"What is going on in Germany"

 

Those that have been reading my blog for a long time know that I was stationed in Germany for over 5 years, worked inside the "1K Zone" and was attached to Field Station Berlin for a bit and other things. and I overall enjoyed my time on Germany and dealing with the people.  I still have friends over there and they tell me that it has changed and not for the good, the migrants have overrun most of the cities and a lot of the small towns, and they don't work.  The Germans have been conditioned to accept it but they are starting to get pissed because whenever there is a local vs migrant issue, the police/state always takes the side of the migrant and the Germans feel the injustice of this.  My ancestry on my maternal side is German with eastern European thrown to the mix so when I speak of the ills of communism and socialism, I have familial history on my side.  

       I saw this post on farcebook and shamelessly "nicked it"   

f you live outside Germany, you may be wondering what is happening in Germany at the moment.

Why are millions of Germans turning away from parties they voted for all their lives? And why has a party that much of the national and international media simply calls “far right” or ‘extreme right’ become the strongest political force in parts of Germany and in the polls for the next nationwide elections? Have millions of people turned into Nazis over night? The answer is definitely not that easy, let me explain and excuse the long post!

I was a returning CDU voter myself. I’ll tell you the story from my perspective; you can decide for yourself whether I was and am right - or not!

The CDU I knew stood for Christian and conservative values, family, personal responsibility, law and order, a strong economy and Ludwig Erhard’s Social Market Economy. It was patriotic without believing that loving Germany meant hating anyone else. Under Adenauer, it helped build modern Germany; under Kohl, it helped reunite it.

Merkel changed the party in many ways. In my view, she also helped create what I call “flag phobia” — a reluctance to display national symbols openly. I still remember the moment when, after being handed a German flag, she dropped it to the ground.

That was the political home I kept returning to — until that day.

I decided not to vote in the next election, even though I still believed in the CDU’s traditional values. I also believed the party when it told us that the young AfD was extreme right-wing and “völkisch” and therefore not a party you could vote out of German heritage reasons. I accepted those claims blindly, without checking the “facts” presented to us.

After the shattered SPD–Green–FDP coalition, Friedrich Merz promised exactly the change many conservative voters had been waiting for in 2025: lower taxes and contributions, economic recovery, secure pensions, control of illegal migration, a smaller state — and adherence to Germany’s debt brake.

The CDU’s own election manifesto warned:

“The debts of today are the tax increases of tomorrow.”

Millions voted for that promised “Politikwechsel.” I did too.

Then came the election.

And Germany got something very different.

That is where this story begins.

Because Friedrich Merz broke arguably his biggest election promise before he had even become Chancellor.

During the campaign, the CDU couldn’t have been clearer:

“We will uphold the constitutional debt brake.”

They even warned us:

“The debts of today are the tax increases of tomorrow.”

Then the election was over.

And before Merz had even taken office, CDU/CSU and SPD used the OLD Bundestag — the parliament elected in 2021, just days before the newly elected Bundestag convened — to change Germany’s Constitution.

They created a €500 BILLION debt-financed special fund for infrastructure and exempted large parts of defense and security spending from the normal debt-brake limits.

Let that sink in.

Germans voted on February 23.

On March 18, the constitutional amendment passed the Bundestag.

Friedrich Merz did not become Chancellor until May 6.

The promised “Politikwechsel” hadn’t even officially begun, and one of its central promises was already gone.

And it wasn’t the only promise that looked very different after the election.

The CDU had promised broad tax relief and lower social-security contributions. Instead, many of the big relief measures were postponed, diluted or tied to later years while contribution pressures remained high.

They promised a smaller, leaner state.

They promised secure pensions and explicitly said there would be no pension cuts and no change to the existing retirement-age rules.

They promised to “stop illegal migration” and even a “factual admission stop” at Germany’s borders. The new government did tighten border controls and increase rejections — so that part should be acknowledged — but Germany did not get the sweeping migration shutdown many voters understood from the campaign rhetoric.

And remember what Merz himself called all of this:

POLITIKWECHSEL.

A change of political direction.

But instead of governing alone, the CDU entered another coalition with the SPD — one of the very parties conservative voters had just voted to remove from power.

And soon Germans were hearing something very different from the promises of the campaign:

We need more money.

We need more debt.

Germans are lazy. They need to work more.

The welfare state can no longer be financed in its present form.

People are sick too often.

Doctors, nurses and caretakers are “Nutznießer” — beneficiaries — of the system.

Retirement and social benefits have to be reconsidered.

At some point you have to ask:

If you campaign on lower taxes, lower contributions, controlled debt, secure pensions, a smaller state and a fundamental change of direction — and after the election Germans are instead confronted with historic borrowing and renewed arguments about how much more ordinary citizens must contribute —

what exactly did people vote for?

Because elections are not supposed to be blank checks.

Promises matter.

And what happened next would make that question much bigger.

Because while Berlin was discovering hundreds of billions of euros in new borrowing, life outside the political bubble was becoming increasingly difficult.

Germany was once the economic powerhouse of Europe.

“Made in Germany” meant something.

Industry, engineering, automobiles, chemicals and machinery didn’t just create jobs — they created the prosperity that financed our entire social system.

Now look at the numbers.

At the end of the first half of 2026, German manufacturing employed 144,100 fewer people than only one year earlier.

That is the equivalent of almost 400 INDUSTRIAL JOBS disappearing every single day.

The automobile industry alone lost 42,300 jobs — nearly 6% of its workforce in just twelve months.

Germany now has fewer automotive workers than at any point since these statistics began in 2005.

Across the entire economy, 212,000 fewer people were employed in the second quarter of 2026 than a year earlier.

And economic growth?

After years of stagnation, the Bundesbank expects real, calendar-adjusted growth of only 0.5% in 2026.

Meanwhile, everyday life keeps getting more expensive.

Inflation reached 2.9% again in August.

Energy prices were 10.5% higher than one year earlier.

Fuel prices: +27.7%.

Heating oil: +49.6%.

Health-related costs: +5.2%.

Social services: +6.3%.

And rents continued climbing.

Those aren’t political opinions.

Those are Germany’s official statistics.

And who feels it?

The people who worked their entire lives.

Almost ONE IN FIVE Germans in retirement aged 65 and older is now considered at risk of poverty.

Around 764,000 elderly people were already dependent on basic income support at the end of 2025 — another record.

And yes, in one of the richest countries on Earth, we have elderly people collecting discarded bottles from trash cans and train stations for the €0.25 deposit.

You see them.

I see them.

People who worked for 40 or 50 years searching garbage bins for a few euros.

And then those same citizens are told:

The welfare state has become too expensive.

People need to work more.

People retire too early.

People call in sick too often.

There isn’t enough money.

And THAT is where another question starts becoming impossible to avoid:

If Germany supposedly cannot afford the promises it made to its own citizens —

where exactly is all the money going?

Because the answer takes us from billions…

to hundreds of billions.

And then something happened that changed this entire debate.

The election campaign in Saxony-Anhalt began.

And one name suddenly became impossible to ignore:

Ulrich Siegmund.

The AfD candidate started asking a very simple question:

If Germany supposedly has no money left for its own people —

WHERE IS ALL THE MONEY GOING?

He pointed to billions spent on migration and integration, money going abroad and more than €20 BILLION in Bürgergeld — Germany’s basic welfare benefit — going to non-German citizens.

The media fact-checked him.

And on that last number, he was essentially right.

Germany paid €46.65 billion in Bürgergeld in 2025. Based on the share of recipients without German citizenship, around €21.7 BILLION corresponded to non-German recipients.

That does not mean those people weren’t legally entitled to it. Nor does it mean foreigners don’t work, contribute and pay taxes in Germany — millions do.

But it raised a legitimate question about priorities.

And once I started looking at those priorities myself, I discovered numbers I had never really paid attention to before.

Germany reported around €26 BILLION in official development assistance in 2025.

And buried inside Germany’s enormous international development system are projects that sound almost unbelievable when Germans at home are constantly being told that money is tight.

Germany committed €20 MILLION toward a bicycle expressway network in Lima, Peru, and another €24 MILLION for bicycle infrastructure elsewhere in Peru.

The German Development Ministry itself confirms those figures.

Germany also funded a €10.5 MILLION sustainable urban-transport project in India, within which around €180,000 supported training women and transgender people for traditionally male-dominated occupations — including driving rickshaws.

There are international programs dealing with gender equality, “positive masculinity,” climate policy, sport and many other social objectives.

Now, to be fair:

The government has an explanation for these programs.

Some are loans that must be repaid rather than grants. Others are intended to reduce poverty, create economic development, stabilize countries, address climate change or ultimately benefit Germany through greater international stability.

You can agree with those arguments.

But you can also ask:

WHAT ARE OUR PRIORITIES?

Because while we’re spending billions internationally, Germany is borrowing on a scale that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.

For 2027 alone, the federal government plans €555.4 BILLION in expenditure.

Net borrowing in the federal budget is projected at €118.7 BILLION.

Then come additional debt-financed special funds and borrowing exempted from the normal debt-brake rules.

And borrowing doesn’t disappear.

It creates interest.

Federal interest expenditure is projected to climb to:

€41.9 BILLION in 2027.

€55.2 BILLION in 2028.

€68.1 BILLION in 2029.

And an astonishing

€80.7 BILLION in 2030.

EIGHTY BILLION EUROS.

IN ONE YEAR.

JUST IN INTEREST.

Remember the CDU election manifesto?

“The debts of today are the tax increases of tomorrow.”

They were right.

And that debt will still exist when Friedrich Merz and today’s ministers are long gone from office.

Our children will pay for it.

Our grandchildren will pay for it.

Maybe even their children will pay for it.

And this was the point when I started doing something I should have done years earlier:

I stopped accepting political labels and headlines at face value.

And I started checking things for myself.

Including the party I had been told for years was simply “far right” and therefore beyond consideration: the AFD.

So I finally did what I should have done years earlier:

I read the AfD program myself.

And I honestly expected to find the extreme-right ideas I had been warned about.

Instead, page after page, I found something strangely familiar.

Social market economy.

Lower taxes.

Strong families.

Law and order.

Controlled immigration.

People who have no right to remain in Germany should leave.

Legal immigration for people Germany actually needs.

Less government and bureaucracy.

National responsibility.

German culture and traditions.

A strong economy.

Those were not strange ideas to me.

Much of it reminded me of the conservative CDU I grew up with — the CDU of the Kohl years.

And suddenly I understood what had happened politically.

As the CDU moved toward the center and increasingly became able to govern with the SPD and Greens, it left a huge space open on its conservative side.

The AfD filled that space.

There ARE positions in today’s AfD that go further than the old CDU, and there are politicians and statements within the party that I strongly question.

But when I actually read the official program, I did not find the Nazi manifesto I had somehow expected after years of headlines.

I found a conservative, patriotic and strongly migration-critical program — with many positions that would have sounded very familiar to CDU voters decades ago.

And then I found one enormous difference that caught my attention:

DIRECT DEMOCRACY.

The AfD wants nationwide referendums based on the Swiss model.

That means giving ordinary citizens a direct vote on major political decisions instead of leaving everything to political parties once an election is over.

And this is where German politics becomes difficult to explain to people outside Germany.

Because there is something here called the:

“BRANDMAUER” — THE FIREWALL.

When the AfD first entered the Bundestag in 2017, the established parties decided that there should be no political cooperation with it.

At first, that may sound simple:

If you believe a party is dangerous, don’t work with it.

But think about what happens when that principle enters everyday parliamentary politics.

Suddenly, it is no longer only about WHAT somebody proposes.

It also becomes about WHO supports it.

And we have seen how absurd that can become.

In Berlin, the Left Party proposed installing more public drinking fountains.

Nothing radical.

Nothing extreme.

Just drinking water.

Then the AfD supported that proposal.

And suddenly, the Left Party voted against its own proposal!

Why?

Because AfD support had turned even a proposal about DRINKING FOUNTAINS into a political problem.

Think about that for a moment.

A proposal doesn’t become bad simply because somebody you dislike votes for it.

If tomorrow the AfD says:

“Let’s repair this broken bridge,”

does repairing the bridge suddenly become extreme right-wing policy?

Of course not.

Democracy should be about debating ideas and then voting on them.

Good ideas should remain good ideas regardless of who supports them.

And bad ideas should be rejected because they are bad — not because of the name printed on the person voting for them.

But the Brandmauer created another problem.

As the AfD became stronger, millions of voters effectively watched the party they elected being treated as politically untouchable.

And instead of stopping the AfD, something very different happened:

It kept growing.

That brings us back to Saxony-Anhalt.

And to an election that would recently shake German politics.

And then came the election campaign in Saxony-Anhalt.

Suddenly, subjects that many Germans felt had been ignored, minimized or simply dismissed as “right-wing” were being discussed more openly.

Migration.

Crime.

Our schools.

What our children are being taught.

And what successful integration actually means.

Some of the reports circulating in Germany were disturbing.

At a public school in Neuss, for example, authorities investigated allegations that a group of Muslim students had pressured other students to follow strict religious rules.

The reported demands included gender separation, Islamic dress rules for girls and special prayer arrangements. There were also allegations of pressure on Muslim students who did not share the group’s interpretation of Islam.

Police and state-security authorities became involved.

That does not mean that Sharia law governs German schools.

But it does mean that allegations of students attempting to impose religious rules within a German public school were serious enough to prompt official attention.

And parents were asking other uncomfortable questions.

How young should children be when schools begin teaching about sexuality?

How much should schools teach about gender identity and queer lifestyles?

Where does education end and ideology begin?

And should children ever feel that there is a “correct” political opinion they are expected to have?

That last question became part of the Saxony-Anhalt campaign itself.

A teacher was reportedly disciplined after making repeated anti-AfD statements in class. One student told ZDF that pupils were tired of repeatedly hearing how bad the AfD was.

If accurate, that raises a legitimate concern.

Teachers should teach children about democracy, Germany’s history and the dangers of extremism.

But teaching children how to evaluate political ideas is different from encouraging them to adopt a particular political view.

The AfD made these subjects a central part of its campaign.

Siegmund promised to remove what his party considers political ideology from schools, strengthen basic education and place greater emphasis on German history and culture.

You can agree with that.

You can disagree with it.

But people were discussing these issues more openly.

In the weeks surrounding the election, there were also reports that some people who publicly supported the AfD faced professional or social pressure.

A caretaker reportedly lost her job after openly supporting the party.

Firefighters who appeared in a photograph with Siegmund were reportedly warned that their employment could be at risk.

Lists also circulated naming companies and individuals accused of supporting the AfD, accompanied by calls to boycott them:

“Don’t buy from them.”

“Don’t work with them.”

“Don’t do business with them.”

These reports should be verified individually, and the legal circumstances of each case matter. But if people are threatened, dismissed or publicly targeted solely because they support a lawful political party, that is deeply troubling.

Germany’s history makes political blacklists especially sensitive.

That is not how a healthy democracy persuades voters.

It risks intimidating people into silence.

It may instead reinforce the belief that the political establishment does not want to understand them.

It wants to isolate them.

And that made me even more concerned.

Then, shortly before the election, another incident intensified the political atmosphere.

After a drone was reportedly observed near Leipzig/Halle Airport, Friedrich Merz publicly suggested that Russia could be responsible. The available information did not establish Russian responsibility, and the incident remained under investigation.

That distinction matters.

A suspected drone flight is not proof of Russian involvement.

Yet the accusation was made at a moment when tensions with Russia were already extremely high.

Instead of stepping back and acknowledging that his support had fallen to around 13% among the population, Merz appeared to be escalating the confrontation.

Rather than asking why so many Germans had lost confidence in him, he seemed willing to use an unverified incident to strengthen the narrative of an external enemy and justify a harder line toward Russia.

For many people, that raised a frightening question:

Was Friedrich Merz trying to drag Germany into a war?

That is not a question to ask lightly.

But when a politician with collapsing public support makes serious accusations against a nuclear power without publicly established evidence, citizens have every right to demand restraint, transparency and proof.

Then September 6 arrived.

The people of Saxony-Anhalt voted.

AfD: 43.8%.

CDU: 17.2%.

Read those numbers again.

The AfD more than doubled its result from the previous state election.

The CDU suffered its worst result ever in Saxony-Anhalt, losing half of what it had received before.

The AfD was no longer a marginal protest party.

Almost 44 out of every 100 second votes cast went to it.

Whatever anyone thinks about that result, one point should have been impossible to ignore:

A large part of the electorate was sending Germany’s political establishment a message.

And this is where I expected politicians to stop and ask:

WHY?

Why did so many voters leave the CDU?

Why did the AfD more than double its vote?

Why did the Brandmauer fail to prevent that growth?

Why did years of describing these voters as “extreme right” not bring them back?

What were these voters trying to communicate?

In a healthy democracy, those should have been among the first questions.

But that wasn’t the reaction I saw.

Only days after almost 44% of voters in Saxony-Anhalt chose the AfD, the debate about BANNING the AfD gained new momentum.

Think about the timing.

The AfD had just won a democratic election with 43.8%.

And instead of the political establishment first focusing on why almost half of the voters had chosen that party, Germany was once again discussing whether the party should be banned.

CDU politician Hendrik Wüst called for a federal-state working group to examine the constitutional options.

Politicians from the SPD and the Greens supported examining a possible ban procedure.

To be fair, Friedrich Merz himself has so far been skeptical.