Our Shit's All Fucked Up

Germany's election results from the weekend show what happens when politicians ignore reality

Landscape scene from the 2006 movie Idiocracy by Mike Judge (image credit: 20th Century Studios)

Düsseldorf, 9 October 2023
Filed under: Politics, Economics

It’s obvious to anyone who’s paying at least a little bit of attention, that the current German government is ignoring the reality many voters are experiencing on the ground. This isn’t a uniquely German phenomenon, it seems. There’s plenty of evidence to be found that the governments in the US and Canada, for example, are suffering from the same issues. And when I say it is obvious, I really mean that. Literally everyone I’ve spoken to about politics this year — from friends to random people I’ve met at parties, in the checkout line at the grocery store or in a random internet forum — have said the same thing: They are all amazed at how out of touch the laws being passed in Berlin, Washington and Ottawa are.

Here in Germany, the government is keeping itself occupied mostly by addressing social and ecological issues, while insisting that the economy is fine. The press, instead of going out into the street and asking people what issues are important to them, is mostly sitting in front of computer screens, backing up the government or trying to push them more towards addressing the same social and ecological issues that already keep parliament busy. If members of the press actually venture out of their offices, it seems that they are often roaming the halls of power, rubbing shoulders with the people they should be keeping in check.

But if you actually go out and wander around in the more neglected parts of big cities, or Germany’s countryside — so often overlooked by the movers and shakers in Berlin — you will very soon find out that most of the politicians seem to be operating in a bubble very much detached from reality. You will find out that the economy is most definitely not fine. How could it be after being decimated by foolish anti-pandemic measures, a decade of disastrous energy politics and now the financing of a major foreign war against Russia?

Things Are Breaking Down

To be perfectly frank: Shit’s fucked up. Shit is breaking down. There’s rampant inflation to such an extend that I’ve seen the price of basic foodstuffs double twice in the last three years. Meanwhile, wages aren’t keeping up and energy costs have gone through the roof. Potholes in the roads aren’t being fixed, public transport is more unreliable than ever and the vast majority of motorway bridges over the river Rhine need to be replaced, but nobody has a plan for doing it.

My parents live in Duisburg, in the heart of the Ruhr area. A city that has become a major transport hub for all kinds of goods arriving on the New Silk Road railway system (part of the Belt and Road Initiative) from China that then get shipped on, all throughout Western Europe. Most of these goods are transported from Duisburg by semi-truck along the extensive network of motorways in the Ruhr. Most of these motorways are breaking down. Duisburg has been in perennial traffic deadlock for years now, because a crucial Rhine bridge on the A 40 is all but collapsing. It actually has traffic lights around it, to weed out vehicles over 3.5 tons, because otherwise the bridge would finally give out. There’s tens of kilometres of traffic jams around Duisburg almost every day because of this and nobody’s got a plan how to fix this bridge.

The government is totally unresponsive, both on a local or the national level. This goes so far that routine government tasks — like getting a new ID card or registering your motor vehicle after a move — require appointments set up weeks in advance now. And your stay at city hall will be so protracted and arduous, that you basically have to take a whole day off work to get through the various procedures. That’s if you can even get an appointment. Friends of ours recently had to wait almost a year for a birth certificate to be issued for their child.

Meanwhile, you walk through streets filled with rubbish and see a guy begging for food at the traffic lights of every major intersection. You hear story after credible story of unscrupulous people, often with immigrant backgrounds, who defraud the state for social benefits and economic assistance, while at the same time having substantial income (often from illegal ventures) that they don’t pay taxes for. It’s quite amazing how many € 150,000 Mercedes AMG luxury cars you see parked in front of low-income housing here in Düsseldorf. It’s also remarkable how many of the barbershops in my neighbourhood accept only cash payments and do not issue receipts, in a country that a few years ago very publicly passed a law that requires electronic cash registers for even the smallest stores. I mean, I really like my barber. He’s told me a lot of relatable stories of why his family came here from Iraq. But I do kind of wish he’d pay taxes on his income like I do.

This is what many streets look like in the inner cities of the Ruhr, where I live. There are whole neighbourhoods where people just dump rubbish straight out of the windows of their flats. (Photo: Ladzinski/WAZ)

At least I can still talk to someone at my barbershop. A very different, but it seems to me connected, kind of breakdown is happening with large companies. I started noticing this during the pandemic, but with everything moving more and more to apps and chat bots, the situation has gotten even worse. Every big company I had dealings with during the last two or three years has made a mistake somewhere, most of which would have cost me money had I not caught them. This includes big retailers like Ikea, where we bought a kitchen, the company that was supposed to install that kitchen, my internet service provider, the post office and culminates quite spectacularly in the large real estate company that is my landlord. They don’t get anything done efficiently there, despite (or maybe precisely because) it being one of the biggest such companies in the country.

Typically, there’s some mistake they make that fucks up stuff for you and it then takes hours (in some cases days or weeks) of your time to get it fixed. These are often simple problems that ten years ago, you would simply have called someone for and they would have sorted it out quickly. Today, you ring the company and the person on the phone often doesn’t know what is happening or how to fix it. Quite often they will tell you one thing and then the company will do something completely different. Or they tell you the problem is being handled and nothing ever happens. That is if you are lucky enough to be able to talk to a human in the first place. Quite often these days, you get stuck with some kind of chat bot that performs even worse.

Signage from the 2006 movie Idiocracy — I would not be surprised to see something like this in real life at this point. (Image credit: 20th Century Studios)

I mean, companies can’t even send you letters or print signs anymore that aren’t full of grammar mistakes or logical errors. When I say that theses days, I see more signage and advertising material where I can spot at least one error than text that doesn’t have any errors, I’m not even exaggerating. Sure, that’s in many ways the occupational hazard of being an editor, but on the other hand I also feel it points to deep problems inherent in our society. We all make mistakes, but how can you expect someone to take pride and care in their workmanship if they can’t even make sure their business sign doesn’t have an error in it? Why these people spent time and energy on politically correct pronouns in copy that is otherwise riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, is beyond me. Again and again, living in this declining society reminds me of the movie Idiocracy.

Alternativlos

Apparently, if you’re a politician in Berlin, you don’t experience any of this. You’re safe and happy in your gentrified suburban neighbourhood and you probably stay within your social bubble and never venture into these desolate places where rubbish piles up on the street, hardworking people can barely afford to put food on the table and the only people who are driving big cars are the people running the night clubs and sketchy hookah bars that probably also sell cocaine under the counter.

If you’re a politician in Berlin your indicator of how the economy is doing are huge corporations like VW, Siemens and Deutsche Bank. Companies that already get huge tax breaks, favourable treatment and in some instances even influence law-making directly. And should they, despite all that, manage to fail through mismanagement and incompetence, they will be bailed out by the government anyway. So yeah, those companies are still making huge profits, the stock market is doing fine so the economy must be doing great, right?

This must be what they are thinking when they are saying that Germany must be spearheading the energy transition, single-handedly save the planet and that nobody needs to worry because we can all afford to take the hit to the economy that these policies will bring. The previous chancellor, Angela Merkel, had a favourite word for when she was conveying that whatever she proposed was the only possible way forward: alternativlos. This is one of the German words for “unavoidable”, literally meaning “without alternative”, and it has become pretty much the rallying cry of every new law the current government has passed. It takes a very special kind of person to look at a country with declining infrastructure, massive inflation and deep social and economic divisions and decide that, instead of fixing any of this, what is unavoidable is that, instead, we need to make it all worse because the planet needs to be saved and, of course, all immigrants are always welcome here. Oh yeah, and surely everyone can understand that we’re rather sending tanks to Ukraine than pay for fixing your roads and bridges.

These people want to outlaw petrol cars and constantly explain to their electorate, in the manner of an arrogant school teacher, that they’d be better off using cargo bikes and public transport, without ever having once in their life even tried to commute by bus, train or tram. Some of these people are so unfit that they would collapse if they had to haul a week’s grocery shopping for an average family from their nearest supermarket home in a cargo bike. They have no idea what the reality of people living in rural areas even looks like.

You Can’t Make a Problem Go Away by Ignoring It

While it takes a special kind of human being to pass laws like that, it takes an even more ridiculous person to call yourself a journalist and constantly fawn over how important and righteous all of this law-making is. According to most of the mainstream press in Germany, much of this policymaking is not only unavoidable, it doesn’t go far enough! The very real issues that decisions like the energy transition and basically unlimited immigration are causing in the lives of many citizens of this country, are being completely ignored by the press. Even worse, when commentators call attention to these things, they are branded as conspiracy theorists or far-right agitators and then promptly silenced.

During the pandemic, the press — almost in lockstep with the government — gave its very best to completely ignore or silence a significant portion of the population who did not agree with measures like lockdowns and vaccine passports. In a very similar way, opposition to immigration policies and the government’s unprecedented support for the war in Ukraine are being supressed.

But what the press doesn’t seem to understand is that while you might be able to censor and marginalise people on internet services — we’ve seen how this works thanks to the revelations from The Twitter Files — it is much, much harder to manipulate them to ignore things they see with their own eyes. You can tell people the German railway system is an amazing way to commute over and over again, but anybody who’s actually spent some time commuting by rail knows that it’s complete bullshit. As Walter Kirn said in a podcast once: The press doesn’t have to cover this stuff for people to figure it out. You just need to leave your house and look around and you’ll notice pretty quickly that things are going downhill.

Granted, I see more and more people constantly looking down at their phone screens — even while out walking the roads — instead of noticing what is going on around them, but it’s getting so bad out there that more and more of them are bound to start noticing something. At the point where you have to cross the street to avoid walking in rubbish it becomes hard to ignore, even if you have a phone screen stuck in your face 24/7. And the people who are already suffering because they were less privileged in their upbringing, or so stupid that they believed the propaganda and thought they could run an honest small business in this climate, sure know what’s up.

The AfD is Taking Advantage

In light of all of this, it comes as absolutely no surprise to me that by far the biggest winner of last night’s local elections in the federal states of Hesse and Bavaria was the AfD. One of the youngest political parties in Germany, the AfD looked at Merkels alternativlos assertion and basically formed itself into one big middle finger to the government’s position by naming itself Alternative für Deutschland (which can be translated pretty straightforward to alternative for Germany). The AfD started as a party for sceptics of the European Union in the wake of the Brexit movement in the UK and relatively quickly also positioned itself against immigration.

At this point, it basically bills itself as the party you’d vote for if you’re fed up by the current government’s politics. It was pretty sceptical of most anti-pandemic measures early on, it’s leadership openly mocks woke ideologies like modern gender concepts and political correctness and its gotten significant leeway out of clearly naming crimes that seem to be connected to immigrant politics — like a significant part of Germany’s organised crime milieu that is made up of large Islamic family clans that have immigrated wholesale in the last ten to twenty years.

Many of these issues were nullified by a media class that is almost uniformly for unlimited immigration, seems to be enamoured with language changes based on progressive gender identity and backed even the most draconic pandemic measures almost wholesale. Because of this, the AfD has now been billed as a far-right party in the media. Which is patently not true. Germany has a number of actual far-right parties — among them the NPD (now called Die Heimat), die Republikaner, Die Rechte, the DVU and Der III. Weg — which are all much more right wing than the AfD and can easily be distinguished by their much more radical views, neo-Nazi members and their general contempt for the democratic process. The AfD is undoubtedly a right-wing party, but it has a very different approach and much broader scope and policy aspirations than actual far-right parties.

Calling it that is an attempt by the press, and also its competitors in the political arena, to marginalise its views. What the press, motivated by disgust for the party and its members, is trying to do here is to make it unacceptable in social circles to admit that you’re voting for the AfD. Because that would mean that you’re a Nazi.

What yesterdays’ election results tell us is that this isn’t working. Which isn’t surprising. The press in the US tried for years to paint Trump supporters (a full half of that country’s electorate) as brutish Nazis and dumb hicks, when most of them were voting for the guy simply because they were fed up with the current political system and its approved candidates from either side of the aisle. That approach didn’t work. And now it’s obvious that turning the AfD into some kind of German MAGA won’t work either. The myth that only the stupid, uneducated proles in former East German states vote for the AfD Nazis has been shattered. And at close to 20% of the votes, the AfD is now a mainstream party that has the second strongest popular support in the federal state of Hesse — which includes the heart of the German financial sector.

This is a mainstream party for people who want to give a big middle finger to the government. It isn’t full of neo-Nazis, which is obvious if you actually watch coverage from its party events. It’s full of people who don’t feel represented by the political establishment — and who, in many cases, are pretty angry with it. It is pretty right-wing for a mainstream party, but with every other party having moved more and more to the middle of the political spectrum in the last thirty years, this isn’t surprising. There is significant political space on the right — and to some extend also on the left — of the established parties which is clearly waiting to be occupied by somebody. And the AfD has mostly picked the right of that spectrum to draw their support from. Which seems to be less out of genuine right-wing tendencies and more born from the fact that this is simply where most of the voters are who feel underserved by a political establishment that itself has been taken over more and more by left-leaning ideas in the last few decades. This exact same thing has happened in Sweden and Denmark years earlier, so it was really no big feat to predict it happening in Germany now.

It’s Time to Wake the Fuck Up

Personally, I’m not a fan. I think most, if not all, of the policies advanced by the AfD are stupid. This is a populist party that excels in telling people what they want to hear and that will most likely not be able to deliver on any of its promises. Closing your borders to immigrants is not a workable solution if your country is situated in the middle of a united Europe. Similarly, there’s a reason Germany has spent so much effort to build up and then exert an inordinate amount of political pressure on the EU: it massively benefits our economy and other foreign policy interests. Exiting this system or causing its collapse would be a mistake of epic proportions. The AfD’s proposals are regressive and often not well thought out. But none of that matters as long as they get to be the lone voice in the wilderness against what many people perceive as insane policy choices from their government. And it’s a pretty easy position to be in, considering how bumbling the current government has dealt with issues both at home and beyond Germany’s borders.

Being pro-immigration is a good thing, but we need to follow up with a strategy that sees immigrants effectively integrated into our society. Just cheering for immigration and then having people live in parallel societies that have no respect for, and investment in, the institutions of our state doesn’t work and it causes obvious problems we need to deal with. We need a plan to educate immigrants and make them productive members of our society. We need to make it clear that living and working in Germany has many benefits, but that those also come at a cost like learning German and having to pay taxes if you’re running a successful business, for example. We need to make clear that our way of life is predicated on ideals like freedom of speech and freedom of religion and that, in Germany, the state has a monopoly on violence and on enforcing the rules that govern our society. And we need to deal with significant crime harshly and justly, independently of what the person who committed it looks like or where they were born.

If the elected government of the country thinks its priority should be to curb carbon emissions above all else, that’s fine. But it needs to admit that the resulting policies will have a definite impact on all kinds of businesses and private households. And it needs a plan on how to help those people who simply can’t afford to put solar arrays on their roofs and replace perfectly good heating systems simply because of new laws. We can’t just pretend everyone is doing fine, pass the laws and then abandon those who are already barely limping along and will now be overproportionally affected by the negative impact of these laws.

The fact that a certain class of people — including apparently all of the politicians and most of the journalists — are doing fine, doesn’t mean that this is the case for most of the people in the country. If the people running the established parties and the members of the press won’t start opening their eyes to notice what is actually going on in the streets, this situation will get much worse. More and more people will start voting for populists like Trump and the AfD, because whatever else their faults might be, these politicians are at least admitting what everyone else, who isn’t deluded by government propaganda, can see out there with their own eyes.

Simply repeating that everything is fine and decrying everyone who disagrees as a Nazi won’t work much longer. Last night, this must have become clear to even the most stubborn of Kool-Aid drinkers.