The Social Democratic Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, feels the pressure. The Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, his main opponent and candidate to succeed him, too. In Germany, the extreme right and the populist left are achieving electoral successes with an anti-war and anti-Western message. They thus push the main moderate parties to distance themselves from Ukraine and seek peace with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Scholz resists, despite the fact that in his party, the SPD, there is a sector that is not enthusiastic about the policy of military rearmament and the determined support for Ukraine that the chancellor imposed after the 2022 invasion. For Merz, CDU candidate/ CSU for the 2025 general elections, Germany’s anchoring in the West and NATO is also unquestionable.
This consensus, however, threatens to crack. In the recent elections in three states of the former East Germany, traditionally closer to Russia, the far-right party
for Germany (AfD) and the new populist left Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) added more than 40% of votes. According to the polls for the general elections, these parties could be around 25% throughout the country.
In its foreign policy program, AfD advocates that Germany play “a bridging and mediating role in the Russian-Asian region” and refers to Otto von Bismarck in the 19th century as a model. BSW condemns the sanctions against Russia and its leader, the charismatic Sahra Wagenknecht, describes Scholz as a “vassal” of the United States.
“Foreign policy has become an area in which a populist discourse can be used, and this is new,” explains Jana Puglierin, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) think tank in Berlin. The debate is simplified: either money for Ukraine, or money to repair bridges in Germany. Puglierin, co-author of the report War, peace and populism: how Germany’s extremist parties are reshaping the foreign policy debatesummarizes: “In times of recession and scarcer resources, there is an intense debate about whether to invest more in Ukraine or in German infrastructure.”
Unlike the AfD, excluded from power by a cordon sanitaire, BSW has started talks with the big moderate parties, SPD and CDU, to form governments in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, the federal states, or statewho voted in September. Wagenknecht demands that the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats include in the coalition agreement the refusal of new arms shipments to Ukraine and the renunciation of the stationing of US missiles in Germany.
“If the CDU and the SPD accepted, it would represent a shift in foreign policy that would seriously damage the credibility of both parties throughout Germany,” he warned in the weekly Der Spiegel the historian Heinrich-August Winkler. In his classic Der lange Weg nach Westen (The Long Road to the West), Winkler tells the story of his country as one of a struggle between Eastern and Western tendencies, which is resolved with Western anchorage after reunification in 1990. Regarding the possible agreement in the state Eastern, writes: “It would give the aggressor Putin a victory of which he could not even dream. “It would be closer to its strategic objective, causing Germany to break with the Western camp.”
The three presidents of the state Eastern Democrats, two Christian Democrats and one Social Democrat, published an article a few days ago in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung titled We want a more active diplomatic role for Germany. And the speculation machine started: had Wagenknecht managed to twist the arm of the big parties? “Germany can and must, as politicians such as Helmut Kohl, Willy Brandt and Hans-Dietrich Genscher did in past decades, act more strongly as a mediator,” wrote presidents Michael Kretschmer, Mario Voigt and Dietmar Woidke. Wagenknecht applauded: “An intelligent and different contribution.”
The idea of the article was that there was a German consensus, supposedly that of the social democrat Willy Brandt, the Christian democrat Helmut Kohl and the liberal Hans-Dietrich Genscher, to maintain a certain equidistance between the West and Russia. This consensus would have been broken in 2022, when Scholz announced an increase in military spending and ended energy dependence on Moscow. According to Puglierin, from the ECFR, the consensus that can be broken is another: the one that, since reunification, prevailed in favor of European integration and NATO.
“Now there is a new situation,” says Puglierin, “in which the AfD, and especially BSW, offer a foreign policy that questions this fundamental consensus, both in terms of the link with the West—NATO and the relationship with the US UU—as well as the European dimension.”
Despite criticism of Scholz for his hesitation in intensifying military involvement, Germany is the second country that helps Ukraine the most, only behind the United States. Will the consensus be broken? It could be broken by Washington: much will depend on the November elections. And those of September in Germany. One thing is certain: Ukraine will be a campaign issue.