German Business Bites Back

Franz Pokorny

The AfD has changed its face many times over its dozen-year existence. One element, however, remains constant: it is a quintessentially reactionary party, reflexively opposed to whatever fantastical notion has lately planted itself in the minds of the laputans running the show in Berlin, be it the Greek bailout, the 2015 Merkelwave, lockdowns, green degrowth, or the Zeitenwende. These layers of dissent have amassed on the AfD’s seabed and buried the political certainties of the Old Bundesrepublik like ammonites locked in shale, their images preserved long after their vital forces have expired. The AfD’s charmingly national liberal self-understanding as a confederation of disgruntled burghers asserting their rights against an overweening state makes the party a dark mirror of The Economist’s Charlemagne columns circa 2010 or the FT in the era of High Barberism, in which the picture of a competent German elite marching in step with a technocratic esprit de corps into a rules and evidence-based European future reflects back.

So much is true — the AfD has always been a fronde of beautiful losers; a merry band of brigands robbing the rich to give to the hard-working taxpayer. Struve and Hecker vs. the woke Duke of Baden. While the incompetence of the ruling class has allowed them to strike some stinging blows against the establishment, the Berlin bubble’s control over the apparatus of mass democratic machine politics and the administrative state makes these victories ephemeral. Unlike in the United States, where Donald Trump forged the incoherent grievances of an embittered conservative counterelite into the steel that slew the dark democrat dragon, the AfD has yet to find a malleable element of the ruling class with which to tear down the gates of Castle Bundesrepublik. What passes for „elite“ sponsorship of the AfD is an equally eccentric coalition of goldbug bankers, mischievous milk magnates, and stingy aristocratic playboys (and girls) stewing in their palaces as the world slips them by. Like The Donald, these are a tabloid journalist’s idea of „the upper classes“, although unlike the lion in his gilded cave high above New York, theirs are not mere affectations carefully designed to fire the imaginations of the hoi polloi, but an authentic way of life.

An argument oft made in this illustrious paper is that German export-oriented industry historically formed a kind of niche society within the liberal democratic order; a secret pleasure garden or adventure park that acted as a pressure valve for the system’s internal contradictions. This is prima facie obvious; the kind of men who booze with Putin at his Black Sea eyrie are hardly trifled by sustainable straws or gender mainstreaming, and yet it is on their shoulders that this rotten Woke world rests. Dark whispers of energy transition could not burst this cloud; the continued flow of Russian gas through NordStream was the great joke behind the European green deal. Even Merkel’s migration mayhem could be winked away, since it did not seriously impact the great industrialists’ balance sheets or their quality of life. From the standpoint of capital, these things are mere inconveniences; the kind of annoying ideological contrivances that governments from Moscow to Riyadh regularly impose as the cost of doing business.

For a time, the Zeitenwende seemed to follow this pattern. While the senile electorate was held in terror by lurid images of the Red Army marching across the Oder and liberating Germany for the second time, backchannels to Moscow were held open and goods, gas, and oil continued to flow back and forth across the frontier. Scholz failed to show leadership; the Confederation of German Industry (the equivalent — albeit far more serious — of the British CBI) adorned its website with Ukrainian flags while its press releases betrayed the world-weary grin of a man who has seen and done it all before. German industry actually seemed to believe that Scholz would find a way to wriggle out of this jam; I recall a conversation, as the sun was setting on Scholz’s terror regime, with the comms manager of an auto manufacturer whose name you will know, who told me that they had ceased funding the Confederation’s Eastern European department because they prioritised moral posturing on Ukraine over the tactfully defined „interests of business in the region“. The big German auto manufacturers may have substantial „government affairs“ divisions, but they are surprisingly bad at „lobbying“ in the sense of organising to build political consensus behind their demands; their structural position at the commanding heights of the German economy has been so long assured that they assumed the politicians would bend over to do their bidding, leaving them to have to haggle over the details of legislation rather than the direction. Only recently have they woken up to the existential danger that the Zeitenwende poses to their interests, and, having long ago forgotten how to do politics in the way that a Krupp or Hugenberg once could, are now scrambling to find a political response.

The predictions made — I believe for the first time anywhere — in J’accuse that Merz would make a serious go of the Zeitenwende and pivot Germany and the EU onto a trajectory of War Keynesianism have been entirely borne out. Industrial production slumped 4.6% on the year in 2024; auto exports to China, the crown jewel of Merkelian mercantilism, have crashed while — vanitatum vanitas! — imports from China have soared; Rheinmetall is converting out-of-use plants for its own production. Military spending, now exempt from the constitutional debt brake, will be financed by borrowing; Merz now calls for a „European Stock Exchange“, and there are plans in Brussels to harmonise capital markets regulations, which will have the side-effect of allowing Germans firms to more easily fund themselves through public offerings rather than through bank lending. Precisely such a move has long opposed by the savings bank sector, a powerful constituency in local-level conservative politics. Whether or not Merzonomics will actually achieve its goals, it represents something completely new in German politics, never yet tried for the simple reason that it is politically suicidal. The political fallout will be to alienate the CDU’s traditional moneyed constituencies, industry, banks, and all those downstream from them, on behalf of a defence sector with Berlin (and, equally importantly, Munich) in its pocket, but shallow roots in society. These constituencies have a ready-made alternative in the AfD, whether they agree with its social agenda or not.

The fronde against Merzonomics would give the AfD its strangest mask yet — the last redoubt of Merkel’s globalist political economy against Merz’s War Keynesianism. This would nicely bundle together the main themes of the AfD’s decade of revolt, mixing fossil fuel growth, antimilitarism, a Eurasian orientation, and the auto’s symbolism of postwar libertinism under threat from green authoritarianism and Merz’s sharia. That Merz bartered away a 500 billion euros Wokefund for his debt brake amendment gives a nice culture war gloss to the argument. The program would be simple enough: a return to Russian gas, fiscal consolidation, the rollback of Merkel-era climate regulations (which were, for the CDU brass, always a fig leaf to double down on Russian energy), and a brake on further European (financial) integration: all but the second point is already standard AfD fare. This would not work because the crisis of German industry is predicated not on Woke Waste by blimmin’ Berlin bureaucrats — though this has exacerbated it and made it more difficult to manage the political fallout — but on structural shifts within the world economy, namely China’s transition from an industrialising nation reliant on German capital to one increasingly able to satisfy its own industrial needs and consumer demands through its own resources and know-how. It would, however, normalise the AfD and thereby bring remigration closer to fruition. In Alice Weidel — a creature of Merkel’s Germany if there ever was one — the AfD even has the right face for this pro-business turn, although Weidel’s fragile position within the party is indicative of the difficulties involved in surmounting the lack of trust between the export sector and a base fully cognisant of the the former’s role in the rise of Woke.

As yet, auto sector backing of the AfD remains but a vague whisper. That both Merkel and Weidel are now regular guests at Orbán’s court at the Carmelite monastery in Budapest is the rare concrete indication of something brewing. Hungary, as an exploration of the furthermost possibilities of Christian Democratic government in the 21st century, played the same role in Merkel’s European system as the Khmer Rouge did vis-a-vis Mao’s China, albeit with the understanding in Berlin and Budapest that interference in German politics on behalf of the AfD was the Bavarian auto sector’s red line. In February it remained unclear whether Weidel’s reception in Budapest was a reckless gamble on Orbán’s part to thrust his weight in on the German election against Merz; a month later, the Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó was ceremoniously received by the Baden-Württemberg state parliament, and the state’s premier auto manufacturer Mercedes-Benz announced plans to relocate production of 100,000 autos from Stuttgart to its plant in the Great Plains town of Kecskemét. At the opening ceremony of BMW’s plant in Debrecen, Orbán inveighed against the Zeitenwende and Merkelian Willkommenskultur — something unthinkable in the balmy days of Merkelism and no doubt coordinated in advance with the company’s upper-level management. This will be heard loud and clear in Berlin.

The auto sector might try to play Harzburg Front with the AfD, but do not think for a minute that their intentions are benign. Pakistani guest workers at the BMW plant in Debrecen have displayed precisely the same kind of sexual depravity to which their compatriots in Britain are prone, and their behaviour is among the many reasons why Orbán’s government seems set for a stern rebuke at next spring’s election. The German Right will soon find itself walking the same path their American counterparts did in the dusky doldrums of the Brandonocene, namely that, in becoming a rallying point for subaltern factions of the ruling class locked out of the corridors of power and forced to turn to democratic mechanisms to renegotiate the social contract, it will find Musks and Ackmans in its ranks not committed to its core program of remigration.