Germans Say ‘No’ to Immigration.

 The polls predicted an electoral earthquake in Germany’s elections—and that is exactly what voters in Europe’s largest economy delivered on Sunday.

Turnout was at its highest since reunification. The right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), doubled its vote share and finished second. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SDP) slumped to an all-time low. And the center-right CDU/CSU bloc came top, with their leader, Friedrich Merz, poised to take over as chancellor.

Never before in Germany’s postwar history has a party other than the CDU and the SDP finished in the top two in the Bundestag election. The message from the result is stark, writes Christopher Caldwell in The Free Press today: “German voters have decided that stopping mass immigration, legal and illegal, is a national emergency.”

Germany is far from the only Western democracy in which voters’ anger at high rates of immigration—and an elite refusal to grapple with the issue—has driven its politics. But, for obvious historical reasons, the rise of a right-wing, populist party brings with it added apprehension in Germany.

That’s part of the reason why the German electorate isn’t quite ready to give up on its establishment parties. The math in the Bundestag means Merz will likely end up in a grand coalition with the SDP—the same governing arrangement that kept Angela Merkel in power for so long. The question, though, is whether the next chancellor can use that power to fix the issue that has voters so angry.

As Caldwell puts it in his piece for us: “A majority of Germans want him to carry out the AfD’s policies—but without the AfD.” That will not be straightforward, he argues.

To find out why, read on: “The German Establishment’s Last Chance.”

ICYMI: The German election has garnered plenty of American attention—some of it from better-informed sources than others. A particularly dumb take on German democracy—and history—came from Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, who recently described the rise of the Nazis as an example of “where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.” That is—obviously—not exactly what happened. But for the avoidance of doubt, we asked historian and Winston Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts to set the record straight.

Read Roberts: “The Nazis Did Not ‘Weaponize’ Free Speech. They Crushed It.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/germans-say-no-to-immigration-plus?utm_campaign=email-post&r=rd3ao&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email