The German establishment has run out of options: Russophobic propaganda is its only weapon against dissent both on the right and the left
Germany’s current political elites are even more submissive toward the US than those of West Germany during the Cold War. Which is ironic as the Cold War has long been over, and, at least after World War Two, America has never treated Germans as atrociously and with such open contempt as now. But clearly, bad old habits are dying hard in Berlin.
In fact, they are mushrooming as if there’s no tomorrow. It’s no surprise then that Germany’s mainstream political culture is also returning to smearing the domestic opposition as in cahoots with – drumroll and very scary music – Moscow!
To be fair, in a way, this is the perfect fusion of something traditionally German and some dutiful copying of the US: the nasty old trick of deriding the opposition as “vaterlandslose Gesellen” (in essence a fifth column) rooted in the mean, militarist politics of semi-authoritarian Wilhelmine Germany combined now with an imitation of slightly dated American-style Russia Rage. The “long-way-West” cult, still so beloved by dogmatic German Atlanticists, meets pre-World War One nationalist info-warring.
The victims of this dirty trick come from both the new left and the new right. When the new left BSW party, then under Sahra Wagenknecht and Amira Mohamed Ali (now under Ali and Fabio De Masi) was surging last year, it was the main target of guilt-by-association-with-Russia propaganda.
German de facto state TV, which has become extremely conformist, misleading, and – quite simply – mean, accused Wagenknecht of being “in sync with Russian propaganda.” The former minister of the economy, the catastrophic yet blissfully complacent Robert Habeck – now on a sinecure at Berkley University – even went so far as to call the BSW “totally bought” by Moscow. The party sued him, and he lost, rightly so. Wagenknecht was vindicated by the failure of Habecks’s “lies” and “fake news” to withstand legal scrutiny.
By now, however, the BSW has been excluded from the German parliament by an extremely malodorous combination of electoral miscounts and what looks like a concerted attempt by the establishment parties to delay addressing this massive failure of what remains of democracy in Germany. In the face of these moves from, as we have learned to say, the ‘playbook’ of electoral manipulation now apparently considered normal in the EU, the BSW has not given up and may very well still prevail. In that case, it is very likely to enter parliament, the current governing coalition of indistinguishable Centrists (CDU and SPD) fall, and German politics will be shaken up mightily – as it should be.
But for now, the German ersatz version of the American Russia-Russia-Russia smear (aka Russia Rage) has focused on the other, currently more powerful opposition party, the AfD – the new right. Even Habeck had already targeted both the BSW and the AfD with his irresponsible and polarizing demagogy. With the AfD holding over 150 seats in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, and forming its only serious opposition force as well as leading the national polls, it has clearly been singled out for a fresh, concentrated barrage of Russophobic propaganda.
The head of the defense committee Thomas Röwekamp, from chancellor Merz’s CDU party, for instance, has warned that AfD parliamentarians might abuse their position to spy for Russia. Evidence – zero. Instead, Röwekamp speculates about their perfectly legal information requests. Requests that every parliamentarian has a right – in fact, a duty – to submit as part of the mandate from their voters to control the executive.
The Ministry of Defense, just going through yet another major scandal about wasting billions of Euros in a truly harebrained scheme to modernize the army’s radios, clearly doesn’t like the scrutiny from the parliamentary opposition either and is also leaking unfounded – and anonymous – warnings about the same AfD requests. Obviously, the true scandal is that Röwekamp and the Ministry are exploiting their position, probably in a coordinated manner, to make such allegations.
In a similar vein, a trip to Russia by four ranking AfD politicians – Bundestag members Steffen Kotré and Rainer Rothfuß, the party’s leader in Saxony Jörg Urban, and EU parliament member Hans Neuhoff – to take part in a conference on cooperation between BRICS and Europe has provoked fierce and shockingly dishonest condemnation: another CDU representative has spoken of “treason.” German mainstream media have amplified these insane reproaches.
Kotré and Urban have defended their trip as taking care of German national interests which the current government neglects, such as affordable energy, peace diplomacy, and contacts with BRICS. The anti-Russia sanctions, they argue, are doing grave damage to Germany. They are, of course, right.
The AfD leadership, meanwhile, has, obviously, rejected the spying smear as an “abysmal insolence,” which is an understatement. At the same time, the party has made concessions: a meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council during the Russia trip was cancelled. Indeed, the party leadership, consisting of co-leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla is even making the rookie mistake of showing clear signs of disunity: Weidel is giving in ever more to the russophobic pressure, clearly having ordered Rothfuß to stay at home“voluntarily,” while Chrupalla is holding up better and taking the brunt of the smear campaign.
From the sidelines, meanwhile, the mainstream media are already gloating over a split in the AfD or, even more insidiously, welcoming it finally becoming “civilized” and capable of “cooperation” with the decaying Center. That is the gist of a recent op-ed in the staid Neue Züricher Zeitung.
Only non-mainstream outliers, such as Jürgen Elsässer’s magazine “Compact” (also under a permanent barrage of Russophobic smears), point out that this is a very dangerous trap for the AfD. Beyond Weidel and Chrupalla, discernible opposing tendencies are forming. If the party cannot avoid a fully articulated split, it will have done exactly what the mainstream Russia Rage smear campaign was trying to achieve.
And if unity should be maintained by imposing the Weidel approach of appeasing the Russa Ragers (even if only for tactical reasons), it will lead to another kind of dead end, namely the loss of many votes, not only but especially in the former East Germany, where hysterical fear of Russia and war-in-sight panic-mongering sell particularly badly.
Against this backdrop, a recent speech by federal president Frank-Walter Steinmeier has made things much worse again. In Germany, the presidency is a largely ceremonial office, but on major national days of commemoration, the president has a bully pulpit that can be used to try to shape not only public debates but the policies that can flow from them.
Speaking on November 9, Steinmeier made an aggressive and destructive use of his platform. The date connotes (in chronological order) the largely failed German revolution of 1918 and the emergence of the badly designed Weimar Republic; the brutal antisemitic pogroms of 1938 formerly mostly known, in Nazi persistent slang, as “Reichskristallnacht”; and the de facto collapse of East Germany in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down.
Steinmeier’s speech was not up to the occasion. Morally condescending and intellectually dogmatic and superficial, it also came across as fundamentally hypocritical. Highlights included his failure to address Israel’s Gaza genocide – in which Germany has been complicit – while deploring a rise of anti-Semitism. With that combination of blind spot and selective conscience, it is likely that Steinmeier was implying that much of the legitimate criticism of Israel, a genocidal apartheid state, falls under “anti-Semitism,” a blatant untruth that is a very popular form of moral perversion and cowardice among German elites. Clearly, the president has not learned the real lesson from Germany’s history of committing genocides (not only one): Never again, to no one and by no one. Including: Not to Palestinians by Israelis with the help of, to name only a few, Germany, the UK, and the US.
The president of all Germans – at least in theory – also felt no compunction about going after the AfD, a legal party in parliament and having the support of almost all of the former East Germany and increasingly in the former West, too. Although not naming them, it was clear that his many references to “extremists” were targeting the AfD; he defended their obviously unfair exclusion from normal coalition building – the infamous firewall – with facile and false Weimar-and-the-Nazis analogies (and I write this as both a man of the left and a historian). He spoke, in effect, in favor of prohibiting the party, displaying either cynicism or an astonishing lack of thorough reflection.
Speaking of which, Steinmeier is a member of the SPD, the Social Democrats, whose more impressive political ancestors were the original “vaterlandslose Gesellen,” i.e., victims of Wilhemine Germany’s systematic foul play with “fifth column” allegations. Irony still has a way of being terribly serious and rather self-unaware in Germany.
The AfD has not missed the message. Its Bundestag leadership has accused Steinmeier of misusing his office as no president before him. Comparisons can be tricky, but the gist of the AfD’s response is correct. Steinmeier claims to want to defend democracy. Yet he has failed to intervene against the scandalous miscount and stalling tactics that have kept the BSW out of parliament.
He also has nothing to say about the fact that many Germans, very plausibly, feel they cannot speak their mind anymore. Instead, he has implied that they deserve to be shut up, since they as well may well fit his narrow yet elastic, doctrinaire and politically self-serving idea of defending democracy.
And with his reckless de facto threats of prohibition, he has confirmed what many Germans rightly suspect: that their political establishment has lost precisely that ‘Augenmaß’ – a sense of proportion and fairness – that Steinmeier claims is a key element of democracy. He is right: it is. A pity he doesn’t have it.
