With a couple of weeks of hindsight, the biggest surprise in the German federal elections was that the political mainstream ended up doing as well as it did. Granted, the traditional parties of the centre-right and -left faced historically low returns, with the Social Democrats (SPD) scraping together some 16.4%, their lowest result since 1887, and their Christian Democratic (CDU) counterparts 28.5% – not quite as bad as last time around, but still their second-worst result in history. Yet given the extent of the country’s economic crisis and social and political malaise, with Germany now slipping into its third straight year of recession and experts estimating it needs somewhere between €500 billion and €1 trillion in overdue public investment, these pillars of the post-war Ordnung made out remarkably well. Compared to the 1.75% for the Socialists and 4.78% for the Republicans in the most recent French presidential elections, one might even say they knocked it out of the park.

Yet even if the centre has managed to hold, it increasingly lists to its right. The CDU, still the strongest party in parliament and set to govern the country in yet another, ever-more precarious grand coalition with the SPD, had already taken a reactionary turn since replacing Angela Merkel, the embodiment of German moderation, with her party rival, the hard-nosed conservative Friedrich Merz, in 2022. At first glance, the CDU’s mediocre election results could be interpreted as a popular rejection of this political drift, but when pairing them with the 20.8% gained by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a more unnerving picture comes into view. More than half of voters cast their ballot for one of two shades of race-baiting neoliberalism, both of which promise that the solution to the country’s woes is not increased public investment, lower rents or higher wages, but rather a combination of eurocrisis-era fiscal belt-tightening and a ramping up of state-sanctioned xenophobia. Whatever the precise contours of the next federal government end up being, the direction of travel is clear. Though the AfD remains outside the halls of power for now, its surge gives Merz an excellent lever to exert pressure on his rudderless junior coalition partner. Moreover, he has already breached the historic firewall around the far right by using the AfD’s parliamentary backing to pass further migration restrictions.

Results for the former governing parties were mixed: the Greens remained in double digits despite their reputation as ‘neoliberals with bicycles’, while their even-more-neoliberal partners, the Free Democrats, now face political oblivion after being ejected from parliament for the second time in twelve years. Overall, though, it is clear that the progressive neoliberal project of the so-called ‘traffic light coalition’, named after the red, green and yellow colours of its constituent parties, has bitten the dust. The outgoing government represented a continuation of the Merkel era, with a little bit of DEI thrown in for good measure and a turn towards outright militarism after the Zeitenwende. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has come a long way since the days when he denounced the USA as the ‘true enemy of peace’ while sharing the stage with East German functionaries, has gone so far as to mimic some of Merkel’s trademark mannerisms. The presence of austerity hawk Christian Lindner as finance minister ensured that economic policy remained largely unchanged. Only the foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock of the Greens, sought to affect some distance from the previous administration by launching her ‘feminist foreign policy’, though that feminism did not, as it turned out, apply to Palestinian women, nor to Ukrainians or Russians seeking to shelter their husbands, brothers and sons from the slaughter on the frontlines.

Germany’s snap elections thus appear to conform to the trends of recent years. An uninspired liberal establishment was punished by voters for its failure to tackle growing economic inequality, amid a widespread feeling that the country was headed in the wrong direction. Small policy adjustments here and there may have, objectively, represented minor improvements for some population groups – Scholz raised the minimum wage to please his trade union backers, for example – but they failed to add up to anything like a compelling agenda for change which could consolidate a loyal base. Much like the dynamic in Trump’s re-election, enough voters chose to switch camps to the AfD or CDU in hopes that they might, if nothing else, shake things up a little bit. The SPD’s lack of ambition and imagination may have thereby paved the way for a potentially more dangerous variety of democratic capitalism.

For although Germany may still be a few election cycles away from the kind of political landscape we see in neighbouring countries like Austria, where the hard-right Freedom Party became the strongest force last autumn, the notion that migration is a zero-sum game that threatens the livelihoods of autochthonous citizens seems to have firmly implanted itself in the popular imagination, particularly among those struggling to make ends meet. Exit polls show the AfD coming first among both workers and people who describe their economic situation as poor, of whom a plurality cite migration as the primary reason for their vote. Small gains on the left-wing fringes aside, large segments of the popular classes in Germany, as in the rest of Europe, appear to be convinced that the main enemy is not at home, as one great German revolutionary once said, but in North Africa and the Middle East. Persuading them otherwise will not be easy.

Germany’s new Leader of the Opposition is a particularly curious specimen among Europe’s coterie of far-right parties. Founded in 2013 as a ‘patriotic’ formation opposed to German bailouts for its Southern European neighbours, the AfD has since drifted further and further into an at times tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless firmly blood-and-soil ideology under the leadership of Alice Weidel, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker and out lesbian married to a partner of South Asian descent. Programmatically, the party stands for the kind of rabid neoliberalism one would expect from a former Goldman employee, meaning that, its oftentimes unpalatable rhetoric aside, it may come in handy for the ruling class as a tool to incapacitate any more radical opposition sooner or later.

Incoming Chancellor Merz, for his part, will unwittingly do his best to help the party get there by pursuing what CDU policy wonks call an ‘Agenda 2030’, reminiscent of the ‘Agenda 2010’ adopted by Gerhard Schröder last time the German economy was in dire straits. Then as now, the Agenda consists largely of cutting taxes for the wealthy, freezing or slashing welfare benefits for those in need, and tweaking the labour market to maximize opportunities for exploitation and profit-seeking. Yet while Schröder managed to win over at least some of the trade unions for his agenda, marketing it as a modernization rather than a demolition of Germany’s welfare state, in Merz’s case it comes with darker undertones.

Merz has promised to tackle illegal migration – Germany’s ‘biggest problem’ – and, far more relevant to the state finances, massively boost armaments expenditures. A week after the election, he announced a pact with the SPD that would allow him to exempt military spending from the country’s so-called ‘debt brake’, which limits federal debt to 0.35% of GDP, in exchange for a one-time infrastructure fund to the tune of €500 billion. While the money for new bridges is surely welcome, how far this defence-spending frenzy might go is anybody’s guess, particularly now that Trump’s awkward press conference with Zelenskyy has triggered a kind of neo-Wilhelmian awakening across the European elite (‘I know no parties anymore, only Europeans!’).

Germany is therefore in for at least four years of an employers’ offensive, more cruelty to those coming to the country in search of a better life, and a breakneck militarization that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. Given all that, the modest gains made by Die Linke, a democratic socialist formation widely regarded as nearing extinction just months ago, are little consolation. And yet, the party’s surprise comeback does offer at least some evidence that a descent into barbarism may not be inevitable. Its 8.7% far exceeded the expectations of even its most optimistic boosters, and while left-liberal opposition to the country’s hardening migration policy played a not insignificant role in this momentum, it must also be noted that the party ran one of the strongest campaigns in its history, with a singular focus on core social issues such as rents and the cost-of-living crisis, coupled with a significantly improved ground game and digital outreach.

This was not, it must be said, without certain opportunity costs: the genocide in Gaza remained conspicuously absent from Die Linke’s messaging, despite the German government’s resolute support for Israel and formal party positions to the contrary. Nevertheless, one should not allow perfect to be the enemy of good. For the first time in at least a decade, Die Linke increased, even doubled its returns among workers and low-income voters. It surged to first place among young voters, tens of thousands of whom joined in the weeks leading up to and following the election, pushing its membership over the 100,000 mark for the first time since the 1990s. This overwhelmingly young, educated and urban base might not represent Germany’s working class in any meaningful sense, but it does give the party some fresh material to work with.

Their former comrades around Sahra Wagenknecht’s eponymous Alliance (BSW), by contrast, just barely missed the 5% electoral threshold and will not be represented in the next parliament. It is hard to pinpoint the precise reason for this shortfall, as the party’s steadfast opposition to weapons shipments to Ukraine remains quite popular among a significant minority of voters. Yet it would seem that as the war faded from public consciousness and opposition to migration became consensus among all parties except Die Linke, Wagenknecht’s core talking points grew less and less compelling. Its decision to join two regional governments last autumn, less than a year after its founding, seems to have disappointed many supporters who hoped to find in Wagenknecht a more resolute opposition than that offered by Die Linke, whose leading figures often vacillate between radicalism on the national stage and a pragmatic, almost conciliatory attitude at the regional level. Perhaps most disappointingly, BSW’s stated mission to win back large numbers of voters from the AfD appears to have failed, having peeled off only 60,000 of them.

What does all this mean for the state of political opposition in Europe’s leading power? In some ways, one can see hints of the left-populist moment that swept across the continent in the 2010s while largely passing Germany by. At least in terms of demographics, the comparison appears apt: Die Linke’s gains are based largely on increased support from former centre-left voters and aspiring but frustrated members of the professional middle classes, whose university degrees failed to deliver the life prospects they were promised. Electorally, this demographic is layered on top of Die Linke’s traditional base of downwardly mobile workers and eastern German pensioners, which, contrary to initial impressions, was not entirely lost to Wagenknecht. But as anyone who experienced the Corbyn years can attest, hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic, freshly radicalized students do not a rejuvenated labour movement make. Much work will have to be invested in rebuilding and redirecting the party’s structures towards long-term organizing if it is to have any chance at becoming a mass movement which offers a meaningful alternative to the ongoing march towards ‘remigration’ and forever war with Russia. But as outgoing finance minister Lindner once told a TV journalist during his years as a teenage entrepreneur, ‘problems are just thorny chances’.

Read on: Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Plus Ça Change’, NLR 131.