In: New Left Review, issue 152: On the German election of February 2025.

A high-turnout election, sharply polarized around immigration, has brought another centrist coalition to power in Berlin. Wolfgang Streeck offers an unsparing analysis of Germany´s political situation as its hardline incoming Chancellor rams through an expansive fiscal revolution and the far-right AfD doubles its seats..

In early march 2025, as Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz laid the groundwork for a massive German military build-up, sidelining the newly elected parliament to push through fiscal reforms that would double the annual defence budget to €100 billion, the Euro-establishment was in celebratory mood. Merz’s rearmament drive was ‘a stroke of commendable boldness’ and ‘a fantastic start’, declared the Economist. ‘From Paris to Warsaw, Brussels and beyond’, Merz’s move had understandably produced ‘giddy excitement’. The Guardian hailed it as a ‘bold and necessary leap’, a ‘chance to renew mainstream politics’ and ‘unleash the radical centre’. For the FT, it represented nothing less than ‘the reawakening of Germany’; for Le Monde, a ‘major and welcome turning point’. The measures may have required certain ‘democratic gymnastics’ to bypass the freshly elected Bundestag, Le Monde conceded, but ‘the times call for boldness’, and ‘the new dynamic in Berlin should be encouraged’. For El País, ‘“Germany is back” means “Europe is back”!’ Merz’s leadership ‘points the way for the rest of Europe.’ (…)

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