Alice Weidel, leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party, and Elon Musk, advertising a livestream chat in advance of the federal election. Photo from X.

It was the budget, stupid. Last November, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired his Finance Minister, Christian Lindner. Scholz had demanded the relaxation of fiscal rules, known as the “debt-brake,” to boost the private economy after two years of recession. Lindner refused and proposed tax and spending cuts instead. To that Scholz could not agree. The severe cuts to social spending approved by the last Social Democratic Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, cost Schröder his job. Scholz didn’t want to follow him down that road.

However, if Scholz thought that he could save his job by avoiding social spending cuts, he was wrong. In fact, even without imposing working class austerity, Scholz was more unpopular than Schröder was after doing so.

What really happened was this: Lindner’s firing led to a non-confidence vote, which Scholz lost. In the federal elections that took place on February 23, social democratic hopes for a last-minute comeback were bitterly disappointed. Conservative leader Friedrich Merz is bound to form a coalition government, presumably with the Social Democrats as junior partner. However, the real winners of the election are the hard-right leader Alice Weidel and her White House friends, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. Whatever Merz’s plans are, he must expect barrage fire from the Weidel-White House-connection. Looking back at the election campaign, it looks like he’s actually inviting it.

Liberals, spread out across old-school conservative, liberal, green and social democratic parties, often charge their critics from the left and the right with gaslighting, that is, making false claims to distort peoples’ sense of reality and abandon a politics of reason for a politics of fear and hate. Without a doubt, gaslighting, paired with scapegoating, has contributed to the emergence of a new age of uncertainty and irrationalism. What is remarkable about the recent federal election campaign in Germany is that all parties, except for the Left Party (Die Linke) engaged in gaslighting. A series of attacks on people in public places in Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and München, all committed by immigrants, prompted politicians and many journalists to stir immigration hysteria that pushed actual problems and uncertainties that people were coping with into the background or blamed immigrants for them. The increase in such attacks during the election campaign had some journalists wondering whether they were orchestrated. Secret service personnel felt compelled to declare they had no evidence for that.

Rising costs of living (notably food and housing), uncertainties about jobs, pensions, war and peace, and climate change—none of that mattered as much as the alleged security threat represented by immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants. The political divisions that brought down Scholz’s coalition government with the Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and the Liberals (Freie Demokratische Partei or FDP), and are likely to weigh on any future government, were forgotten in the face of the ‘immigrant threat.’ All parties except the Left Party agreed that tough migration policies, including deportations, were in order. The question was just how tough these policies should be. Even employer demands to keep immigration, preferably of skilled workers, going to avoid labour shortages were overshadowed by tough-on-immigration rhetoric, along with other employer demands that politicians were quite happy to keep in the background until after the election.

The Conservative Christian Democrats (the Christlich-Demokratische Union or CDU) had a tradition of anti-immigration attitudes and policies, which some in the party, including Merz, felt Angela Merkel had betrayed when, as chancellor, she opened the borders to Syrian refugees in 2015. The FDP and even the Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD) had also sometimes strayed in that direction. By and large, the Greens had abstained from an anti-immigration stand until this last election campaign. At that point, Weidel’s Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland or AfD) could claim to be the most consistent and radical proponent of anti-immigration politics. Arguably, the AfD was built on a model that was adopted by almost the entire political spectrum during the campaign: Produce so much anti-immigration noise that nobody notices the anti-working class policies your party advocates or, as in the case of the SPD, is willing to support despite nominal commitments to defending what is left of the welfare state.

Any serious........

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