costs, the coalition’s economic policy is solely oriented toward one maxim: growth. The agreement rejects every legal regulation that could exert the least amount of pressure on companies in favour of a guided transformation of their industrial model.

Instead, the Union and SPD affirm their support of the automobile industry —including the combustion engine technology that is doomed to obsolescence — as the “key industry and job guarantor for our country”. They promise to “provide relief to companies” by lowering taxes and duties as well an “electricity price package” that would allow for the lowering of energy costs to the benefit of the export industries.

The few social and environmental projects the outgoing “traffic light Coalition” could bring itself to do are being cancelled, such as the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, intended to put a stop to exploitative working conditions at foreign suppliers, the Building Energy Act, which had aimed to reduce carbon emissions in the building sector, and the “unconditional basic income”, which is to be converted into “new basic security benefits for job seekers” with substantially harsher penalties. The aim of the new basic security benefits is to “improve the incentive to work.” In other words, the officials’ increased pressure on the recipients of social services will force them even more quickly into the low-wage sector.

These measures, which expand capital’s leeway at the expense of workers and the environment, are being sold as “reducing bureaucracy”. In eyes of the coalition, political ballast is anything that guarantees social rights or sets boundaries for the fossil fuel industry.

While the state is expected to give up supervisory functions to “the economy”, nothing less than a “new era” in the development of surveillance tools is being promised. Against this backdrop, journalist Matthias Monroy referred to the new government in the newspaper nd as the “Grand Surveillance Coalition” and summarized the most important changes as follows: Criminal law penalties for the protection of police and rescue workers are to be toughened, the Federal Police is to receive digital surveillance tools (“Quellen-TKÜ” or lawful interception) for combatting serious crime, under which falls the act of assisting illegal immigration (often designated as immigrant smuggling). Also planned are an increased use of biometric surveillance in investigations and criminal prosecution, as well as AI in the comparison of faces on the internet and in “biometric remote identification” in public spaces. 

The security authorities are to be strengthened across the board, their powers expanded, and the cooperation between them made easier. This is expected to further undermine the principle of separation between the police and the intelligence services as guaranteed by the constitution. All of this culminates in the grandiose declaration: “As far as the enemies of democracy are concerned, the policy of ‘zero tolerance’ applies.”

It’s no secret who will be the target of the announced “security offensive”. Since the 1970s, the neoliberal right around the world has relied on policies that consistently link the dismantling of social infrastructures, the armament of police apparatuses, and racist narratives. For the UK, the social scientist and racism critic Stuart Hall meticulously outlined  this connection as early as 1978, speaking of how the government was “policing the crisis”. With this approach, it is a matter of holding in check the impoverished populations hit especially hard by economic reforms — who in the majority of cases consist of immigrants — through the expanded powers of the police. This type of politics is legitimized through a cheap propaganda that Stuart Hall refers to as a “moral panic” concerning young people who are alleged to be highly dangerous. 

A quite similar development can be also be observed in Germany 50 years later: Despite a declining crime rate, the new government is embracing the far-right narrative, according to which Germany finds itself in a state of emergency. Not surprisingly, the focus of the “security offensive” is the impoverished migrants from non-European countries. Although the coalition agreement between the Union and SPD states that there can continue to be “qualified immigration” to Germany in order to “safeguard the necessary minimum quantity of skilled-workers”, “irregular migration” is framed, as with the far right, as a threat to social coexistence. 

To that effect, the refugee admission programme is to be terminated, and family reunification, which in many countries has long been virtually impossible due to unreachable embassies, is to be suspended. The sending back of migrants on the German border to other EU states is to be reintroduced, and a “repatriation offensive” is to be launched in which the authorities will rely on a mass incarceration of irregular immigrants. Through these plans, the coalition wants to “exhaust all options for considerably increasing capacities for detention pending deportation, and in doing so ensure that they develop options for detention and custody in a way that is more practical”.

The tools of repression against Germans with a migration background will also be intensified. In the fight against “clan crime”, a “complete shift of the burden of proof in the confiscation of assets of unclear origin” is to be implemented — which is a recipe for arbitrary actions against migrant families that are stereotypically understood as “clans” in the eyes of German authorities. The announcement that in the future both explosives and knives are to be regarded as objects for preparing terrorist attacks points in this same direction. Tellingly, the vast weapon arsenals that are regularly found among far-right groups receives no mention in the coalition agreement.

In contrast, the section in which the armament of the Federal Armed Forces is negotiated is kept inconspicuous. Although the debt brake has been lifted for military expenses and a clear increase in the war budget has been announced, the wording is rather cautious:

Here, sabre-rattling has a different ring to it. It remains an open question whether the Union’s reticence with respect to Social Democracy (though making some concessions) or the new geopolitical constellation following Donald Trump’s election victory is to blame for making overly aggressive behaviour toward Russia seem no longer advisable.

Could the Far Right Devour the Right?

One can already predict that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) will continue their rise under the new government. The most important reason for this is the German industrial model, which due to at least three different reasons may continue to worsen.

First of all, the economy’s decades-long dependence on exports, which had been desired by government policymakers in response to China’s rise; the growing geopolitical competition; and the new US protectionism are all increasingly proving to be a problem. Secondly, Germany’s key industries have missed the boat in the transformation towards “electric capitalism”. The rapid rise in importance of the “new three” (renewal energies, storages technologies, e-mobility) in China especially makes Germany’s fossil-fuel-based industrial structures seem antiquated, and this may soon cost international sales markets. Third and finally, capitalism finds itself in an ill-fated metabolic crisis: The environmental consequences of its mode of production and way of life undermine its material bases.  Resources are becoming scarcer and more contested, the food supply less reliable.

Against this backdrop, the fears of losing one’s status in society will continue to gain in importance. However, it is exactly this that is the breeding grounds of the far right, which understands how to channel the general uncertainty better than any another political force. 

Admittedly, their strategy of continuing to accelerate the dynamics of capitalist destruction by blocking any efforts to address the crisis will have catastrophic consequences. Yet a political programme that generally denies reality is also in line with a widespread yearning for a preservation of the status quo. The new government will pave the way for this process because it affirms key elements of the AfD narrative. In this way, the new coalition first of all plays into the false hope that a continuation of the existing industrial model is possible, and second of all supports the racist assertion that the existence of a migrant subclass (“irregular migration”) is the cause of the social crises.

Fascism, which as early as the 1930s relied on the paradoxical promise to radically change society without touching its fundamental power relations, can only benefit from this constellation. As long as the political centre does everything possible to keep the distribution of wealth between the upper and lower classes out of the public debate despite growing social insecurity, the crisis will enable the continued rise of the far right.

It is quite likely that this development will soon also plunge the most important German political state party, the Union, into an existential crisis. That CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann, who is especially close to capital and lobbyists, has abstained from assuming a ministerial post indicates how the Union’s more conservative wing plans to proceed. Should the economic crisis continue, as is to be expected, then they will blame the concessions to the SPD, and from the outside pressure the coalition to change course. The “firewall” against the AfD may then fall, and the Union will attempt to forge its first alliances with the far right at the federal state level. 

Up until now, however there was no place in Europe where cooperation with the far right was sufficient for preventing the conservative parties’ approval ratings from plunging. Should the Union fall behind the AfD permanently, as already indicated in the first polls, one can expect substantial disengagement. In Italy, France, and the Netherlands we saw how quickly Christian Democratic and liberal-conservative state parties can fall apart when the competition emerges from the right.

The Union may concede — in light of a supposedly imminent state crisis should there be a coalition breakup — that Social Democracy will be ready to bite nearly every conceivable bullet. The SPD, with 16.4 percent of the votes still the third-strongest party, will for this reason continue to be blamed for the crisis. The radicalization of the political centre is entering a dramatic new phase: According to Infratest / Dimap, 1 million voters defected from the Union to the AfD in the last federal elections, as did 890,000 voters from the Free Democrats (FDP) and 720,000 voters from the SPD.

Possible Cracks: Social Divisions, Climate Crisis, Security State

There is a complex scenario facing the Left during the upcoming four years. Michael Ehrhardt, a trade union representative from IG Metall, convincingly described the problem in an interview with this author: if the unions wanted to stop the AfD, then they would have to “prove that it is possible to successfully take on the rich and powerful and ensure redistribution of wealth. The key problem today is that many employees no longer believe us.”

In keeping with this, putting the question of redistribution on the agenda is the most important anti-fascist strategy. This has certainly been successful in recent years — with the explosion of rent prices, which was addressed with social actions (most recently the campaign to expropriate real estate companies such as Deutsche Wohnen) as well as in the context of election campaigns by Die Linke.

On the other hand, due to doubts about its own ability to fight successfully, the service workers’ union Ver.di has refrained from engaging in a major labour conflict in the public sector. In addition to wage demands, this also could have addressed the devastating situation of public services and mobilized almost 3 million employees for a different society. Furthermore, private (and public!) media will continue to do everything they can to use the issue of migration to channel social discontent and conceal the distributional relationships between those at the top and those at the bottom.

One starting point for a mobilization could be the enormous social cuts that are to be expected despite having relaxed the debt brake. The CDU/CSU has already announced it will counter-finance the rapid rise in defence spending. Pressure to make cuts will increase because it has ruled out tax increases. A social movement against this can only emerge here if the policy of military build-up is also addressed as a problem.

Broad swaths of the population will be prepared to put class interests aside in favour of national interests as long as there is the prevailing notion that arms companies defend the social rights and freedoms of “all of us”. Against this backdrop, Die Linke must make it clear that militarism from without cannot be stopped by militarization from within, and that no progressive policy has ever been made in lockstep with defence contractors and the armed forces. Today, large sections of the Left and the trade union base are far removed from this position.

The ecological crisis could also soon return as a second mobilizing topic. The climate movement seems to have been pushed out of the public debate. However, this could quickly change again with the probable extreme weather events. This topic is extremely important for Die Linke because it must position itself as a competent political perspective at an early stage. Since the Greens, as a bourgeois party, conceal the unbreakable tie between the capitalist mode of production and the climate crisis, only Die Linke remains as a mouthpiece for ecological criticism. Only they can express the obvious: Without abandoning the capitalist compulsion to accumulate, the destruction of life’s natural foundations will continue to accelerate.

In order to be able to defend this position, Die Linke must develop a materialist analysis of metabolic relationships. It must repeatedly point out that the ecological crisis is the result of a specific mode of production, is essentially the responsibility of the upper classes and has a much more devastating effect on the lower classes than on the wealthy. This way, it can demonstrate that clinging to the status quo, as propagated by the right, is an attack on material livelihoods.

Finally, a third area in which social conflicts are likely to emerge under the new coalition is the issue of state repression. To date, it has hardly been addressed in Germany that some of the most important mass movements of recent years have been fuelled by police violence. For example, the Black Lives Matter protests in the brought an estimated 15 to 25 million people onto the streets US in 2020. In France, the plurinational proletarian class from the banlieues regularly reacts to police killings with riots, and the voting out of the neoliberal governments of Chile and Colombia in 2022 was also because of months of protests against state repression.

So far, this has not been the case in Germany, although police violence is also a massive problem here. Last year there were 22 people were shot dead by the police — in France, there were 13 cases in scandal-filled 2023, when the whole country was debating the shooting of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk. According to a recent study by the University of Bochum, there are more than 10,000 suspected cases of unlawful police violence in Germany. 

Migrant groups and police abolition groups regard the phenomenon as being closely connected with the EU border regime. For them, police violence against a predominantly poor migrant population and the prevention of “irregular” poverty immigration are two sides of the same coin — which also happens to be at the centre of far-right politics.

Indeed, the Right give hardly any other political goal as much as importance as arming the security apparatuses and racist-motived closing of borders. If the Left wants to successfully confront the AfD, it must not only argue in “humanitarian” terms, but must also make the class-political core of the far-right agenda visible. This is about containing supposedly “dangerous classes” by expanding instruments of repression and concealing social differences between those at the top and those at the bottom.

This is difficult terrain for Die Linke. As a parliamentary and reform party, it is strange to it to think and act outside of nation-state categories. However, the defence of the welfare state, as regularly emphasized by Die Linke leader Ines Schwerdtner, for example, almost inevitably leads to conflict with globalized class relations, as expressed in migration.[2] This is because the welfare state is historically and economically based on the existence of globalized inequalities and the distinction between the domestic and global classes.

Against this backdrop, strategic considerations are needed on how to create a social welfare system that is not hierarchized by nation states. The existence of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) or the World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that such structures are certainly conceivable.

 

Raul Zelik is an author and translator. He currently works for the newspaper nd.

Translated by Hunter Bolin for Gegensatz Translation Collective.