Shockwaves travelled across the German political landscape as news broke yesterday that the first round of elections in the Bundestag had failed to produce a Chancellor. Under the German constitution, this means that there will be a further round of voting, for which another candidate must be found. If this vote fails to produce an overall majority, another election will be called — and the part with the most votes will form a government. This is the first time that a vote in the Bundestag has failed to produce a Chancellor in the history of the German Republic, an unprecedented crisis of confidence and legitimacy.
One party’s name is on everybody’s list: the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) which surged into second place in the recent federal elections. A special election is a unique chance at taking power in a country where other parties refuse to work with them, and with the frustration of German voters at fever pitch, and the legislature divided, it could really happen.
There is no clever platform or reform that will diffuse and disarm this movement
This image of a politics in crisis, of unprecedented results, and populists making gains, is replicated across Europe. Reform swept hundreds of seats in the UK’s local elections, the nationalist George Simion has won the first round of the Romanian elections, and the populist Portuguese party Chega is expected to continue improving its vote share, having finished third in the previous elections. At a certain point when a pattern is consistent, uniform and intensifying, it cannot be dismissed as an anomaly, dismissed by opponents as the result of misinformation and bad actors exploiting discontent. The West is undergoing an epochal change, a revolution against globalisation and a resurgence of national sentiment.
Nor is it the first time. Over 170 years ago, nationalism exploded into a series of revolutions across the European continent in what has come to be known as the “springtime of nations”. In an extraordinary moment of convergence, turmoil exploded across the empires and kingdoms of Europe, toppling thrones, enfranchising serfs and shaking the foundations of the old order. In another fateful May, Germans gathered from across the fractured lands of the German Confederation to create a new nation, electing a national assembly in Frankfurt to create a constitution for a united Germany. Whilst this effort, like most of the events of 1848, were to be stymied by the great powers of the time, it is obvious in retrospect that a fundamental shift had occurred. Democracy and nationhood were from that time on inevitabilities, dreams that had irrevocably taken root in the hearts of the people of that time.
The same thing is happening in Europe today. The great experiment of a post-national, borderless liberalism, has fast become a nightmare. The historic people’s of Europe have had their culture and identity denigrated and attacked by elites, their jobs and industries shipped overseas, and foreign workers imported to take on work in a new, far more fluid and chaotic economy. The post-war social democratic consensus has been shattered, as neoliberal economics has coincided with lowered social trust and collapsing birthrates. Novel ethnic, generational and educational divides have been opened up, imposed from above by an arrogant and rootless ruling class.
It does not matter if the AfD enters government, or if populists are held off in Poland and Canada. The wind of history is behind them, or something like them. If Farage and Trump did not exist, they would need to be invented. When populists have been truly disarmed, it has been in the same manner as the cannier rulers in 1848 — by voluntarily and gradually moving where you are going to be violently pushed otherwise. That is what the centre left has done in Denmark, where nationalists have lost momentum by the one simple expedient of bringing immigration back under control and thus restoring Denmark’s social democratic norms.
There is no strategy or tactic, no clever platform or reform, that will diffuse and disarm this movement. The winds of change are howling across Europe, and the only choice is whether to bend or break before them.
But that does not mean we are on a static one way road to an unchanging destination. Romantic nationalism had many potentials then as it does now. Those who embrace the changing sensibilities and seek to meet the spiritual hunger of the present moment can direct it either for good or for ill. The desire for belonging and rootedness in a globalised world can give rise to new local and transnational identities as well as sheerly national ones. Likewise, as in 1848, it can go hand in hand with greater popular participation in economic and political life. But frustrated and corrupted revolutions of this kind can go badly, horrifically wrong, as it did in Germany after the Prussians crushed the aspirations of ’48. Those who fear disaster in the rise of European nationalism must find a way to positively shape it — before it moves far beyond their ability to influence or control.
