Europe’s centrists are finally paying the price of their extremism

Friedrich Merz has been German chancellor for less than a year and half, and his approval ratings are at record lows. His centre-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), which just lost one state election and was obliterated in another, is in free fall across the country.

The German media cannot talk or write about anything else, blaming Merz for weak campaigning, for boxing himself into an unpopular coalition with the social democrats, for failing to energise the youth as the ultraright Alternative for Germany (AfD) has. All true, all secondary.

What is actually dying in Germany is not just a hitherto dominant party, but the image of centrist politicians as moderate technocrats. After three decades of this facade of moderation and competence, it is now becoming clear that they were neither moderate nor competent.

Alas, first gradually, then suddenly, the masks are falling to the ground, and now the majority can see them for what they have always been: Zealots ruthlessly pursuing dead-end, misanthropic policies that have gutted German society’s capacity to sustain itself and brought it to the verge of an unnecessary war on European soil.

Zealotry dressed in a grey suit and speaking in a soothing voice, repeating ad nauseam that “there is no alternative,” doesn’t look like zealotry until it starts to fail at an epic scale. What changed recently, with inevitable repercussions at the ballot box, is that the deindustrialisation and stagnation caused by the centrists’ extremism has become impossible to ignore.

The AfD did not surge because, overnight, millions of Germans had an epiphany that made them more susceptible to fascist tropes. Its ranks swelled because years of austerity made the German people stare in the face of a loss of status and a high probability of real poverty. Is it any wonder that the ultra-right succeeded in creating an electoral tsunami out of the longing for a return to a fictional golden past – a past lacking the “suspicious” stranger: The Muslim, the Jew, the trans?

It is the same story from Berlin to Paris to London. French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrism has single-handedly pushed France to the edge of a far-right presidency. He made promises of a French renaissance that is impossible, given the shackles of the monetary union with Germany that lacks the necessary democratic and political union.

He has piled tax breaks on the ultra-rich few at a time when the many have struggled to pay for the petrol that their cars need to get them to work. He has raised the retirement age to 64 at a time when impoverished workers’ life expectancy is no more than 72 years.