"By the way, what is denazification?"
“Oh no, the AfD won!”.
In the old days, a sentence like that would have been followed by a “what a surprise!”. Those were the days when the world had supposedly been settled by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the definitive triumph of capitalism and liberalism over the communist and authoritarian project.
A victory proclaimed by people who do not really know history, to the point of declaring its end - even if admittedly in a deliberately provocative manner. After all it is easy to forget that, when set against the span of human history, the 80 years of peace since the Second World War and the even shorter period since the end of authoritarianism in what is now the European Union, amount to little more than an almost imperceptible dot on humanity’s great timeline.
From what I can see around me reactions to this AfD victory, which in my view serves as a portent of what is to come once the current German chancellor finds himself with nowhere left to turn in a government that was moribund from the start, fall into two broad camps. One says the victory is ultimately irrelevant because the state of Saxony-Anhalt is tiny both in population and economic terms. Besides many of the measures proposed by the AfD during the campaign, such as segregating primary-school classrooms between Germans, immigrants and asylum-seeking children, would likely be deemed unconstitutional.
On the other side, where I openly place myself, are those who see this as the prologue to a very difficult chapter for a Europe that has always imagined itself above such dynamics. After all, once again, everything had supposedly been settled after the end of the Soviet Union and, consequently, the end of any meaningful pressure from social movements, trade unions and the like for social democracy to keep advancing. Quite the opposite: that moment opened an “avenue” toward turning the European Union into the United States of Europe, with social and economic policies closely aligned with its transatlantic overlord.
As an immigrant, I need to know my “enemies” very well. Increasingly, the native European fits that description.
I often think of a passage from a James Baldwin essay about his stay in a tiny Swiss village during his years of exile from the racial tensions of the United States. At the time, Baldwin saw Europe as a way of escaping the many prejudices of his homeland, only to encounter them there with similar intensity, albeit in forms that were not quite as visceral.
To paraphrase Baldwin, even the most ignorant resident of that little Alpine village moved through the world with an incomparable confidence. The confidence of someone who owns himself, his destiny and, why not, the entire planet. After all, even if Europe’s achievements were built on the shoulders of “giants” who undeniably accomplished great things, however dubious their purposes - colonialism among them -, this ignoramus is nonetheless a direct descendant of those once-great men.
Baldwin wrote that essay in the 1950s. Seventy years later, the feeling I encounter in everyday life is much the same, though at a reasonably lower dose. Part of the reason is not only Europe’s loss of status on the global stage, but also the deterioration in the lives of a large share of Europeans since precisely the end of the Soviet Union, and the consequent permission to begin stripping away the post-war welfare state.
The average European has little sense of the largely political and financial privilege in which they live. To paraphrase another author, this time Branko Milanovic in one of his books on income and wealth inequality between countries, the mere fact of being born in a European country places a baby somewhere around the top 70-80% of the global income distribution.
The thing is that in the past this was even “worse”. The European middle-class citizen used to sit around the top 85-90% when compared with the rest of the world. Today, they are closer to the aforementioned 70 to 80%. And in Milanovic’s research, with each passing year Europeans found themselves drifting ever farther from the old summit they once occupied.
This is not felt as acutely as it would be in a low- or middle-income country, where runaway inflation can sometimes mean the difference between bringing home a large bag of white rice or several packets of the most brittle spaghetti from the supermarket. But it obviously matters to someone who once used their holiday allowance to pay for one or two weeks at some seaside corner of the continent and now uses that extra money to cover ordinary expenses.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the decline is even sharper. I am not here to make any apology for totalitarianism, but I am not ignorant enough to deny that the Soviet Union provided, however clumsily and inconsistently, a welfare state that in some respects went further than anything European social democracy ever dreamed of becoming. Social democracy itself might not even have remained a politically viable banner on the continent without Soviet pressure exercised through movements aligned with its values, movements that constantly threatened social cohesion whenever the balance threatened to tilt too far toward employers and capital.
East Germany represented a very tangible and real danger precisely because it stood next door to one of the great strongholds of European-style capitalism. Of course, social democracy itself has some of its roots in pre-First World War Germany, going back to Bismarck and his state policies aimed not only at late industrialisation but also at guaranteeing basic needs in a newly unified country that was still far from cohesive. It was always fertile ground for Marx and company, as well as for that much-celebrated ordoliberalism embraced by capitalists who still carry within themselves a trace of Christian guilt.
I do not think I need to spell out in great detail the decline in social and economic conditions after the Soviet Union lost its grip over East Germany. It did not happen overnight, as it did in some former Soviet republics where declines in things such as daily caloric intake were almost immediate. But the project of integrating the two Germanies, enormously costly to both sides from the beginning, did not produce the results that had been expected.
Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s least populous and poorest states, and that has a direct relationship with the disappearance of industries and social policies that once sustained the region. The exodus toward western states continues, not least because employment in the region is heavily concentrated in minijobs, part-time jobs paying very low wages. Yet, as elsewhere in Europe, those willing to accept these working conditions are precisely immigrants. Even though immigrants are not particularly numerous in Saxony-Anhalt, they still account for around 5% of the population in a state whose economy offers few, if any, attractions to those who still live there.
And so these 5% of immigrants are apparently enough to enrage those who feel they have been thrown into history’s dustbin.
Immigrants make an extremely easy target for anyone seeking to divert attention from the real problems faced by native-born citizens who still bother to participate in the greatest political exercise of their lives: voting. Immigrants:
- enter the country illegally, even though many obtained their documents in their countries of origin through consulates;
- “take” jobs that Germans had previously abandoned but might supposedly accept if wages were higher, something that would be easier if the region’s GDP were larger, which is itself difficult to achieve when jobs remain unfilled;
- “take up” places in hospitals and even schools without contributing to the state, although they regularly pay taxes and, in the case of schools, some of those institutions barely had enough pupils to keep classrooms open before immigrant children arrived;
- and, to make matters worse, commit crimes, at rates considerably lower than those of the native-born population.
What really makes all of this easier, however, is that the immigrant has no voice. Above all, no political voice.
Not only in Europe must an immigrant live in a country for years before, even as a resident, acquiring the right to vote in elections. Often that right is restricted to ultra-local elections, such as those of a municipality and its respective subdivisions. Only after acquiring citizenship does the immigrant gain the right to a political voice that was already guaranteed at birth to someone lucky enough to have been born in the country to which this now-citizen emigrated.
It is well established that regions where native-born people have more contact with immigrants tend to vote less for parties whose agenda is purely anti-immigration. Yet when the anti-immigration party becomes the force setting the terms of a political campaign, to the point of “forcing” formerly moderate centrist parties to adopt similar initiatives, the traditional centrist voter has few places left to go.
That is because, in their political calculus, the centrist voter continues to equate the far left and its “backward” values with the far right and its vile ones. They therefore vote for what they consider the lesser evil, which tends to be a centre-right party that will soon embrace the far right in an attempt to appropriate its agenda and satisfy, at least partially, the demands of its supporters.
It is something that can work in the short term. But Germany, and probably France before long, show that it is not enough. After all, when given the choice between the original and the copy, voters will always choose the original.
In this respect, both Brazil and the United States belong to an unfortunate “vanguard”. The centre-right in both countries tried, entirely unsuccessfully, to contain the far right. The bargain was simple: let us handle the day-to-day business of politics and, in exchange, we will implement some of your policies, since we agree with many of them anyway.
Predictably, the bargain fell apart. Voters no longer wanted the same old routine of electing yet another man in a red tie, delivering the same monotonous speech in both form and substance, while guaranteeing nothing more than a managed decline within the capitalist system. They wanted more informality, more energy, more spontaneity. Above all, they wanted a project different from what liberal democracies had been selling for decades, a project that has become increasingly difficult both to promote and to sustain.
Europe believed itself immune to the siren song of the far right. I have little doubt that one reason lies in what I paraphrased from Baldwin: the extraordinary self-esteem of people who once saw themselves as “ruling” the world, even though the people who actually did so amounted to a small handful of thoroughly reprehensible men. Europeans, with all their supposed cultural refinement and especially their historical knowledge, would therefore be above something as bestial and visceral as the far right.
After all, the first experiment went so terribly well all those years ago.
“By the way, what is denazification?”
Bullseye - unfortunately.