When the nationalistic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party swept into the national legislature with 13 percent of the vote in the fall, the American op-ed industry boomed but Germans mostly took it in stride. The country has had populist parties since World War II, even extremist ones. They have tended to burn themselves out. True, none has been quite so big as the AfD, and none has drawn on grievances so widely shared. First is the euro. Germany has prospered from the European Union’s common currency, but other EU members feel trapped in it, resentful, and entitled to compensation from the German taxpayer. The AfD, against such bailouts, would leave the eurozone. Second is migration. Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to refugees from the Syrian war in 2015, and well over a million young men walked to Germany from all across the Muslim world. Germany has now had half a dozen incidents of Islamist terrorism, a scourge from which it had been relatively free. The year 2016 began with hundreds of sexual assaults by migrants in front of the Cologne cathedral and ended with a Tunisian migrant driving an 18-wheeler into a Berlin Christmas fair, killing 12. Still, Germans have grown confident about their institutions over the decades and outright cocky about their ability to keep their political system on an even keel.
But since the weekend before Thanksgiving, German institutions have been reeling. The coalition talks that followed September’s election broke down and failed to produce a government. That has never happened before. Suddenly the newspapers are full of articles about the “Lessons of Weimar” and the “End of the Merkel Era,” and foreign statesmen are telling Germans that their actions in the coming weeks might determine whether the European Union stands or falls.
The problem is that the election was both a victory for Merkel and a repudiation. Her Christian Democrat (CDU) party lost 9 points in the polls (falling to 33 percent); its Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partner lost 5 (falling to 21). Since the war, these have been the two main parties of right and left. There was something disreputable about banding the whole political establishment together in a “grand coalition.” So humiliating was the SPD loss that its leader, Martin Schulz, announced he would not consider joining the government. Since Merkel had ruled out governing with the AfD, this required working something out with two upper-middle-class parties that couldn’t stand each other: the businessmen’s Free Democratic party and the environmentalist Greens.
After two months, FDP leader Christian Lindner announced he was pulling out of the talks. As usual when someone blows up a coalition, his allies called it a matter of principle, his adversaries a fit of pique. The allies were right. Lindner was worried about two things: first, that the impulsive Merkel would try to make herself a hero to the European Union. She might agree with French president Emmanuel Macron on a large common budget or on Europe-wide deposit insurance that would put German savers at risk.
Lindner’s second worry was that Merkel would issue a further invitation to migrants. Lindner had brought his party back from the dead to a stunning 11-percent finish, and he had done so with uncompromising talk about border security. For some voters, the FDP was a way to support the AfD’s policies while still getting invited to cocktail parties. After months of tergiversating, Merkel and the Greens had agreed to a cap of 200,000 on new migration—but they had insisted it be kept flexible, and Lindner assumed that the letter of the law would be used to undermine the spirit. He walked. The Social Democrats agreed to make themselves available to govern. Merkel is now negotiating to reinstall the same grand coalition to which voters gave poor marks.
Just how explosive an issue Muslim immigration is was shown by an extraordinary report on Muslim population growth that the Pew Research Center issued in the last days of November. Between 2010 and 2016, Germany’s Muslim population rose from 3.3 million (or 4.1 percent of the population) to 5 million (6.1 percent), a 50-percent increase in half a decade—most of it due to Merkel’s invitation. Its consequences will be magnified by a second problem: Germany’s native population is in a state of demographic collapse. With a median age of 47, it vies with the two other defeated Axis countries, Italy and Japan, for the title of the oldest society in the history of the planet. Germany’s native population is projected to decline by 15 percent by 2050. Europe as a whole is going to lose about 10 percent of its non-Muslim population, which Pew reckons could fall from 495 million to 446 million.
Pew modeled several possible scenarios for the next generation and found that demographically speaking Germany is going to be altered at its core, no matter what happens. Should it halt all migration today, the relative youth and higher fertility of Muslim residents would still result in a country that is 9 percent Muslim a generation from now. Should Germany’s Willkommenskultur continue to flourish—that is, should migration continue at the rate of the period 2014-2016—Germany will be 20 percent Muslim.
This is a continent-wide transformation, and it is coming soon—roughly when the children of people getting married today finish grad school. With low immigration, according to Pew’s models, Europe will have 36 million Muslims by 2050. With high immigration, it will have 76 million. An extraordinary number: This would mean 17 million in Germany, 13 million in France, and 13 million in Britain. Sweden would have 5 million; it would be 31 percent Muslim.
These numbers are not predictions—they are Pew’s projections, assuming a scenario of high Muslim immigration. But there are many forces at work to encourage such immigration. Most migrants to Europe are Muslims. Of the top five source countries for immigration, four are almost wholly Muslim (Syria, Morocco, Pakistan, Bangladesh) and the fifth, India, has a Muslim minority of 170 million people. Pew’s projections do not count those million or so Muslims who are in “legal limbo” after having had an asylum application rejected, considering it “unlikely” that they will stay in Europe. One wonders what grounds Pew has for making that assumption.
Pew displays an extraordinary sociological optimism about German public opinion: “Only about three-in-ten (28 percent),” the Pew experts write, “say these refugees are a ‘major threat’ to Germany.” (Only!) This optimism is shared by most European governments and experts, but not by most European citizens, who understand what an important thing a religion is. Even with merely moderate immigration, there are two countries that would see their Muslim population rise by more than 10 percent: Sweden and Britain. You begin to understand the electrifying effect that immigration had on the Brexit referendum: All these nations, even if no one dares to say it, are fighting for their demographic lives.
And you begin to see how, under the surface of German politeness and historic repentance, people might be angered by the return of the Christian Democrat-Social Democrat grand coalition that got Germany into its immigration predicament. Normally a leader in Merkel’s position will pay a high price in policy and personnel for the support of a reluctant coalition partner like the SPD. But Merkel’s governing strategy has always been to upstage and demoralize the Social Democrats by preempting the issues they care about. She committed Germany to phasing out nuclear power, instituted quotas for women on corporate boards, and secured gay marriage (while professing to be personally opposed). Germany’s taboo against right-wing parties allowed Merkel to pull this off, protecting her from her own conservative voters. But the vote for the AfD and the FDP this fall is a sign that the taboo is losing its power. And what is left on the SPD’s wish list for Merkel to provide? The key proposals that have been leaked from negotiations so far include tax hikes and the abolition of private health insurance.
Germany is not the only country that runs on collusion between two parties that once stood at opposite poles of the system. Ireland has a “confidence and supply agreement” by which one major party backs the other. The Netherlands had such a government until the last election. Such arrangements are usually justified as a defense against radicalism. They run the risk, though, of stoking the tensions that lead to radicalism in the first place.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
