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Friedrich Merz has been German chancellor for less than a year and half, and his approval ratings are at record lows. His centre-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), which just lost one state election and was obliterated in another, is in free fall across the country.
The German media cannot talk or write about anything else, blaming Merz for weak campaigning, for boxing himself into an unpopular coalition with the social democrats, for failing to energise the youth as the ultraright Alternative for Germany (AfD) has. All true, all secondary.
What is actually dying in Germany is not just a hitherto dominant party, but the image of centrist politicians as moderate technocrats. After three decades of this facade of moderation and competence, it is now becoming clear that they were neither moderate nor competent.
Alas, first gradually, then suddenly, the masks are falling to the ground, and now the majority can see them for what they have always been: Zealots ruthlessly pursuing dead-end, misanthropic policies that have gutted German society’s capacity to sustain itself and brought it to the verge of an unnecessary war on European soil.
Zealotry dressed in a grey suit and speaking in a soothing voice, repeating ad nauseam that “there is no alternative,” doesn’t look like zealotry until it starts to fail at an epic scale. What changed recently, with inevitable repercussions at the ballot box, is that the deindustrialisation and stagnation caused by the centrists’ extremism has become impossible to ignore.
The AfD did not surge because, overnight, millions of Germans had an epiphany that made them more susceptible to fascist tropes. Its ranks swelled because years of austerity made the German people stare in the face of a loss of status and a high probability of real poverty. Is it any wonder that the ultra-right succeeded in creating an electoral tsunami out of the longing for a return to a fictional golden past – a past lacking the “suspicious” stranger: The Muslim, the Jew, the trans?
It is the same story from Berlin to Paris to London. French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrism has single-handedly pushed France to the edge of a far-right presidency. He made promises of a French renaissance that is impossible, given the shackles of the monetary union with Germany that lacks the necessary democratic and political union.
He has piled tax breaks on the ultra-rich few at a time when the many have struggled to pay for the petrol that their cars need to get them to work. He has raised the retirement age to 64 at a time when impoverished workers’ life expectancy is no more than 72 years.
He has never seen a rent-seeking banker that he has not warmed up to. And all along, he has countenanced no deviation, no compromise, no democratic argument about alternatives.
In the United Kingdom, the centrist Tory-Labour duopoly has also embraced the same austerity policies. In the 1980s, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s wanton vandalism of British industry and her financialisation of homes and utilities made the UK a cesspit of mind-numbing inequality, with a burgeoning import-based service economy and real estate spivs living parasitically at the expense of the vast, disenfranchised majority.
However, it was Tony Blair’s Labour government that sealed this victory of Britain’s oligarchic rentier class by devising innovative ways to continue the gutting of public goods, while completing the unshackling of the City of London bankers. Naturally, as in Germany and France, the politics of fear and loathing are on the march in the UK.
Everywhere, it is the same mechanism: Parties that called themselves sensible, pragmatic, and centrist have pursued one of the most doctrinaire economic programmes in European history – and pursued it with a rigidity, an intolerance of dissent, and a contempt for democratic contestation that the actual political extremes of the 20th century would have recognised as their own method, even if they had rejected the content.
I want to be precise about what I mean by extremism here, because it is not a rhetorical flourish. An ideology is extreme not so much because of where it sits on a left-right spectrum, not even because of the extreme impact of its policies on the majority, but because of how it treats disagreement: As illegitimate, as a problem to be managed rather than a proposition to be responded to.
By that test, Europe’s centre has been the most extreme political formation since the end of World War II. It has built a currency union explicitly designed to remove economic policy from the reach of elections. It has enabled electricity cartels to rob people and businesses blind. It has labelled anyone proposing an alternative “unserious”, “populist” or “anti-European” – regardless of whether that alternative makes economic sense.
In 2015, as the minister of finance of Greece, I had the privilege of experiencing in person the European centrists’ casual extremism. After five years of a failed stabilisation programme that cost Europeans more than an annual Greek gross domestic product, the people of Greece voted for Syriza, which I was a member of, in January 2015 to renegotiate financial terms that even bankers admitted were ludicrous.
And how did the centre respond? They crushed us. Not because they disagreed with our proposals but because, as Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, put it to me, they had put so much political capital into the Greek programme that they could not go back.
To understand the nature and causes of the centre’s extremism, I can think of no better case study than the late Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, with whom I negotiated in 2015. His entire career was organised around a (not illegitimate) fear that Paris would capture the Bundesbank and use the deutschmark, the German currency, to pay for French-style deficit-funded policies across Europe.
Once French President Francois Mitterrand convinced German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to agree to a European Monetary Union and a single currency (the euro) in return for France’s consent to Germany’s reunification in 1989, Schauble and the Bundesbank went into overdrive to prevent the French from usurping Germany’s currency.
In this they succeeded by designing a monetary union featuring no fiscal union, no democratic political union, no banking union, and no shock absorbers, so that the German control Schauble couldn’t legislate directly was built into the plumbing instead.
It was not prudence. It was a man convinced, with the zeal of a convert, that there was exactly one correct economic morality and that anyone departing from it – French socialists, Greek pensioners, Italian voters – had to be constrained by architecture since they could not be trusted with a vote. Fiscal Calvinism is the correct term for it.
And the French socialists? Deluded that they could still command the new currency for their purposes, they applauded. And so a new fiscal Calvinism was embedded at the heart of the European Union, in the eurozone – and, lest we forget, Calvinism is not a synonym for moderation.
When in the autumn of 2008 the global financial crisis began, our Calvinist monetary union faced an almighty shock without any shock absorbers. The sequential bankruptcy of the Franco-German banks and almost every eurozone government was inevitable.
And how did Schauble, with every European centrist in tow, respond? Not just by doubling down, but by putting on display an extreme authoritarianism that most Europeans thought had been expunged from Europe in 1945.
Consider the following: After we came to power with an overwhelming mandate, I suggested to them that we sit down and find a compromise. Schauble reacted with a classic extremist line: “Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy!”
A few months later, Schauble and his minions forced our government to accept a new loan – a new credit card – that would be given under conditions of crushing austerity so that we could pretend that we were repaying our previous credit cards.
When we insisted this was a matter for the Greek people to decide through a referendum, the centrists in authority blackmailed Greece to accept their terms of surrender by practising what I called – and still characterise as – financial terrorism: They effectively shut down Greece’s banking system by having the European Central Bank freeze financing for Greek banks.
Was Schauble demonstrating cruelty to the Greeks? No. He was imposing harsh austerity – discipline, he called it – on us because he wanted to bring it to Spain, Italy, France and, eventually, to Germany. And how did the European centrists, including the social democrats and the Greens, respond? They went along with Schauble’s extremism.
By now it should be clear why the centre is not holding across Europe. Their extreme austerity threw Europe’s economy into a depression. Panicking, the centre reacted by getting the European Central Bank to print mountain ranges of euros – which they gave to the bankers to hand over to Big Business, which did not dare invest it, as the masses were impecunious and, thus, unlikely to buy new high value-added goods. Instead, corporate executives used the money to buy back their own shares and bolster their bonuses, while inequality went through the stratosphere.
This is the mess that Merz inherited. A Germany whose industrial model is kaput because its businesses did not invest during the 15 years their executives were getting rich through austerity for the many and money-printing for the oligarchy. The result is that, today, Volkswagen cannot sell cars, and Merz is forced to transfer its production lines to Rheinmetall to manufacture tanks that not even the Ukrainians want.
Is there a parallel with the 1920s and 1930s? Yes, though not the lazy one where a single leader plays Hitler. The real parallel is in the shape of the orthodoxy: The gold standard then, fiscal austerity now, each treated not as one policy among several but as a fact of nature, defended with a fervour that brooked no dissent even as it visibly deepened the depression it was supposed to cure.
Then, as now, the mainstream parties were not moderates flanked by extremists; they were themselves the immovable ideological core, and it was precisely their refusal to entertain any alternative that left “extremist” as the only label available for anyone who did. The tragedy repeating itself is not that fascism is marching back in uniform. It is that a political culture calling itself the sensible middle keeps behaving like a sect – intolerant, doctrinaire, certain of its own necessity – and keeps being surprised when voters who are refused a legitimate alternative eventually take the illegitimate one on offer.
Merz’s collapsing numbers are not a verdict on his personal charisma. They are the bill finally arriving for a centre that mistook its own fanaticism for moderation and called everyone who noticed a threat to Europe.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
