Wes Streeting wants to take Britain back towards the European Union. Or at least closer to it – close enough to feel the warmth without quite committing. Brussels, naturally, is delighted. Here, at last, is a senior British minister who speaks the language of regulatory alignment and single-market adjacency. The grown-ups, they believe, are back. Finally an antidote to Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe, they must be thinking.
The current chaos in Britain should serve as a warning for Germany
But Streeting’s charm offensive rests on a assumption so fragile it barely survives contact with reality: that parties like Reform UK can be defeated through economic growth and better public services. Make people richer, the theory goes, and they will stop voting for Nigel Farage. Prosperity as political sedative. It is a comforting thought. It is also profoundly wrong.
The political revolt sweeping the West is not, at its core, an economic one. It is a revolt of identity, sovereignty and belonging – a collision between the cosmopolitan and national self-assertion that no amount of GDP growth will resolve. Brexit was never really about trade or the shape of bananas. For millions of voters, it was about who governs Britain and in whose interest. The economists who insisted on quantifying everything in terms of market access missed the point entirely. They are still missing it.
And now Germany’s mainstream parties are making precisely the same mistake. Friedrich Merz came to power promising a harder edge. He talked about limiting migration. He gestured towards cultural conservatism. For a brief, exhilarating moment, it looked as though the CDU might actually engage with the questions that have driven the AfD’s rise. Then he formed a coalition with the social democrats, took office, and reverted to type. The Merz chancellorship has become, with dispiriting speed, a continuation of Merkel-era managerialism in a slightly rougher suit.
The CDU’s operating theory is identical to Streeting’s: fix the economy, and the populists will wither. Get growth moving, reduce energy costs, restore German industrial competitiveness, and voters will come to their senses. The AfD, in this reading, is a fever that will break once the patient feels better.
This is a catastrophic misdiagnosis. The AfD is not rising because Germans cannot afford a new kitchen. It is rising because millions of Germans feel that their country is being transformed without their consent – by uncontrolled migration, by an energy transition that has gutted industrial regions, by a political class that treats dissent as a crime. The green revolution, pursued with characteristically German thoroughness, has not merely raised electricity prices. It has decapitated an industrial model that was the foundation of national self-confidence. So, when BASF moves production to China, it is not just a corporate decision. It is a shambolic symbol.
On migration, the CDU still has no credible answer. Merz talks tough in opposition and governs softly in coalition. The result is the worst of both worlds: he alienates liberal voters without convincing conservative ones. The AfD, meanwhile, offers something the CDU cannot: clarity. It may be the clarity of the demagogue, but in politics, a clear wrong answer often beats a muddled right one.
The European centre-left faces an even deeper problem. For decades, identity politics was its monopoly, in which the politics of recognition, of minority rights, of progressive social change lead on. But identity now cuts the other way. The new identity politics is national, not cosmopolitan. It is about borders, not their abolition. About cultural continuity, not perpetual reinvention. The centre-left has no vocabulary for this. It can only denounce and thereby shovels its grave even further.
The current chaos in Britain should serve as a warning for Germany. The Conservatives ignored the cultural undercurrents that produced Brexit and were eventually consumed by them. Labour now governs a country where Reform UK sets the tempo of political debate on migration and national identity, while Streeting’s answer is to edge back towards Brussels – as though the whole upheaval were simply a misunderstanding that better economic management might have prevented.
Germany’s centrists are making the same bet. They believe that a growing economy and a few symbolic gestures on border security will be enough. They are wrong. Voters do not only want prosperity. They want to know where their country is going, what the strategy is – and they want leaders honest enough to say so. Until the CDU finds an answer to that question, the AfD will keep asking it for them and outrun them in the polls.
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