Angela Merkel, not the populist right, was the true extremist of our age
Jürgen Klopp has it wrong. The German national team coach (and former Liverpool legend) said in a press conference on Thursday that German national pride had to be reclaimed from the “wrong people”. He didn’t name AfD voters directly but he’s a supersmart guy who (I believe) knew precisely what he was doing and how his words would be taken. Indeed, his comments led the headlines for 48 hours.
Let me say at the outset that I count myself as a liberal (in the classical sense). I would not vote for the AfD or their counterparts around the world for reasons I’ll come to. But let me say, frankly, that if Klopp wants to understand extremism, he should not look at these parties but rather the figure who preceded them and whose tenure ended almost precisely five years ago to universal acclaim: Angela Merkel. The former chancellor was described as “the most pragmatic of leaders” by the LA Times and “a shining light of our European project” by Charles Michel, the former president of the European Council. Time magazine called her “chancellor of the free world”.
Really? If extremism is defined as acting out of proportion with context, history or consent, I suggest Merkel’s tenure represented the high point of postwar European extremism. It was not just that she opened the door in 2015 to almost a million unvetted, largely male asylum seekers, but did so knowing perfectly well what the consequences would be. We know this because she alluded to many at the time of her (again, widely acclaimed) “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”) speech. She knew it would impose ruinous fiscal cost on the German people but she went ahead anyway, prioritising the projection of her own virtue above the interests of her voters. She knew it would add huge pressure to schools with tens of thousands of extra pupils needing German-as-second-language teaching in an already short-staffed system, not to mention adding huge tension to a tight housing market. She knew this would shaft her neighbours as migrants moved westwards, making a mockery of Schengen and adding to the drumbeat for Brexit. She must also have surely known there would be a spike in crime; rape and sexual assaults rose by 13 per cent in 2016 and asylum seekers were overrepresented sixfold in the numbers. On New Year’s Eve in 2015 more than 500 sexual offences were recorded in Cologne on a single night.
You’ll doubtless have noted the increasingly Orwellian terminology applied to parties such as the AfD, Reform and the like. It started with “far” right, then moved to “hard” right, then “radical” right. Soon they will be labelled the “rabid right” by politicians who sit like blancmanges as tens of thousands more young men stream into Europe while they throw billions of taxpayers’ money at a system that hands huge power to evil people smugglers and tyrants like Putin. So let me ask again: who are the extremists here? Is it the people who want to rip up a chronically out of date legal framework or “moderates” who follow in the footsteps of Mutti by waving them in?
I should perhaps say that I agree with those who say that many of these rightwing parties are dangerously pro-Putin, but where were these people when Merkel was backing Nord Stream 1 and then (perhaps the most astonishing foreign policy decision of my lifetime) doubling down on Nord Stream 2 — yes, after the invasion of Crimea and against the wishes of, successively, the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, which, in a state of exasperation, imposed sanctions? Where were they when Merkel cosied up to China even as that nation was remilitarising at breakneck speed and menacing allies?
Terminology applied to the AfD, Reform and the like is increasingly Orwellian
Where were they when Merkel personally signed up to a pledge to spend 2 per cent on defence in 2006 and then failed to meet the obligation every year; indeed never even coming close? Even after Obama insisted on a more formal accord in 2014 and with the Pentagon pleading with allies to regard 2 per cent as “a floor not a ceiling”, Merkel continued to do what she always did: speak out of both sides of her mouth, her rhetoric resoundingly pro-western, her actions the precise opposite.
Isn’t it time, in this context, to reorganise our categories and vocabulary? The extremists are not the “populist” right, regardless of the label we attach to them. It is the likes of Merkel and that broader generation of western leaders who presided over the two great sins of hyperliberalism: open borders and the betrayal of Nato.
Liberalism as an ideology is muscular and realistic. It recognises that defending freedom requires powerful militaries, solid alliances and strong borders, otherwise fifth columnists will enter our nations and wreck that which we value. As Karl Popper, the great theorist of open societies, put it: “If we extend unlimited tolerance to those who are intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
In this sense, hyperliberals have been the enemies of freedom by allowing militaries to atrophy and borders to dissolve. My sense is that the leaders of the various uniparties believed their legacies would be defined by the tenets of wokeism, seeing this ideology not as a passing cultural spasm but a new moral paradigm. This is why we got trans ideology (was this not extremist?), net zero zealotry (was this not extremist, at least in its implementation?) and more.
It is also why I believe history will judge the likes of Cameron, Johnson, Trudeau, Hollande, Macron and von der Leyen as the most disastrous in postwar history since they undermined both the concept of the nation state and the alliance that defends our version of it.
I should perhaps note for the purposes of completeness that the new right parties have significant differences between them, which is why it is lazy to lump them all together. There perhaps isn’t space to probe these differences, but let me note my deep concerns about not just the pro- Putin stance of some but also the antisemitism of others. My loyalties today rest with leaders who are both fearless in diagnosing what went wrong and pragmatic in how to put it right. Let me mention in this regard the increasingly impressive Kemi Badenoch in the UK and the “abundance agenda” Democrats in the US who emphasise both borders and growth. Such figures offer me some hope for the future of muscular liberalism.
But let me finish with Merkel, arguably the worst of modern western leaders (and I haven’t even had time to chronicle her disastrous nuclear policy). She embraced policies she knew would harm those at the bottom but (of course) not those like Klopp who live in gated developments and whose closest contact with migrants is millionaire footballers.
Although some voters for the AfD and the like are doubtless racist, I believe a majority are neither “rabid” nor “extremist” (nor “deplorable”). On the contrary, the rise of these new right parties was fuelled by the extremism of those who preceded them: a generation of hyperliberal leaders who forgot what they were for and who they were supposed to serve.
Comments
Post a Comment