Berlin is a wonderful city, even if its hipster vibe is a bit much for a square like me. The decadence is part of the charm, and the Germans, or at least the Prussians, are good at it, having enough sense of order that it can feel squalid without feeling unsafe.
When I most recently visited the German capital last year, there seemed to be quite a bleak mood. The politics of sustained boredom that characterized the successful post-war Federal Republic had run out of road, and a mindset which had worked for so long now seemed to be pushing the country to the brink of disaster. As someone who loves Germany and admires its culture, I find this very sad, although at least it provides a brief distraction from my own country’s woes.
Demography is starting to have real political effects across the West, especially in big cities
That mood will not have been improved by two recent elections, the first of which brought Alternative für Deutschland to the brink of power in Saxony-Anhalt and the second a spectacular result for Die Linke, the successor party of the East German Communists, in Berlin.
What explains this support for the AfD? Is it affordability? Is it nostalgia for an era that didn’t exist, driven by inequality? Perhaps it’s AI. There is an elephant in the room, but people will go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid mentioning it.
Every criticism of Germany could equally be applied to Britain, and every criticism by an Englishman might appear like projection, but it is a common observation among people who speak to their politicians that they lack the imagination to change course. Many find comfort in the idea that “if you adopt the negative framing around immigration, you’re playing into the hands of the far right.” This is all down to an overreliance on the power of narrative, which influences politicians across western Europe who have taken on board the power of words to shape reality, but not for reality to shape public opinion. It drives the increasing concern with misinformation, talk of censorship, and draconian punishments for hate speech.
One New York Times op-ed even suggested “innovative new policies to fight back” against the AfD, such as buying “empty real estate in inner cities” to set up “cooling rooms”, and even more immigration. In one sense, more immigration will indeed crush the far right, on a local level, because there will be more immigrants to vote against them. This is how the Labour party “beat the BNP” in Barking, after all – but you might not like the extremists immigrants vote for.
It also seems odd that, a generation after Berliners tore down the wall, a quarter of them voted for the people who put it up. But then, of course, Die Linke’s largest support came from those too young to remember communism, and from newcomers with an often vague connection to the country’s past. Almost half of Berliners are now immigrants or descended from recent immigrants, the Turks of the post-war period followed by the arrival of Arabs, including what is now Europe’s largest Palestinian community.
Demography is starting to have real political effects across the West, especially in big cities. In New York, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor in part thanks to the support of young people and immigrants, and the same thing will happen everywhere as “third worldism” becomes a coalition large enough to win. Immigrant groups do not have to constitute majorities in order for their favored candidates to win; they simply need to form electoral alliances with native malcontents, the equivalent of the distressed Romans who joined with the Germanic invaders.
As with Manhattan, Berlin’s move to the left was influenced by demographic change, as well as other factors like housing shortages (itself linked to immigration). Al Jazeera, owned by a regime which has perhaps the strictest naturalization laws in the world, sympathetically reported how one resident of Balkan ancestry celebrated in an immigrant dominated neighborhood. She told them how “I want them to tax the rich and to provide more opportunities for everyone”. Another crowed that, “We are going to have a woman who has an immigrant background and who is like us,” and this would mean “solidarity with Palestine.”
The woman in question, Elif Eralp, is Turkish by ancestry, Bavarian by birth, given sanctuary by Germany after her activist parents were forced to flee their homeland. Left-wing Turks may have politics far closer to the European tradition than the Middle Eastern world, but such movements can count on a reliable Muslim vote for leftist parties in Europe, while the same people vote for reactionaries back home. Indeed, many of Germany’s Muslims opt for ultra-progressive policies while also supporting the establishment of theocracy. The same is true of Britain, where many new Greens aren’t overly agitated by environmental issues, let alone such niche concerns as gender identity.
If this alliance seems incoherent, what the French call the Islamo-gauche understand Kevin Phillips’s maxim that “the whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who”. Both wings of the bloc are oppositional cultures, hostile to the establishment of their respective European nations, and to the moral prestige of European civilization. Israel, seen through the prism of western colonialism despite the more complex history, is the glue which holds this coalition together, far more adhesive than the black nationalism-by-proxy of Woke 1.0, for which most Middle Easterners care little.
The essential law of political alliances is that people don’t vote for values, but for who’s on their side, and in a multicultural society this is heavily influenced by ancestry and religion. It was once a common argument that right-wing parties needed to court immigrant communities in order to win power, and this inevitably entailed favoring more immigration, because to do otherwise would harm the dignity of those already settled. This was obviously bad advice – in some cases deliberately so – and the argument has been made irrelevant by the fall of the mainstream right and their replacement by national populists.
It was not especially good advice for the center-left, either, because it was always a risk that once large enough, immigrant voting blocs would opt for parties that courted them with more naked group interests, or would form their own, leaving their sponsors behind. German voters from immigrant families historically voted most of all for the center-left; in Berlin a majority of Muslims backed Die Linke. Thanks for your help, but we can manage fine on our own now.
This religious bloc does not gain concessions by promoting “sharia law” or other elements of majority Muslim nations, and indeed most sectarian politicians are not “Islamists” in any real sense; they are merely fighting for the interests and dignity of their group, often framed in the language of the left.
Die Linke, like others of its kind, looks recognizably left-wing on paper: it makes appeals to social justice and redistribution, invokes traditional class enemies like landlords and bankers, yet in multicultural societies such appeals always have a communal appeal, because the emotional appeal of ethnic and religious solidarity is so much stronger than class. As Lee Kuan Yew saw, “unlike communism, whose dialectics have to be taught and learned before loyalties to it can develop, communalism makes a direct primitive appeal to emotional loyalties whose response can be immediate and spontaneous.”
In Russia, Vietnam, post-colonial Africa and Latin America, demands for redistribution often had a racial angle: when agitators spoke of the “bourgeois” or “capitalists”, the people heard “Germans”, “Chinese” or “Asians”. Sometimes they don’t even need to disguise their language, as when Mamdani talked about taxing white areas more heavily. In the global medieval village we now inhabit, with the ravings and superstitions of the post-literate amplified across borders, animosity often focuses most of all on the traditional target of European peasants: Jews.
For the left’s anti-nativist native wing, this might just look like familiar radical socialism. Die Linke wants to take over large housing companies. The party has also pledged to expropriate 200,000 homes. One representative has called on investors to leave the capital, and for Axel Springer’s media empire to be seized by the government.
Like Mamdani, Elif Eralp ran on a campaign of rent caps – she wears the phrase on her gold necklace – and taking homes from landlords. If that doesn’t ring some alarm bells, then some of Die Linke’s ideas for the city are certainly radical, including the reduced role of police, a ban on AfD activities, the end of deportations or fines for fare evasion, and further drug liberalization.
Berlin is a great city, and I always love visiting, but I wouldn’t say it was exactly short of people who look out of their skull openly using hard drugs. The police aren’t delighted. The city’s Jews are even more demoralized, it seems, hardly surprising when the victorious people’s party hosted a known Hamas supporter.
This is Europe’s future now, and it’s not just in Berlin. In Sweden last month, the right-wing coalition lost the closest of elections, in part because the center-left parties turned out many more voters among migrant populations. There were “striking differences” in voting patterns between ethnic Swedes and what continentals call “migration background”, and it has been noted that the previous right-wing coalition’s generosity with citizenship may have proved crucial. A victory for the left – for now.
In Britain the Green party have chased the sectarian vote, and in doing so is playing with fire. In the Holborn and St Pancras by-election they have been endorsed by the organisation Muslim Vote, a pressure group which aims to maximize group interests, although Zack Polanski faced a challenge for the candidacy because he is not “Global Majority”, a sign of things to come.
The Greens have now adopted an explicit motion stating that Zionism is racism, one tabled by a Palestinian born in Britain, who has previously said that “We will continue until we dismantle Zionism from the world, from every country. They will be shunned and that time will come when they are hunted in the same way as the Nazi oppressors were… It won’t happen without force.” No doubt her allies will applaud her commitment to social justice, decolonization and all the values they hold high. Lee Kuan Yew probably would have seen it differently.
This article first appeared in Ed West’s Wrong Side of History Substack.
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