The German left in the age of rearmament

Will Atlanticism be the AfD's path to respectability?

Of all the hideous gargoyles who leer at Germany through the television set, Ole Nymoen is perhaps the least offensive (in appearance, if not politically). A columnist for the local edition of Jacobin Magazine and the author of a breezy polemic published last year by the prestigious Rowohlt-Verlag under the title ‘Why I Would Never Fight For My Country’, the 27-year-old Nymoen is a rare dissenter from the Berlin Bubble consensus on rebuilding and rearming Germany’s stagnant armed forces. Nymoen’s ideas are not new; there is nothing in his standard-issue pacifism that should have the power to shock an establishment whose left sees the student protests of the late 1960s as its heroic age, and whose right has long been content to reap the ‘peace dividend’ and trade with friend and foe alike. That this mundane figure should both antagonise the feuilleton in the extreme while also benefitting from its patronage is the cipher key to left-wing politics in Germany in the coming age of military Keynesianism.

Compared to Britain and the United States, Germany’s retrograde media landscape might as well be written in cuneiform. Question Time-style formats still set the tone in political high society; newspaper columns, lined up on off-white paper like columns of riot police filing orderly into the plaza, bark commands into the public sphere; Twitter, to the extent it is still used after the mass defection of the country’s quangos to Mastodon (a BlueSky equivalent that seems to have caught on in no other country), is mainly a platform for journalists and woke academics to engage tasteful banter amongst each other. Lefty media elites — a term almost quaint in the civilised West, where Substack has long banished the skeletons of unreason back into their dusty crypts — still zealously guard the Overton Window. Not just anyone can mount the soapbox. So, why Nymoen?

Germany’s media-bureaucratic-academic nomenklatura watches with troubled conscience as Friedrich Merz’s unsteady hand guides the trowel of military procurement across the economy’s ill-laid foundations. Military Keynesianism, as an establishment project repulsive to establishment sensibilities, is the German equivalent of Brexit. Its proponents conceive it both as a heroic last stand to save German industry and a fundamental rethink of the civil-military relationship — in this case less Hitler, and more the Cold War Federal Republic. The two souls of Merzian militarism sit uneasily with each other. As modernisers from Louis XVI to Gorbachev have discovered (and as a comparatively well-funded subfield of German political science has spent decades theorising about), political and economic reforms run on separate timetables and are difficult to synchronise. Not few in Germany would be glad to see the train derail; the Lust am Untergang — the secret desire to see one’s own immoral works laid low — is a surprisingly powerful motivator, and, like the ghost in Hamlet, Nymoen lends corporeal guise to the white-collar left’s inner torments.

Merz has paid little heed to the political scientists: although the benefits of economic realignment have yet to materialise at scale, his government has surged ahead with military reforms. Most prominent among these is a plan to slowly reintroduce compulsory military service, starting with an ominous, legally-mandated online survey on ‘military readiness’ accessible via QR codes to be mailed out this year to the country’s entire 18-year-old male population. In an ethnically-divided society lacking any explicitly institutionalised mechanisms to ensure coexistence through segregation (such as separate ethnic units inside the military), the latter will only exacerbate existing tensions, whether this be by forcing different groups into proximity with each other within the armed forces, by the perception of unequal burden sharing, or by the likelihood that those roadmen who opt to do civilian service (effectively allowed for by the constitution, which prohibits mandatory armed military service) will make nuisances of themselves doing alternative service in care homes and other places on the ‘home front’. Combined with ongoing economic dislocation, this will prove an explosive cocktail for a political establishment that has pinned its hopes on rearmament to weather the crisis in the export economy and stare down the populist right.

The AfD’s irresistible rise only heightens the political bubble’s angst at the rebirth of militarism. There is a genuine fear amongst Berlin apparatchiks that a reinvigorated Bundeswehr could fall into the hands of what they perceive — wrongly, but it is perceptions here that matter — as unreconstructed nazis. It is widely believed in this milieu that a remilitarised Germany will be a more right-wing Germany; a country unconcerned with ‘work-life balance’ and at risk of backsliding into regressive gender stereotypes. Remilitarisation may be necessary to ‘honour our commitments to our allies and partners’ and ‘stand up to Mr Putin’s bullying’, and recent strains on the transatlantic relationship have only heightened the political class’s sense of urgency, but the spirits that it summons are not easily dispelled. All the more reason, then, to heed young Nymoen’s counsel.

At the same time as it worries over a cultural shift to the right, Germany’s apparatchik class registers decreasing organic enthusiasm for its grand projects. Lockdowns have left a bitter taste, and while Greta-style environmentalism still smothers the public sphere, this meme has few dedicated believers outside retirement homes, the LinkedIn homepage, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung feuilleton. The left-wing parties slump in the polls; the Greens, which in the late Merkel years hovered around 20% and seemed in touching distance of forming a government, now languish around half of that figure, while the SPD has not polled so poorly since the Bismarckian anti-socialist laws were in force. The rare green blade struggling upwards through the grey fascist asphalt is the Left Party (Die Linke), the successor to East Germany’s perennial party of government, which had been left for dead by most political observers in 2022 after a group of MPs defected over the party’s support for Russia sanctions, apparently taking its Ossi boomer base (and most of the party’s non-white parliamentarians) with them. This experiment has since acrimoniously collapsed, with the new BfW failing to enter parliament — falling just 0.02% short of the 5% threshold — and thus banishing from the left Putinism’s spectre to the shades whence it came.

The (capital-l) Left’s resurrection at last year’s ballot, at which it won 8.8% of the vote, has been credited by befuddled commentators to ‘a strong TikTok game’. The true reason is instead likely to be Green defections from the party’s internal war over Palestine (the German left is perhaps the only one in the world of which a substantial faction takes ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ to be a core article of faith). The party’s rise to respectability is best understood as an internal showdown between the ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘realist’ wings of Germany’s bureaucratic-cultural nomenklatura; as the reassertion of its antifa id against its woke managerial superego.

The way forward for the Left is to act as a spoiler; a Fronde on behalf of elite conscience. Palestine, for all the passions it ignites, is no base for a popular politics, but with anti-militarism, the Left has struck a chord with a genuinely wide appeal. Rheinmetall stocks soaring while the mums and kids pinch pennies; children of lockdown (not that the Left emphasises this part) forced to hand away another year of their youth to palliate boomer fears of a Russian army stuck in the Donbass mud for four years in a row — these are rich veins of dissent for any populist party to mine.

The ultimate consequence of this politics of libidinal self-satisfaction will be to create an opening for the AfD. The Left is not currently a bête noire to the extent that the AfD is — its party foundation receives state funding whereas the latter’s does not, and it has participated in governing coalitions in various East German states — but it is still an awkward dance partner, particularly for the CDU, whose 2017 ‘incompatibility resolution’, the oft-cited basis for the party’s internal prohibition against cooperation with the AfD, equally ruled out any joint action with the Left. The establishment troika of CDU, SPD, and Greens is in secular decline and has already lost its two-thirds majority in the Bundestag; so long as the anti-AfD firewall remains in place, majorities for certain items (constitutional amendments and judicial appointments) are impossible without the Left’s support. This is not the end of the world for the CDU, a party that stands above all for compromise; the greater risk lies instead in the possibility that competition on the left over a dwindling vote pool pushes the Social Democrats (or perhaps the Greens, although this is far less likely), led by their powerful ‘post-industrial’ faction, to turn against the ‘war economy’ to stop the bleeding to the Left. Such a volte-face would represent an existential threat to German industry and radicalise the Christian Democratic basis — and with it, one presumes, the party — towards to the right.

Were this to occur, the architects of rearmament would find their great state project reliant on a vanishing parliamentary majority. To their left, they would find only Putin’s useful idiots; to their right, an AfD increasingly well-networked in Washington, and which, under Alice Weidel’s leadership, is shedding its Russophile baggage and placing its chips on the transatlantic relationship as the foundation stone of Germany’s foreign relations. Looking abroad, they would find their NATO and EU partners urging them to take whatever internal measures are necessary to meet their alliance commitments and for the German economic motor to continue powering the continent. The positive example of Giorgia Meloni’s grand bargain with Italy’s Atlanticists would be the lodestar guiding weary Germany out from Wokeness’ endless night. There are powerful forces abroad and — if we are to take the conspiracy-minded yet nevertheless well-informed AfD lawyer Dubravko Mandić’s speculations at face value — within the upper echelons of German society itself that wish to see the CDU and AfD overcome their mutual antagonism, and, as Germany’s Russia hawks are well aware, nothing bridges old enmities like the sudden appearance of a common foe.

Perhaps that’s why Nymoen keeps getting invited back on the chat shows.

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This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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