(An error with Substack led to the original version of this post being deleted. It has been rewritten and reuploaded here.)
On February 23rd, Germany held its federal elections. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) came out the victor with 28.6 percent of the vote, and 208 seats in the Bundestag. Leader Friedrich Merz is now the incumbent Chancellor, with outgoing Olaf Schulz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) losing 9.3 percent of their vote share — the party’s worst ever result in a federal election, and its largest election-on-election loss of votes. Two million SPD voters switched to the CDU. Every member of the collapsed “traffic light” coalition lost seats: with the Greens losing 3.1 percent, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) losing 7.1 percent — falling below the 5 percent threshold to enter the Bundestag.
However, despite gaining 20.8 percent of the vote and coming second, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) has been “absolutely excluded” from a coalition with the CDU by the Brandmauer (firewall) maintained around them by other parties. In January, 124 lawmakers — including members of the SPD, Greens, and CDU — supported an attempt to ban the AfD according to anti-Nazi provisions in Germany’s post-War constitution. In its migration proposal, the CDU smeared the AfD as using “problems, worries and fears caused by illegal migration to stir up xenophobia and spread conspiracy theories”. If Weidel, a lesbian partnered with a Sri Lankan immigrant, is considered the second coming of Adolf Hitler, then the criteria for membership of the “far right” is so vague as to be meaningless.
This anxiety to perpetually prove Germany’s antiracist bonafides after the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War explain the wide generational divide between voters aged 18-24 and over 70.
Germany’s post-War generation voted overwhelmingly for establishment parties CDU and SPD — both of whom presided over millions of migrants entering Germany, under Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz. A misplaced sense of collective guilt for Nazi atrocities, which they were not alive to be party to, causes them to double-down on the dangerous policy of mass immigration and failed project of multiculturalism, because such pathological openness is the equally extreme opposite of evil Nazi racism.
Generation Z, however, voted either to accelerate the revolution with Die Linke — the latest iteration of the German communist party — or to reverse the permissive asylum system via the AfD. In 2024’s Bavarian elections, the AfD was the most popular party for voters aged 18-24 in Thuringia (38%) and Saxony (31%). A third of Germans under 34 voted for the AfD. In February, 21 percent of 18-24s voted for AfD, and 25 percent for Die Linke. As I predicted in my Triggernometry episode last year: you don’t get to pick whether or not we get a revolutionary Gen Z — only the flavour of revolution.
The Western trend of political gender polarisation played out again in Germany: with young women voting for leftist parties 25% more than the national average, but young men only voting for the AfD at 4% more than average. The gender gap between men and women voting for the AfD was 7 percent, compared to 2-3 percent for other parties.
I discussed the implications of Europe’s politicians remaining wilfully ignorant of Vice President Vance’s prescient warnings at the Munich Security Conference with
and on The Weekly Wrap — a new news podcast for Courage MediaYou can watch it here on Substack, or on YouTube (below).
Episodes release every Saturday. Last week’s episode on the Mannheim attack and President Trump’s first address to the 119th Congress available on Courage Media and on YouTube:
For more written analysis on the German elections:
I wrote the following essay for Courage Media, on how the long hangover of the post-War consensus has rendered Germany incapable of expelling the most dangerous elements invited in by the declaration “Wir schaffen das!” Paradoxically, Germany persecutes critics of the most illiberal strains of Islam, censoring lawful opposition parties in the name of “defending democracy.”
This apparent paradox of insisting on censorship to “save democracy” is exactly what Vice President Vance criticized in his speech at the Munich Security Conference.
“I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process. protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential — and trust me, I say this with all humor — if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.
But what no democracy, American, German or European will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.
Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t. Europeans, the people have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.”
For this, Vance was condemned by Germany’s Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, who insisted that:
“democracy does not mean that a vociferous minority will automatically be right, and they cannot decide what truth is. It does not mean that anyone can say anything, and democracy must be able to defend itself against extremists that try to destroy it. I am happy to live in Europe where this democracy is defended every day against its internal and external enemies.”
Merz concurred, promising to make his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can achieve, step by step, real independence from the US … especially after Donald Trump’s statements from last week”.
As explained in a previous essay, “democracy” as used by progressive politicians does not mean a system of government where each citizen is afforded a vote, and politicians are accountable to the electorate. Instead, democracy is the system by which man’s egalitarian nature is revealed by every election resulting in a predictable progressive victory. This is based on the “blank slate” assumption that we are all equal, that all differences are superficial and unnatural, and therefore that any inequality is a result of oppression. One need only censor and ban those who disagree for being “far right”, “racist”, and spreaders of misinformation, and everyone will realize the false consciousness of inequality we have labored under for so long. The will of the people can be ignored if their expressed wishes go against the ideological goal of equality. This is how they square the circle of authoritarian censorship to “defend democracy”.
This belief in the “blank slate” was put on steroids after the Second World War. As I wrote in another essay, in seeking to fulfill the promise “Never Again”, Europe’s politicians adopted a philosophy of value-pluralist liberalism and moral relativism, antithetical to Nazi racism. It enshrined this politics in institutions such as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights. As R.R. Reno explained in Return of the Strong Gods, any preference for one’s own family, people, religion, culture, history, heritage, and nation became synonymous with fascism. A policy of pathological openness had to be practiced, to prevent the smoke-stacks of Auschwitz from being resurrected. We had to act as if an anthropology of indistinguishable human sameness was really true — because making any qualitative observations about cultures and civilizations became the first step toward ineluctably justifying genocide.
Author and demographer Paul Morland, the son of German-Jewish refugees who fled to Britain in the 1930s, wrote in the Telegraph six days before the election that
“My grandparents would be horrified at the shoddy, litter-strewn centres of German cities. They would be depressed to find out that, lacking confidence and pride, Germans have not been having enough children to replace themselves for more than half a century.
They would find it deeply worrying that synagogues in Germany continue to be attacked and anti-Semitic slogans daubed on community buildings. They would be honest enough to see that the threat to Germany’s small and vulnerable Jewish communities, remnants risen from the ashes, comes from a new direction.
The threat of a revival of anti-Semitism is [sic] Germany is real but it is far from the only problem Germany faces as it struggles to absorb the vast inflow of Middle Eastern immigrants it has received in the last decade.
Germany must be ever-mindful of its past, and indeed its contrition for the Holocaust has been sincere, long lasting and exemplary. But it must also take responsibility for its future. It cannot do this if it is forever hobbled by a cultural guilt that prevents an honest and open discussion of what ails the country.”
Morland’s point is that, by failing to differentiate between cultures for fear of being called a racist, Germany is endangering its recovering Jewish minority with imported Islamic antisemitism as much as its ethnic German population. The twisted irony is that, in attempting to atone for the atrocities of the Holocaust, Germany has conducted a program of mass migration which has caused further death and destruction.
You can read the full essay on Courage Media, or on
:
The best possible atonement the German people could make for past sins is to not inflict avoidable harms on the children of the present, and to rebuild into a great nation per the will of their population. But I fear that this election will mean years more of a managed decline by a German establishment too afraid of being called racist to take the necessary action of removing the violent foreign criminals from their country.
As for the frequency of terror attacks, referenced by JD Vance:
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