The extreme right’s win in Germany poses an existential problem: what is the truth, and what are the limits of representation’s power? Like a century ago, the answers matter to the world
Catholic writer and analyst Chris Caldwell is, as usual, brilliant in writing about the crisis in Germany that led to the recent AfD victory in Saxony-Anhalt. He says[1]:
“Fifteen years ago, Germany held an unassailable position as the top Western European economy. It was an export powerhouse, built around the auto industry and a sturdy business model that needed only three things: cheap Russian energy, cheap Central European labor, and the exponentially rising Chinese demand for cars and industrial machinery. There was a mystery, though. At a time when all seemed to be going well, voters were souring on the CDU and SPD—to the extent that those two parties essentially had to merge in three of the four coalitions through which Angela Merkel ruled Germany from 2005 to 2021. It seemed that whomever you voted for, you got the same parties in power.
A diagnosis was offered by the former Berlin finance official Thilo Sarrazin in his book Deutschland schafft sich ab (“The Abolition of Germany”) in 2010. Sarrazin, a Social Democrat, argued that Germany was making a lot of bad investments, which over time would undermine its economy. The very worst of these was mass migration. Far from aiding the economy, it was building up invisible liabilities in the pension, education, and health systems. And part of the reason, the blunt Sarrazin added, with educational statistics at the ready, was that the migrants were generally not as bright as the natives whose places they were taking. The book sparked an unprecedented intellectual rage.”
However, the president of the German Conference of Bishops, Bishop Heiner Wilmer, had a different take.[2] The issue isn’t taking away legitimate representation, as Caldwell put it, but rather a misleading misrepresentation of reality that offers easy answers to concrete but complex problems.
“The temptations of our time don’t come in the shape of dictatorships. They come along claiming to offer us convenience and superficial efficiency. We are confronted by veritable promises of salvation every single day…Truth is the infrastructure of freedom. A free society lives from people being able to put forward different opinions. But freedom is also contingent on a shared reality. And this is not a new challenge that is posed in the digital age… freedom of opinion loses its democratic meaning when facts are falsified, suppressed or replaced by disinformation. Where the truth becomes arbitrary, freedom becomes arbitrary too.
The opponent of freedom is fear. Italian sociologist Carlo Bordoni describes fear as a formative political and societal force of the present. Traditional certainties begin to crack, leading to the creation of a “liquid society” in which uncertainty becomes a permanent experience. Bordoni shows that countries are becoming increasingly unable to live up to their promise of being able to guarantee comprehensive security. People are thus not only living with concrete dangers, but also with the constant expectation of potential threats. This is precisely where the political power of fear lies: It influences how people perceive the world and take political decisions. Fear heightens the desire for certainty, for simple answers, for home. When people experience uncertainty, the temptation to reduce complex questions to simple solutions grows. Whose fault is it? Who promises to provide security? And then also: Who will take away our responsibility? The real danger is thus that people are willing to give up a part of their freedom out of fear of uncertainty, and to seek protection from external authorities… The actual conflict of our time is therefore a conflict of hermeneutics: How do we understand and interpret reality? There are religious and philosophical interpretations promising simple answers to the great cultural questions of our time, construing a new Antichrist and ruthlessly exploiting people’s longing for orientation and their need for protection. We as a Church, and as Churches, are strongly opposed to this. Faith loses its truth when it becomes an ideology and religious language is used to sow fear or to pit people against one another.
if freedom needs truth, if fear threatens freedom, and we find ourselves in a cultural conflict about the interpretation of reality, then the decisive question arises as to the responsibility which this entails for us. This confrontation is not abstract. It is decided in the political and cultural sphere in which we live… Our society lives on people being willing to repeatedly examine their own convictions in comparison with reality. This means that truth starts with a willingness to self-correct. Anyone only looking for confirmation via their smartphone or from the population loses the ability to enter into a dialogue. But those seeking the truth assume responsibility for the public debate, enhancing trust and our democracy.”
In other words, Caldwell may be entirely correct in analyzing the German situation, but if the AfD whipped up consensus by stirring fears, distorting reality, and peddling outlandish solutions, then we are in a different ball game. Adolf Hitler did win an election; was it wrong to deny representation to 1/3 of Germany that chose to vote for him? Germany indeed had many problems before Hitler, and his rule did provide some solutions.
This is an ancient quandary of democracy. In ancient Greek, the terms tyrannòs and demokratikòs were synonymous and described someone who stirred up popular sentiment to pervert democracy, using democracy against a democratic system.
Where are we now? Moreover, the AfD is the single largest party with about 28% in opinion polls. But since Germany is now pitted for or against the AfD (this seems to be the biggest divide), that means 72% of Germans are against the AfD.
The core problem, however, seems to be that the United States, the philosophical and cultural center of the world, and the American Catholics perceive German troubles very differently from how many Germans and the German Church perceive them. This could be quite important. Because understanding Germany one way or another leads to Europe and thus also the United States to move in one way or another.
In the spirit of a genuine pursuit of truth from facts, the US Church should invite Bishop Wilmer to America to ask questions and try to understand what is happening there. A century later, Germany’s future could still be the world’s future.
[1] https://firstthings.com/why-the-afd-wins/
[2] Bishop Dr Heiner Wilmer, President of the German Bishops’ Conference,The future of freedom starts with the truth. What our democracy depends on, 9 September 2026, Berlin
