All happy families are alike; each unhappy family, on the other hand, is unhappy in its own way. It is the famous incipit of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and we journalists abuse it whenever possible.
Also to talk about the German general elections that just took place, their domestic but also European and global geopolitical significance, especially in relation to the tumultuous Trump era that has just re-started.
We have been talking since the European vote in June 2024 about a kind of fever bedeviling the continent’s democracies: the advance more or less everywhere of right-wingers. We use the plural because the facets are different in different countries and different are the political families into which elected officials have ended up, a fragmentation that did not prevent the formation of the second Von Der Lyen government with substantial center-left traction. But the symptom remains.
Reversing Tolstoy’s ‘incipit, we could say that European unhappiness has common traits, poorer, angrier citizens, afraid of wars, the future, and wild immigration. Translated, rejection of the first Von Der Lyen government on green deal, foreign policy and overall management of migrants.
In Germany, the face of the radical right is that of Alice Weidel, who led AfD ( Alternative for Germany) from 10.4 percent in 2021 to 20.7 yesterday, the second largest party behind Merz’s winning Cdu, the future chancellor. Politically all as expected, the success of a movement considered extreme (even though Weidel branded Hitler’s National Socialism as a form of communism) will be contained by the alliance of the other parties, a kind of Grosse coalition, we shall see who precisely will be there, that will effectively prevent bad Alice from governing.
There are also those who say that the endorsements in favor of AfD by Trump’s visionary arm, Musk, and institutional arm, Vice President Vance, fostered some sort of popular reaction, and the 84 percent turnout, in contrast to the rampant Western abstentionism, is there to testify to that.
But the symptom remains. German unhappiness, with a former East Germany that feels almost damaged by freedom, is mirrored in European unhappiness in the face of non-answers on the great issues of our Time. An unhappiness that Trump has only highlighted as in a dramatic session with a merciless hypnotist.
The article German unhappiness comes from TheNewyorker.
