Polycrisis and far-right resurgence in Germany

In 2021, the new government of chancellor Olaf Scholz took over from the conservatives and pre-emptively celebrated itself as a “progress coalition” that is “setting the course for a decade of social, ecological, economic, digital, and social renewal”.1 The coalition comprised the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozial-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD), the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei; FDP). It had been brought into office on the back of the climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, only three years later, the government collapsed—and in the snap elections of 23 February 2025, the primary beneficiary was the right. The fascist Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland; AfD) gained 20.8 percent. The conservative Christian Democratic Union of Germany/Christian Social Union in Bavaria (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands/Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern; CDU/CSU) had moved further to the right under the leadership of Friedrich Merz. It won 28.6 percent, and Merz is set to become the new chancellor. The SPD, the Greens and the FDP all lost votes. The SPD’s 16.4 percent was its worst result in over a century. The Green vote dropped slightly to 11.6 percent, while the FDP has lost all its seats in parliament. The results also point to the increasing polarisation between the right and the left. The only radical left-wing party in parliament, Die Linke (the Left), raised its vote by 3.9 percent, reaching 8.8 percent.

A central point of contention within the previous government was the “debt brake”, a constitutional mechanism designed to limit budget deficits. The FDP, whose chairperson was hoping for “a pinch of [Javier] Milei and [Elon] Musk”, opposed the SPD and Greens in seeking to preserve the debt brake in its current form.3 Beneath this conflict lies a deeper issue that not only led to the collapse of the coalition but also paved the way for the rise of the AfD: Germany has been thrown into the midst of the polycrisis. The liberal centre is struggling to offer a convincing response, while the left is also finding it difficult to fill the vacuum.

In The New Age of Catastrophe, Alex Callinicos examines the polycrisis through a Marxist lens, arguing its various dimensions—the climate crisis, economic crisis, imperialist rivalries, the rise of the far right—“are immanent in the system, arising from its internal logic”.4 The polycrisis is haunting all countries. However, it is always articulated in specific ways, tied to the uneven and combined nature of capitalist development, to specific historical pathways, government responses and resistance from below. In the German case, it is necessary to understand, as a central element, the growing prominence of imperialist rivalries. The German government needs to take on new debt to fund massive militarisation, while the war in Ukraine has contributed to rising living costs. For Scholz, Germany’s response to Russia signifies nothing less than a Zeitenwende (a historic turning point). The ground on which the AfD is thriving is precisely the intersection between Germany’s growing geopolitical assertiveness, racist scapegoating and deep structural economic problems

Politics of the Zeitenwende

Back in February 2014, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs started an unprecedented review of German foreign policy. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the SPD’s then foreign minister, solemnly opened the discussion, explaining: “In a world that is still searching for a new order 25 years after the end of the East-West confrontation and the demise of a black-and-white order that had prevailed for decades, German foreign policy has no choice but to call itself into question”.5 A year later, he summarised the lessons learned. Among the more substantial was that “crisis is not an exception to the rule within globalisation: it is a permanent epiphenomenon, sometimes even a product of globalisation. We must adapt ourselves better to this reality”.6

Due to the destruction and suffering resulting from the Second World War, early postwar German society was sceptical about assertive foreign policy and militarisation. Despite this, it took only ten years for the new Federal Republic to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and rebuild its military. For the ruling class, the dream of German imperialism was not over. Some of the more far-sighted voices, anchored in nationalist and racist thinking, knew that they would not be able to “restore [Germany’s] old status alone, that allies were needed”.7 Konrad Adenauer, the first West German chancellor, explained: “the danger of the world situation…has developed from the opposition between the United States, which wants freedom for all, and Soviet Russia, which wants to subjugate all peoples to its dictatorship”.8

Being accepted within the Western bloc required reconciliation with Western countries that suffered during the Second World War. Above all, this included the “hereditary enemy”, France, but also Israel, which was wrongly equated with the Jewish people. In 1966, Adenauer justified his extraordinary support for Israeli statehood:

We had done so much wrong to the Jews; we had committed such crimes against them that they somehow had to be atoned for or made amends for if we were ever to regain any standing among the nations of the world. And furthermore, the power of the Jews even today, particularly in America, should not be underestimated.9

In this revealing moment, Adenauer embedded his purely instrumental support for Israel in deep-seated antisemitism, mobilising familiar tropes about the supposed power of a Jewish lobby. Geopolitical and economic logics began to tie the success of the Federal Republic to Israel’s “right to exist”.10

Opposition to war was still troubling the ruling class. These increasing concerns were well-summarised by Franz Josef Strauß, CSU chairperson and vulgar anti-communist with a penchant for dictatorships: “In the long term, there can be no Germany that is an economic giant and a political dwarf”.11 The first war effort of the Federal Republic had to wait until the 1990s. It needed nothing less than the collapse of the Soviet Union and a new nationalist mood in the context of “reunification” with East Germany. This effort was led by the first coalition of the SPD and the Greens, overseen by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, which sent troops abroad to support the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in March 1999.

The Greens were still tangibly rooted in the post-1968 movement. Its members were not only active in the early climate movement but also in movements for peace and disarmament. Joschka Fischer, Green foreign minister, studied under Theodor W Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, and was subsequently active in a militant workerist group. During his early years, he even attended a conference calling for the destruction of Israel, organised by the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Algiers.12 Yet, in many respects, Fischer personifies the “march through the institutions” proclaimed by 1960s student leader Rudi Dutschke. In 1994, already well up the career ladder, during discussions about intervention in the Bosnian war, Fischer stated: “I am firmly convinced that German soldiers would fuel the conflict in places where Hitler’s Soldateska raged in the Second World War”.13 Five years later, as Schröder’s foreign minister, he justified the deployment of the German Bundeswehr (Federal Defence) with reference to the Holocaust: “I have not only learned: never again war. I also learned: never again Auschwitz”, referring to the Srebrenica massacre.14 In 2001, the same coalition deployed the army in Afghanistan.15

Despite the wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, an overarching imperialist strategy was slow to emerge, and foreign policy tended to be decided on a case-by-case basis. For example, in 2002, Schröder opposed deploying troops to Iraq, responding to widespread scepticism in an election year, mass protests and, to a certain extent, a political rapprochement with Russia. A turning point came with the global economic crisis starting in 2007-8. This entailed a growing understanding of the weaknesses of Western imperialism.

The divergence in economic growth between, on the one hand, the US and traditional European powers such as France and Britain and, on the other hand, some countries in the Global South, became more obvious. The struggle for resources, markets and order intensified, helping the German ruling class to understand the fragile state of the liberal world order. The Dignity Revolutions of 2011 further shook the pillars of this order in the Middle East and North Africa. Western states had to watch as pro-Western dictatorships were overthrown, and the influence of Iran and Russia, which had become increasingly averse to the US and European Union (EU) over the second half of the 2000s, rose. In 2013, a policy paper, New Power, New Responsibility, was published by two think tanks, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Politicians, foundations, journalists, academics and the Federation of German Industries were involved in its preparation. It argued:

Germany, with its free and open civil society, lives off globalisation like hardly any other country… It is existentially dependent on the exchange (of people, goods, resources, ideas and data) with other societies. Germany therefore needs demand from other markets and access to international trade routes and raw materials. But even more, it needs the stable and vital global environment…[including] a strong Europe, and a liberal, standards-based world order with free, open states and societies. Germany’s overriding strategic goal must therefore be to preserve, protect and further develop this world order.16

The paper, as well as the review initiated by Steinmeier in 2014 mentioned earlier, tried to come to terms with the growing signs of global crisis. However, Steinmeier, like many members of the liberal elite, underestimated the threats to globalisation and peaceful cooperation. New Power, New Responsibility, by contrast, began to divide the world into “allies”, pro-Western liberal democracies, and “spoilers” such as Iran and North Korea. In between were “challengers”, including China and Russia, that could develop in either direction.

Then, in February 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. Although the conflict had started in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea, and despite the previous war in Georgia in 2008, the German ruling class seemed shocked and unprepared. At the General Assembly of the United Nations, chancellor Olaf Scholz struck an aggressive tone:

This is pure imperialism… It is…a disaster for our global peace order, which is the antithesis of imperialism and neo-colonialism… Putin will only give up his war and his imperial ambitions if he realises that he cannot win this war.17

Scholz used the invasion to announce an investment of €100 billion (£85 billion) in the Bundeswehr, in an attempt to build “the largest conventional army in Europe within NATO”.18 With that, the end of Germany’s existence as a “political dwarf” came closer than ever.

A new National Security Strategy, published by the German government in 2023, presented Russia as “the greatest threat to peace and security in the Euro-Atlantic area”, while defining China as a “partner, competitor and systemic rival”.19 Today, wars and destruction pervade the European periphery—whether in Mali, Sudan, Palestine or Ukraine. After Trump’s election victory in 2024, Germany’s rulers are under pressure to meet US demands for increased military spending—so that the US can focus on containing China—but at the same time assume that the reliability of the transatlantic alliance is no longer guaranteed. Further militarisation responds to both. The proclamation of former chancellor Angela Merkel as the “new leader of the free world” after Trump’s first election victory in 2016 was a gross exaggeration—but, although many German liberals do not like the idea of global leadership, they are aware that some of their allies are even weaker.20 Militarisation expands the possibilities of asserting German interests more independently of the US. After Trump humiliated Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February 2025, Merz announced plans for enormous further investment in the German military, proclaiming: “Germany is back”.21

Disaster economics

Oliver Nachtwey’s 2016 book Die Abstiegsgesellschaft (“The Downward-Mobility Society”) is an exception to a general lack of critical analyses of the German economy.22 He argues that German neoliberalism has led to sharp increases in inequality, large-scale precarious employment and the social decline of the working class. Nachtwey’s book is a welcome attempt to capture the brutal breakthrough of German neoliberalism in the 2000s. Yet, the polycrisis does not play any role in his account and the long-term social outcome of the neoliberal turn is less extreme than he suggests through his somewhat nostalgic contrast with earlier phases.

In 1999, the Economist famously identified low growth, high unemployment and excessive government spending as main challenges for the German government, calling the country the “sick man of Europe”.23 Like Tony Blair in Britain, Schröder set German social democracy on a neoliberal course and introduced drastic reforms.24 Reform programmes such as the Agenda 2010 aimed at dismantling the welfare state and containing real wage growth. Up to the 2008-9 crisis, government spending declined, and unit labour costs fell by 6.5 percent between 2000 and 2007. However, despite the views of neoliberal commentators at the time, German capitalism was still in a relatively strong position—enabling the country’s imperialist rise. Manufacturing hardly faced any problems and overall productivity was increasing. The creation of the European single market in 1993 and the EU enlargement in 2004 provided cheap labour and export opportunities for industry. Nonethless, Agenda 2010 caused deep fear among many people and had to be pushed through in the face of mass protests, from which, ultimately, the radical left party Die Linke emerged.

It was clear that Schröder would not enjoy another term in office. In 2005, Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU took over. Her various governments (2005-21) faced the effects of the polycrisis and increasingly struggled to manage them, just as her even more hapless successor, Scholz (2021-4) would. In 2008-9, as part of the global economic crisis, Merkel’s first government was faced with the collapse of major banks and had to create a €480 billion stabilisation fund. This rescue measure was paid for through strict austerity, and the constitution was expanded to include the debt brake. Later, and on a European level, Wolfgang Schäuble, Merkel’s minister of finance from 2009 to 2017, became the infamous neoliberal opponent of Yanis Varoufakis.25 Austerity came with drastic social consequences—the idea of financial support for banks but cuts for everyone else fuelled the Blockupy protests of 2012-3. Yet, austerity did not create the conditions for sustainable long-term expansion of capital accumulation or a restoration of profitability to high rates. The general economic course was nonetheless maintained by Merkel and, later, Scholz.

In the 2000s, Germany was regarded as a leading country in initiating climate-friendly energy generation, although it remained far from replacing fossil fuels. Such a transition is, of course, expensive (especially considering that capital does not bear the costs of environmental destruction caused by fossil fuels). At the heart of the German strategy was the Renewable Energy Sources Act, which came into force in 2000 and was revised several times. Until 2022, it implied that costs for the expansion of renewables should be included in energy prices; some leading capitalists were exempt. In 2012, after a sharp rise of this surcharge, the Frankfurter Allgemeine found that almost a quarter of the final price consumers paid was to subsidise capital.26

The CDU/CSU initially insisted on nuclear energy as an interim solution to the energy transition, but this could not be maintained after the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011 and mass protests in Germany. Instead, cheap natural gas, largely imported from Russia, was declared a “clean” bridge technology. The war in Ukraine, which stopped these imports, added to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, raising inflation and placing pressure on Scholz’s government. In 2022, as one of the measures to reduce prices, the cost of support for the expansion of renewable energies was transferred from consumers to the state, straining its budget. With the interaction of the different crises, it becomes clear that Germany’s much celebrated Klimawende (climate turn) does not stand up to the polycrisis—far too slow and too expensive, this failure also points to the weaknesses of capitalist “solutions” to the climate crisis more generally.27

It is clear that the new imperialist fault lines, in particular the struggle between the US and China and their respective partners, are having a growing impact on the economy. In 2024, Joachim Nagel, president of the German central bank, said in a speech at the University of Tokyo:

The global landscape has clearly changed in recent years. A world once characterised by multilateralism and global cooperation has slowly shifted towards confrontation and fracture. The first signs of geoeconomic fragmentation are becoming increasingly evident. And, unfortunately, we may be on the brink of significant escalation. This is a concerning development, and we should all strive to restore cooperation and free trade.28

Even some large companies are struggling to adapt to the climate crisis and new international conflicts. Shortly before the February 2025 elections, Volkswagen announced it would cut 35,000 jobs. The auto manufacturer has difficulties producing affordable electric vehicles and is over-reliant on the Chinese market, where it faces intense competition from domestic manufacturers.29 Meanwhile, government investment, held back by austerity and the debt brake, was too low to substitute for subdued private investment—a recent study speaks of “severe and persistent underinvestment”.30 The coalition government led by Scholz had promised nothing less than that “Germany could for some time achieve growth rates last seen in the 1950s and 1960s”, but it failed catastrophically to deliver this.31 Although precarious employment decreased over the past decade, workers are confronted with the fact that real wages fell in the mid-2000s and amid the pandemic, and social inequality remains at a very high level. These failures open up space for the right.

The fascist threat

Over the past decade, the AfD has evolved into a fascist party. It was founded in 2013 in an intellectual middle-class environment, and it was often labelled a “party of professors”. Its founders provided a critique of the government’s course during the Eurozone Crisis that followed the 2008-9 crash, wrapping it up in nationalism, prejudice and racism. This proved to be successful in “attracting disaffected middle-class professionals, entrepreneurs and teachers”.32 If many leading figures at that time were conservatives using a right-wing populist rhetoric to win votes, the party also gave space to more extreme ideas. The fascist current grew, gradually taking over in three stages, each including a change in the leadership: first, Bernd Lucke gave up, then Frauke Petry and later Jörg Meuthen. Since 2022, the AfD has been led by Alice Weidel, who has gained international fame for her recent online discussion with Elon Musk, and Tino Chrupalla. Yet, it is Björn Höcke who sets the tone.33

Höcke was one of the founders of the AfD in the state of Thuringia. He and his people were able to establish an official faction of the party, called Der Flügel (the wing). Despite its dissolution in 2020, due to external and internal pressures, Höcke prevailed in the decisive conflicts over the direction of the AfD. In 2017, he said about the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin: “Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital”.34 Many were outraged. However, those in the AfD that were in favour of a more moderate approach, similar to those of Marine Le Pen in France or Giorgia Meloni in Italy, did not succeed in expelling him. Instead, they either gave in or left the party.

Höcke is part of a network of fascists around Götz Kubitschek, a former Bundeswehr officer who fought in Bosnia and is an enthusiast of the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right). Höcke describes their approach in his book Nie zweimal in denselben Fluß (Never Into the Same River Twice). Their stated aim is to remove “the rubble dumps of modernity”, drawing together in the AfD a “parliamentary spearhead”, a “protesting citizen base” and “the frustrated parts of the state and security apparatus”.35 This strategy explicitly includes the use of force; Höcke speaks of a “politics of ‘well-tempered cruelty’”.36 Members of Generation Identity, fascist students who also train for street combat, belong to his network.37 Other openly violent far-right groups appear to have close ties. One such case is Hannibal, a recently uncovered informal organisation that prepared for “Day X”. It has attracted people from the military, the police and the domestic secret service and was led by an officer of the Kommando Spezialkräfte (Special Operations Forces).38

Höcke, Kubitschek and Martin Sellner, one of the leaders of Generation Identity, seek to normalise far-right ideas in broader society as a prelude to any attempt to conquer state power. This includes learning from Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci, himself a victim of the rise of Italian fascism. As Sellner wrote in 2017: “Our battlefield is almost exclusively…cultural hegemony in Antonio Gramsci’s sense” and “our ‘Grand Strategy’ is not a regime change, but an opinion change”.39 Trivialising the Holocaust, as Höcke has done, is part of this strategy. Here, they exploit a gap liberals have created through their instrumentalisation of the Holocaust to support their imperialist ambitions. Alongside this, they have sought to popularise the euphemism “remigration”. According to Sellner, this refers to the deportation of people of colour from Germany, including those who are German. At the January 2025 AfD conference, the party included “remigration”, albeit somewhat more narrowly defined, in its programme. Weidel, who had previously been cautious towards Höcke, said: “If it is to be called remigration, then it will be called remigration”.40

Although the AfD is led by middle-class individuals and has, since its foundation, been attractive to the middle class, its support is not limited to this section of society. In her brilliant 1923 analysis of fascism, Clara Zetkin observes a radicalisation of the middle class in the period after the First World War, providing fascism with “a contingent of distinguished figures”. Yet, she also notes that fascism “reach[es] even into the proletariat”.41 The degree to which workers express support for the fascists today may be higher than in the past. For example, the share of votes coming from manual workers increased from 5 percent in 2017 to 38 percent in 2025.42 In the previous regional elections in Thuringia, where the party is particularly radical, the share was 49 percent.43

This has led to debate on the left. Stephan Lessenich, left-leaning director of the famous Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, has argued, unconvincingly, that this reflects the way workers are bought off by Western imperialism, forming a labour aristocracy: “national-authoritarian thinking and protectionist, exclusionary behaviour are not external to the subalterns, who are often removed from the analytical-political firing line by the Marxist left”.44 Nora Schmid and I have argued before that these and similar arguments are theoretically and empirically questionable.45

A more credible, but also flawed left-wing position, expressed by figures such as Klaus Dörre, points in the opposite direction: to socio-economic injustices as an explanation. Dörre writes that “right-wing populist everyday philosophies correspond to experiences of injustice, but they are…not an expression of desolation, ever-increasing precarisation or extreme poverty”.46 In one crisis after another, reforms won in the past seem increasingly threatened and the idea of winning further positive change seems less and less viable. Importantly, behind this—and the acceptance of far-right views—lies the fact that, although labour struggles exist, they hardly generate any power to transform politics. He points to the weakness of the left, an issue to which I will return.

Dörre’s work can be seen as an attempt to understand how the current situation in Germany is experienced by workers. However, he focuses too much on socio-economic aspects, seeing crisis dynamics purely through an economic lens. Moreover, he differentiates between three fragmented working classes: the new working class (for example academics), the manual working class and the underclass (for example illegalised migrants and unemployed people). Manual workers are, he argues, “primarily interested in maintaining [their] social status”.47 This means, while he writes extensively about the climate crisis, the feasibility of left-wing strategies is measured in terms of whether they benefit workers materially. A radical break with capitalism seems to be out of the question: “A socialist alternative, if it can be realised at all, will probably be realised through a change of formation which, like the transition from feudalism to capitalism, will take place as a contingent, multi-layered process, also driven by external shocks [what are “external” shocks?] and natural disasters”.48

Many workers do experience the polycrisis as a cost-of-living crisis or as a potential threat to their standard of living. Yet, the character of this crisis also leads to more directly political experiences. Daniel Mullis’s interviews with people in middle-income neighbourhoods in Germany shows how income-related issues, which, in the wake of 2008-9 crisis had been individualised, were increasingly viewed as a “collective crisis” once the Covid-19 pandemic hit.49 Subsequently, Mullins argues that “inflation, war and the climate crisis have replaced the pandemic as drivers of uncertainty”.50 An interviewee tells him:

I believe that there is more awareness that crises do indeed exist in our world too. Previously, they were part of the lives of my parents‘ or even grandparents’ generation…but somehow everything seemed safer in our time. Covid-19 has changed that, I think. The pandemic is affecting everyone. But it‘s even stronger now in the Ukraine war.51

Just as the polycrisis encompasses many interacting dimensions, people also experience it in different forms, moving between economics and politics. The AfD, as also Dörre highlights, offers an overarching narrative in response, but it was allowed to do this by the mainstream left, the SPD and the Greens, legitimising imperialism and intensifying economic pressures on workers, starting in the late 1990s. Today, for many, the result is a homogeneous bloc of parties that barely differ in their policies. The AfD lumps them together as “the old parties” (“die Altparteien”).52

Not only did these mainstream parties oversee the development of the polycrisis but they also play on the themes of the AfD. There is a long history of this. For example, president Joachim Gauck complained in 2012 that “German casualties” in Afghanistan are “hard to bear for our happiness-addicted society”—a call for fatherland, honour and masculinity.53 In the February 2025 election, all major parties except for Die Linke campaigned for militarisation. As for migration, the CDU/CSU and SPD engaged in a competition for tighter border controls and more deportations. The current electoral success of the AfD is driven, too, by Islamophobia promoted by the mainstream parties in response to the genocide in Palestine. In an interview, Scholz would call the attack on 7 October 2023 a “terrible, murderous, inhuman terrorist attack by Hamas on innocent Israeli citizens”. Prompted by the journalist about stricter migration laws, given that many Germans from migrant backgrounds oppose the Israeli genocide, his response was to call for the deportation of illegalised people “on a large scale”, adding that “we need to deport more and faster”.54

In this climate, the middle class and workers can be attracted to fascism. Yet, these classes exhibit important differences. Although Dörre and many others see workplaces as a place where the working class is divided into different fractions, or even different classes, it can also be a place where unity is forged. For example, my father, a manual worker, leans towards right-wing social democracy and makes racist remarks. At the same time, however, he can honestly claim that a young black worker who has recently arrived in Germany is one of the best coworkers he has. When the war in Ukraine began, he tried to help Ukrainian and Russian transport workers stuck in Germany. Racist ideology hardly aligns with his everyday experiences in the workplace. With the working class comes a specific collective agency and power that the middle class does not possess: “the proletariat is the class that will remake society”, as Zetkin writes.55 This does not imply that the economic struggles of workers will spontaneously eradicate racism within the class or society at large—racism still needs to be challenged politically.

Which anti-fascism?

Although the major feature of the election was the breakthrough of the far right, Die Linke was able to win a decent number of votes and, surprisingly, performed better than in the previous general election. During the campaign, over 23,000 new members joined the party. This followed mass protests in all major cities after Merz’s CDU/CSU broke the so-called firewall between it and the far right, pushing a motion through parliament with the votes of the AfD. In a parliamentary speech, which went viral on social media, Die Linke’s Heidi Reichinnek demanded that Merz “stand up to fascism”, ending with: “to the barricades!”56 Such developments can disguise the fact that the party as such is weak on many crucial political questions. Its election campaign focused on socio-economic issues, and it was not a significant force within the protests against the AfD. There are important exceptions, in terms of individuals and local branches. Yet, Die Linke’s success came more through its symbolic link to struggles rather than its active participation in them.

In their evaluation of the elections, the co-chairs of Die Linke, Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken, point out: “We have focused on a few core demands and issues that we are constantly emphasising”. This centred on “concrete and realistic demands such as the rent cap, the abolition of value-added tax on basic foodstuffs and a wealth tax”.57 What Dörre and others argue theoretically is already the reality for the party. Mario Candeias, a leading researcher at Die Linke’s Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, writes that workers moving to the right “are not acting ‘against’ their own interests”, merely “in favour of other interests”.58 Hence, workers are relevant insofar as they are the largest part of the electorate, and many sympathise with left-wing ideas. The response of Die Linke’s leadership to fascism, then, becomes restricted to what Isabella Weber calls “antifascist economics”.59 In an article published in Jacobin, Lukas Scholle and Ines Schwerdtner explain: “Anyone who wants to deprive the AfD of its foundation must advocate a different economic policy. This is the only way to take away people’s fear of decline and give them material security.” For them: “Antifa[cism] means welfare state”.60

Such an approach, which avoids actually confronting and challenging racism and fascism, has always been problematic. Yet, it is especially limited now, because it addresses only the economic dimension of the polycrisis. The problems are compounded by the right wing of Die Linke seeking to align the party with core principles of German imperialism.61 In doing so, they benefit from the departure of Sahra Wagenknecht, who, as well as taking anti-war positions, undoubtedly also stood for discrimination against migrants, women and LGBT+ people.62 Importantly, genuinely left-wing anti-imperialists, such as Christine Buchholz, left over the past year. What remains of the organised left inside Die Linke has already shifted from a categorical rejection of any acts of war, for instance by advocating sanctions against Russia. The party leadership officially rejects militarisation but advocates for “strategic autonomy of the European Union”, playing into the hands of the liberals.63 The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation published an article by Daniel Merwecki, in which he wrote that NATO, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, was “transformed…into what hardly any leftist ever wanted to think of it as: an anti-imperialist defensive alliance”.64 Currently, this is not the majority view, but it is taken seriously, particularly in regional party branches like Bremen.

Due to the polycrisis, the scope for reformist politics has narrowed more generally. Often overlooked, Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of imperialist rivalries linked this to the shrinking scope for reformism. In 1904, she wrote that “the powerful rise of world politics in the last ten years has dragged the entire economic and social life of the capitalist countries into a maelstrom of immense, uncontrollable international effects, conflicts and reorganisations”.65 Against this backdrop, she observes that the parliament “is meeting mainly to approve the budget, a new army bill, new loans for the African colonial war, the inevitable new naval demands beckoning in the background, and the trade treaties”.66 The international context can restrict national politics. In today’s Germany, this is clear from debates over Merz’s plans for increased military spending and his effort to remove the debt brake from the constitution to pay for this. Die Linke’s dilution and silent abandonment of key political positions may lead to short-term electoral success. Yet, in the long run, this will harm the movement and ultimately undermine the radical left. This is particularly clear over the issue of Palestine.

Support for German imperialism and, with that, for Israel, has become a prerequisite for any party’s acceptance within the state. Merkel popularised the term Staatsräson (reason of state) at a speech to the Israeli parliament in 2008, expressing the intrinsic commitment of post-war Germany to Israeli security. Far from being simply a response to German history and the brutality of the Nazis, as an otherwise brilliant article from Jewish Currents suggests­, this is driven by capitalism and class interests.67 The narrative is rooted in the (historic and contemporary) rebuilding and growing assertiveness of the German state in a rapidly changing and hostile world. Die Linke does not challenge this. Instead, they, for instance, expelled Ramsis Kilani, a socialist active in the Palestinian movement in Germany, to align with the Staatsräson. In this way, Die Linke reproduces racist divisions within the working class, weakening the movement as a whole.

For the near future, revolutionary socialists remain a small minority in Germany. It is necessary to work alongside forces oriented on reform to build political movements and raise the level of class struggle. Central to this must be fending off fascism through a united front tactic.68 This primarily involves joint activities with Die Linke, trade unions and, in most places, members of the SPD, Greens and religious communities. The protests against Merz and the AfD were already an important step. To make the argument for the need of a united front, socialists can draw on both historical and current experiences, such as the reaction of Stand Up to Racism to the far-right riots in Britain in summer 2024. However, new fields of struggle are constantly emerging—as argued above, the polycrisis drives and accelerates these processes. Socialists must work to connect the various struggles with each other. Economics and politics cannot stand in isolation, and the fight against the far right cannot be isolated from German imperialism and the genocide in Palestine. A prerequisite is organisational independence. This makes it possible for concrete tactical decisions and overall strategy to cohere with one another. The only way out of the “new age of catastrophe” remains a radical break with capitalism.69

Sascha Radl is the deputy editor of International Socialism.

Notes