A lesson for Germany from its own past
#402
Friend of Democracy,
There is a group within Germany’s conservative ruling party, the CDU/CSU, that has one goal: to see the current coalition government fail. Campaigns to this end can be recognised by the fact that they badmouth pretty much everything the coalition government of CDU/CSU and the Social Democrats (SPD) does. This is because this conservative group sees much greater common ground with the opposition and far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) positions.
I know, history does not repeat itself exactly. But we can sometimes learn from history.
The right-wing conservative DNVP, which became the second strongest force behind the SPD in the 1924 Reichstag elections in Germany, allied with the NSDAP in 1928. The latter had won a mere 3.0 per cent of the vote in 1924 and only 2.6 per cent in 1928.
In his book ‘The Shortest History of Germany‘, James Hawes writes about the DNVP:
“It was the DNVP that made Hitler. The party could call on proud old names and wealthy donors, but it was so decidedly Prussian – and hence Protestant – that it had never appealed much even to right-wing voters in other regions of Germany. The new leader, media tycoon and former Krupp board member Alfred Hugenberg, decided that the Nazis were really just a smaller, rougher version of the DNVP with useful hard-core grassroots activists. Thugs, yes, but our thugs. What if the hard-talking, modern-seeming, but essentially conservative brownshirts could deliver some votes from the rest of Germany, leaving their social superiors, the top-hatted DNVP, natural rulers of East Elbia, as the real power in the land? This delusion persisted right up to the day Franz von Papen, the last Chancellor before Hitler, gave his famous last words of assurance to his colleagues on 4 January 1933: ‘We’ve hired Hitler.’”
As I said, what happened will not be repeated one-to-one. The idea that the AfD could become part of a government or tolerate a minority government is more than I want to imagine.
See you in Democracy,
Johannes Eber