An AfD co-leader has stated the obvious – that pouring money into the Ukraine war is killing the German economy. But will anyone listen?
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/tarik-cyril-amar/ByTarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/tarik-cyril-amar/
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/tarik-cyril-amar/@tarikcyrilamartarikcyrilamar.substack.comtarikcyrilamar.com
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party and AfD candidate for chancellor, speaks at the party congress on January 11, 2025 in Riesa, Germany. © Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, has given a speech to which every observer of Germany should pay close attention. And not simply because of Weidel’s inherent political weight.
She
is among the country’s most important politicians and with serious
prospects for very high office: if her New-Right party breaks through to
leading a Berlin government, Weidel is the most likely chancellor. Next
to her co-chairman Tino Chrupalla, she is the only real opposition that
matters inside the current German parliament.
What makes this
particular Weidel speech, delivered in the city of Heilbronn while
campaigning in state elections in the classically 'West German' Land of
Baden-Württemberg, especially noteworthy is its unprecedently outspoken,
bracingly combative, and, stirringly logical and honest take on one
specific topic, namely Germany’s masochistic relationship to Ukraine.
Not
that there were no other topics. Indeed, Weidel started what was a
gleefully pugnacious 'Rundumschlag' (German for onslaught) where you
would expect, the absolutely dismal state of Germany’s once proud and
now relentlessly tanking national economy. She reminded her large audience
that Germany’s industrial sector is bleeding jobs and companies;
national insolvency statistics are a horror and won’t stop breaking
abysmal records; and the traditional parties have nothing to offer but
same-old-same-old.
And yet, as most right-wing politicians –
whether traditional or insurgent – former business consultant Weidel is
not at all original with her own suggestions either. She complains that
producing things in Germany is so expensive that the country’s economy
as a whole has been losing international competitiveness. True enough.
But things get more debatable when Weidel starts explaining the causes of the national malaise. Costs that are too high
include, in her view, taxes in general, payroll taxes, and social
security payments. This is a classical conservative position: if
anything is wrong with capitalism, it’s that those at the bottom of the
income and power pyramid still have it too good. Cut the state down and rely on the market’s miraculous powers – pretty much the essence of Weidel’s extremely tired recipe for the future.
In
that respect, Weidel’s talk had nothing to offer that isn’t already
generously supplied by the grindingly repetitive rhetoric of the current
centrist Berlin government under mainstream conservative and
sour-schoolmaster-in-chief Friedrich Merz. In essence, 'shut up, work
harder, ask for less. (At least if you aren’t rich like me and my
chums).'
With so little of that sounding like a genuine
alternative from the 'Alternative for Germany,' can the AfD really
succeed in breaking the traditional parties’ stranglehold by winning
another – at least – ten or so percent of the national electorate? In a
country where even the government admits that 17.6 percent of its citizens must get by without “important goods and social activities due to poverty.” In a society where 2.2 million children are officially categorized as at risk of or in poverty? Where income inequality has been growing ever worse, with Germany’s five wealthiest families now boasting combined fortunes of €250 billion, which is more than the poorer half of Germans – over 40 million people –https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/vermoegen-und-ungleichheit-heute-leben-wir-wieder-im-feudalismus-a-4c294c06-6e22-46d0-a9c6-672a8b4a1875combined? Where, finally, working hard is not even
a halfway reliable way to achieve success? More than half of private
fortunes are now inherited or gifted (usually to circumvent inheritance
taxes, low as they are) and that share rises to between 75-80% among the
rich.
Weidel’s criticism of Berlin’s – and the EU’s – current
economic suicide non-strategy is often refreshingly on point, but it’s
also the very easy part. Yet cosplaying as yet another 'iron lady,'
promising more blood, sweat, and tears for those who are already getting
plenty of all that, may well get the AfD stuck where it is now at less than 30% in Germany
as a whole, weaker in the West and doing better only in the East.
Weidel and her solidly neoliberal wing in the AfD would do well not to
be too sure of themselves yet.
For, if the party does get stuck
electorally instead of continuing its surge, then the AfD will not be
able to fracture the traditional parties’ undemocratic and, arguably,
effectively unconstitutional 'firewall' policy of exclusion. Studiously
supported by Germany’s propagandistic and conformist mainstream media,
in reality the 'firewall' is a scandal, since it massively discriminates
against more than a fifth of Germany’s voters (and more in the East) who are, in effect, partially disenfranchised.
Yet ending that scandal will take electoral success beyond anything the
AfD has yet achieved. That’s simply a cold hard fact. Weidel’s rigid
capitalist dogmatism could be a dead-end, making the AfD, despite all
its current surging, a might-have-been story. We’ll see.
Yet, to her credit, Weidel added a crucial point to her diagnosis of
the German economy’s dramatic downfall. A point that almost no other
German top politician – at least outside the New-Left BSW, which has
been electorally kneecapped, most likely by foul means – has the guts to
be honest about in public: The main cause of Germany’s ongoing crash, according to Weidel, are “exploding energy costs,” and that explosion is “homemade,” a result of catastrophically self-harming policies by the traditional parties.
While
many of these policies of self-strangulation have been driven by an
ideologically motivated exit from nuclear energy and misguided – as well
as ineffective – attempts to mitigate global warming, one factor stands
out because it is a matter of life and death in a straightforward
manner, namely the Ukraine war. That is, in reality, the barely indirect
war between Russia and the West (including Germany) via Ukraine.
It
is a direct consequence not of the war but of the position toward it
taken by at least two successive governments in Berlin (first under the
hapless Olaf “the Grinner” Scholz, now under Friedrich “the Scolder” Merz) that Germany’s energy has become ever more backbreakingly expensive.
Even official German agencies and mainstream media have not been able to conceal this basic fact. According to the government statistics office,
as of early 2023, the industry price for natural gas was 50.7% higher
than before the escalation of February 2022; for electrical power –
27.3%, and for petroleum derivatives – 12.6%. In February 2025, German
households were paying a whopping 31% more for energy than in 2021 (according to the mega-mainstream RND). One month later, the respectable Handelsblatt called the “price leap” since the pre-2022, “immense” and reported that gas prices for private households had increased by almost 80%
in a little over one year. Let that sink in. And where private
citizens’ budgets are squeezed like that, the whole economy badly
suffers as well, of course.
And just now, the EU has confirmed it will cut itself off from even the last remnants of Russian gas supplies by 2027. Good luck!
Weidel addressed both the insanity of German policy toward this war
and the single most emblematic symbol of that madness, the destruction
of most of the Nord Stream pipelines and Berlin’s perfectly perverse
response to it.
Weidel rightly noted that the AfD’s long-standing – and plausible – arguments in favor of pursuing peace with Russia in earnest have long been met with the usual witch-hunting smears. That is, the type of neo-McCarthyite suppression which all such displays of dispassionate reason in search of an end to the “nonsensical dying” (Weidel) have been receiving from the “politico-media complex” in war-besotted NATO-EU Europe. Weidel was merciless, too, in skewering the persistent sabotage
of any peace prospects by (at least) two German governments and their
co-bellicists in the EU and most of Europe. All pretty obvious? Yes.
Among the reasonable. But not in the German mainstream media and elite.
And then there was the passage that really rocked the hall: “This government [in Berlin] doesn’t utter a squeak”
when Ukrainians, helped by other special services (which Weidel
cautiously refrained from naming), blow up German energy infrastructure “in our face.” Genuinely irate, Weidel asked how a German government could keep quiet in such a situation. For “the lost delivery of inexpensive gas,” she continued, “harms not only Germany but all of Europe, [and] Germany the most.”
Nice one. So much then for the domestic non-credibility of the Scholz
and Merz governments, and for Merz’s aspirations to play a leading role
in Europe.
And yes, the Nord Stream scandal marks not merely a
political and economic catastrophe. It’s worse than that, because it
also stands for a shameful display of submissiveness: “How can a government have so little self-respect,”
Weidel asked, that it won’t even genuinely seek to solve such a blatant
case of, in effect, massive economic sabotage? That indeed is the
question. Even a German very far left of Weidel, such as me, can only
agree here. It takes a fundamental lack of elementary patriotism and
decency not to share her exasperation.
If the ultra-corruptioneers in Kiev were listening, things got even
worse: Weidel was explicit that a country attacking Germany in this
manner is not a friend. Obvious? Yes, but not in Germany. Not yet. And
she declared her party’s intention to make Ukraine – and Zelensky personally – pay
if the AfD gets into power in Berlin. Not only for the enormous damage
done by Ukraine’s cowardly Nord Stream terror attack, but also for the
dozens of billions preceding German governments have pumped into one of
the most corrupt regimes in the world. All power to her arm on that one
as well.
Intriguingly, that was a moment when the audience reacted
with much applause, as usual, but also loud booing. Clearly, not
everyone had caught up to reality when it comes to Germany and its
perversely self-damaging relationship to Ukraine. But Weidel is right
when she also declared that Germany should have stayed neutral instead
of joining the Great Western Proxy Crusade against Russia with gusto.
Berlin could have served as an 'honest broker,' to the benefit of
everyone, not only Germans but also millions of ordinary Ukrainians.
Whatever
you think about the specific mix of stale market-dogmatic Thatcherism,
undue deference to Donald Trump, and refreshing no-bullshit honesty on
foreign policy and national interest with regard to Ukraine and the
Ukraine war that Weidel had to offer, there can be no doubt that this
was a breakthrough moment. It was the first time a major German party
with potentially very good electoral prospects has come out and clearly
stated the obvious – Germany was attacked by Ukraine (and quite a few
other 'friends' as well from Warsaw to London and Washington, even if
Weidel skirted that part of the issue), not by Russia.
Therefore,
for Germany and Germans, Ukraine is anything but a friendly state, and
it is absurd – to put it very mildly – that German governments have
ruined the relationship with Russia and the German economy as well,
while pumping Kiev full of money and arms. This is an immense national
scandal, as clearly as 2 plus 2 is 4. And like that simple fact, it’s
always true, no matter who has the courage to say it.