Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz (pictured), is ripping up the script so quickly that we scribblers can hardly keep pace. In early March, there was the double bazooka of €100bn each for defence and infrastructure; a few days later, he raised us “whatever it takes”. Goodbye, the sacred “debt brake” – and about time. As I said on the opening page of my book The Shortest History of Germany, published in 2017, Europe’s largest economy needs to start acting like a great power at the heart of the West. Eight years later, this call has become an SOS. But what about the German federal election at the end of February? Do we really want to be led by a nation in which Elon Musk’s beloved Alternative for Germany (AFD) is the second-largest parliamentary party? To misquote Barack Obama: yes, we do. To understand this, we need to understand why the AFD is not the threat to German democracy that many make it out to be. After the election, a widely circulated map showed what the outcome of the vote would have been if Germany had a first-past-the-post system like the UK: it exactly mirrored the Cold War division between east and west. 

Many people blame West German arrogance after reunification for the far-right’s triumph in the country’s east. This is just the domestic German version of the Putin-is-only-aggressive-because-Nato-provoked-him shtick. The truth is that the electorate in the east has chosen authoritarian, anti-liberal parties ever since it got the vote: first the Prussian Conservatives before the First World War, then the German National People’s Party (DNVP), then the Nazi Party. Indeed, in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor, he only ever got within distant sight of a national majority (43.9 per cent) because he piled up huge votes in eastern Germany. And he only made it over the 50 per cent threshold thanks to the 8 per cent of the DNVP, which was also much stronger in the east and formed an important part of the so-called “Hitler coalition”. 

And therein lies the truth about Germany: the east is unique because it has always had completely different priorities to the west, being far younger and colonial in origin. When, in 1198, Germans took the small Slavic fishing villages next to what we now call Berlin, Köln, Mainz, Bonn and Frankfurt were 1,200-year-old, Roman-founded cities at the heart of western Europe. For the Germans in the east, though, the story, through the Teutonic knights, Frederick the Great and the Prussian General Staff, up to the Hitler-Stalin pact and Operation Barbarossa, was the same: keep peace with the Slavs when they seem too strong; crush them if you get the chance. And like William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” Anyone who lived in the German Democratic Republic experienced the final humiliation in this 900-year battle: occupation by the Red Army. Different histories; different people.

So all that actually happened in February is that eastern Germany voted as it always has. The consolation is that the region is now much smaller than in 1933. Indeed, provided that the west holds its nerve, the east can vote however it wants to. Western Germans can forget the optimistic vision of national near-consensus and get used to seeing Germany like the US: a country with almost immoveable red and blue states. Democracy is a fight. So bring on that double bazooka, Herr Kanzler, or whatever it takes. And please use that €500bn infrastructure spending in the West. Taxpayers there have sent more than €2trn to the East since 1990 and it hasn’t changed a thing; because it can’t.

Hawes is the author of several books, including ‘The Shortest History of Germany’.