Feb. 24: Germans Vote for—but Won't Get—Change
U.S. and Ukraine close to mineral deal; Trump meets with Macron at White House; Is MAGA latching on to the wrong man?
The Big Story
In German federal elections on Sunday, voters delivered a decisive rebuke to the incumbent ruling coalition led by the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) won the largest share of votes, 28.5%, while the populist-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), lately endorsed by Elon Musk, finished in second, with 20.8%, double the party’s share from 2021. The SPD earned a little more than 16% of the vote, the party’s worst result since 1887, when it was subject to official repression under the Wilhelmine Anti-Socialist Laws.
Altogether, the political right received 49.3% of the vote. The ruling “traffic-light coalition”—comprising the Social Democrats (red), the Greens (green), and the pro-business Free Democratic Party (yellow)—earned less than a third, with the FDP falling below the 5% threshold for representation in the Bundestag. Aside from the CDU and AfD, the only faction to increase its vote share was the far left: Die Linke, the successor to the old East German ruling party, received 8.8% of the vote, nearly double its 2021 share, and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which recently splintered from Die Linke, received 4.9%. Altogether, the “extremes” earned 34.5% of the total vote—more than all the parties of the governing coalition combined. The rejection of the center was most pronounced among the young, a majority of whom voted for the far left or far right. According to the Financial Times, 52% of voters aged 18 to 24 voted for the AfD, Die Linke, or BSW, though the overall number obscures a dramatic gender gap. One-quarter of German men aged 18 to 24 voted for AfD, compared to 14% of women of the same age, while nearly one-third (31%) of women under 25 voted for Die Linke.
In Germany, as elsewhere in the West, the collapse of the center left is being driven principally by immigration. Though post-pandemic inflation, economic stagnation, and high energy prices related to the war in Ukraine all played a role, preelection polling suggested that immigration was the single most important issue for the German electorate. As The New York Times’ David Leonhardt notes, the share of Germany’s population born in another country has risen from 12.5% in 2015 to nearly 20% today, including about 1 million Syrians and half a million Afghans; the foreign-born commit about 40% of the country’s crimes, which has not been lost on German voters for whom the events of New Year’s Eve 2015, when about 1,200 German women across the country were sexually assaulted by men of Middle Eastern and North African origin, still loom large. Long-term frustrations have been amplified by a string of high-profile murders and terror attacks in the run-up to the election. Last summer, a German police officer in Mannheim was stabbed to death on camera by an Afghan migrant while policing a demonstration from a far-right anti-immigrant group. In January, a 28-year-old Afghan attacked a group of kindergarten children with a knife in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, killing two. Earlier this month, a 24-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan drove a Mini Cooper into a crowd in Munich while shouting “Allahu akbar,” killing two and injuring more than 40.
Despite what would seem to be a decisive popular rebuke to the political status quo, Germans are likely to continue receiving a version of it. CDU leader Friedrich Merz, a businessman and committed Atlanticist who now looks set to become Germany’s next chancellor, has promised to toughen Germany’s immigration laws, slash regulations to promote economic growth, and assume a leading role in Europe’s efforts to resist the Trump administration. But he has ruled out the possibility of forming a coalition with the AfD, which means his only viable option is to form a “grand coalition” with the SPD, which will likely force the CDU to moderate on some or all of these issues. Indeed, the German establishment’s strategy of perpetually forming grand coalitions of the center to keep the “far right” out of government—the country has been ruled by a CDU-SPD coalition for 12 of the past 20 years—has itself contributed to the rise of the extremes. As Jeremy Stern explained for Tablet last March, the grand coalition pushes the CDU to the left and the SPD to the right, barring them from offering anything other than the “centrist compromise politics” that voters are increasingly rejecting.
As Stern wrote at the time:
We can … expect the various efforts to wish away the AfD to fail, and for the next German government to be a grand coalition with Merz at the helm. In the meantime, immigration continues to rise. Germany is now receiving half the number of migrants America does, despite having only a quarter of the population and being roughly the size of Montana. On the whole, the migrants will not provide a quick solution to Germany’s aging workforce or shortage of skilled labor. Instead, they are increasingly identified as disproportionately responsible for a recent spate of antisemitic incidents, especially since Oct. 7, as well as a marked rise in violent crime—including an escalating crisis of rapes and sexual assaults. In other words, it is hard to imagine a political configuration more favorable to the AfD. Unless the CDU can find a way to both govern and win elections from the right, the firewall will eventually crumble, and the AfD will take power in Germany.
The first part of that prediction has been borne out. We’ll have to wait and see about the second part.
Read Jeremy Stern’s essay here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/germany-far-right-stopped-afd-jeremy-stern
The Rest
→The United States and Ukraine are in the “final stages of negotiations” regarding a minerals deal, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna announced Monday morning on X. According to reports in Bloomberg and Axios, the new deal drops the demand for Ukraine to commit to paying $500 billion to the United States as repayment for military aid—a provision that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reportedly balked at when he rejected the initial deal last week. Ukraine will, however, pay $500 billion into a “Reconstruction Investment Fund” jointly managed by Washington and Kyiv but 100% owned by the United States. In exchange, Washington will “provide a long-term financial commitment to the development of a stable and economically prosperous Ukraine,” though the deal does not include the formal security guarantees that Zelenskyy had been lobbying for.
→Trump hosted French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House on Monday, and both leaders dialed in to a meeting of the G7 in Kyiv to mark the third anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war. Compared to most other Western European leaders, Macron has been relatively sanguine about what he described to the Financial Times earlier this month as Trump’s “electroshock” directed at Europe—which he seems to regard as a spur to the more active European security policy he has long championed—and the two leaders were relaxed and chummy at a joint White House press conference Monday afternoon. Trump told the press that fighting in Ukraine could be wrapped up within “weeks,” and also floated the idea of reaching an “economic” deal with Russia if peace negotiations proceed successfully. Trump and Macron endorsed the idea of deploying European peacekeepers to Ukraine, a move Trump said would obviate the need for formal U.S. security guarantees to Ukraine.
→Israel announced on Sunday that it would not release 602 Palestinian security prisoners—who had been slated to be freed on Saturday—in retaliation for Hamas’ ceremony last Thursday parading the bodies of dead Israeli hostages. On Monday, YNet News reported that Israel was offering to release the prisoners in exchange for the bodies of four additional Israeli hostages currently held in Gaza, as long as Hamas guaranteed that it would hand over the bodies without a ceremony. YNet later reported, citing Palestinian and Saudi sources, that the sides were close to an agreement in which Israel would release the prisoners in exchange for the bodies of two hostages, though nothing had been announced by the time The Scroll closed on Monday. Ahead of his planned trip to the Middle East later this week, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff said Sunday that he was hoping to negotiate an extension of phase one of the deal, which is set to expire at the end of this week, rather than proceed to phase two, which calls for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a permanent end to the war.
→Speaking of Witkoff and Trump’s other surrogates, we’re seeing more messaging confusion regarding Trump’s proposal for Israel to “clear out” Gaza and then hand it over to the United States. As we noted in Friday’s Big Story, Trump indicated at the end of last week that he still favored his relocation proposal over the Arab alternative, which merely calls for the disarmament of Hamas, and noted that it would be difficult if not impossible to “wipe out” Hamas without clearing out the population because “they are so interspersed among people.” Apparently, Trump is the only person in the Trump administration to feel that way. On Saturday night, for instance, Witkoff’s deputy, Morgan Ortagus, told Fox’s Sean Hannity that Gaza would have to be “demilitarized” and “deradicalized.” On Sunday, Witkoff said, “I would say at this point, for sure, [Hamas] can’t be any part of governance in Gaza” and that Hamas’ leaders will have to “physically” leave Gaza, but that he’d leave to Netanyahu the question of Hamas “existing.” And on Monday, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz told Fox, “Hamas will not rule Gaza, period.” Which may be what they wish Trump had said, but it is not what he actually said.
→Matthew Kassel of Jewish Insider has a new report on Elbridge “Bridge” Colby’s close professional ties to the Obama-Biden foreign policy world. Colby, nominated for undersecretary of defense policy, has been billed by his supporters as a champion of “America First” foreign policy opposed only by “neocons,” “globalists,” and surviving members of the “Bush/Cheney cabal.” But as Kassel notes, Colby’s “newfound status as a MAGA favorite has come in spite of his deep professional ties to Democratic foreign policy circles—where his views, until not too long ago, found a more receptive home.” Among the connections listed by Kassel, some of which were included in Lee Smith’s Tablet article last week:
Between 2014 and 2017, and again from 2018 to 2019, Colby worked at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a Democratic Party-aligned think tank that served as a feeder for the Obama administration. One Democratic national security expert who worked with Colby at CNAS told JI that he was seen within the organization as a “reasonable” conservative, but one whose views on Iran were “to the left of most Democrats.”
Colby worked as a “senior adviser” at WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm founded by Antony Blinken and CNAS co-founder and Obama administration veteran Michèle Flournoy. A 2020 article in Politico described WestExec as “Biden’s Cabinet in waiting.”
In the acknowledgments of his 2021 book, Colby listed Flournoy among the “friends, mentors, colleagues, and supporters” who helped shape the book, and he thanked Jon Finer, who served as then Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff under Obama and as a top deputy to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan under Biden, for reading and commenting on his manuscript.
In 2011, Colby was a member of a public-private nuclear disarmament working group alongside Alexandra Bell of the Ploughshares Fund, the central node in the “echo chamber” used to sell Obama’s Iran deal.
Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a veteran of the CIA, told JI that Colby “used to be my assistant.”
As one anonymous former defense official told Jewish Insider, “I think MAGA has an unsophisticated take on geopolitics and U.S. foreign policy, and they latch on to people who they think are aligned ideologically. I don’t actually think they are aligned that much in [Colby’s] case.”
Read it here: https://jewishinsider.com/2025/02/trumps-embattled-pentagon-pick-colby-holds-close-ties-to-obamas-foreign-policy-advisors/
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When you say Merz is an Atlanticist, you must mean he is aligned with the Democrat party foreign policy and intelligence blob, the Atlantic Council crowd and the anti-Trump EU ... the latter three will recognize an ally in him for their own failing anti-Trump campaign on a European level. Friedrich Merz is all in for censorship, just like they are ... Anyway, Germany will muddle through four years of escalating political and economic malaise ... The sole hope to end it is that some force from outside, like TRUMP, bursts their tragic complacency. Otherwise, decline ... and 50% and rising of the country's foreign-born ... Bye bye, Germany.
The conservative Wall Street Journal continued taking swipes at Donald Trump this week with two editorials, published in as many days, that called out the U.S. president’s purported bid to end Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The newspaper’s editorial board called out what it described as “the looming rehabilitation” of Russian President Vladimir Putin, facilitated by Trump, as negotiations to end the conflict, which Putin began with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, start between U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia. Ukrainian officials were notably not invited to participate in the meeting to decide their fate.
The Journal reminded readers of just some of the horrors of Putin’s brutal campaign in Ukraine — such as the killing or maiming of hundreds of thousands of people, the targeting of civilian homes, and the kidnapping of Ukrainian-born children. It contrasted all that, and more, with Trump’s talk about inviting Putin to America.
“We realize that the ruthless men who rule much of the world can’t be ignored. But usually, those men aren’t rewarded with a visit to the U.S., as Mr. Trump hinted last week before they’ve made any compromises,” said the board.
“Any peace Mr. Putin strikes has to be made with all of his legacy of destruction in mind,” it concluded