Germany Foils a Far-Right Coup Plot
The political madness spreads
In Monday’s post, I wrote about the return of America’s hallucinatory bad-trip politics—how it ran rampant in our minds during the presidency of Donald Trump, burst briefly into the real world on January 6, 2021, then receded, and has now begun surging back thanks to Kanye West, Nick Fuentes, Elon Musk, and (of course) Trump himself.
On Wednesday morning, events in Germany reminded us that conspiracy-sodden political psychosis now wanders the globe, carried to other democracies on the digital winds of social media networks, where it can take root and inspire radical acts of political disruption.
Echoes of Weimar
On one level, the story is like something you’d read in a history of the Weimar Republic—or struggle to follow along with on Babylon Berlin, the excellent German TV show set in that period. An aging minor aristocrat obsessed with cockamamie conspiracies hatches plans with a radical retired army officer and a member of a far-right xenophobic political party to collaborate with a couple dozen insurgents in storming parliament, imprisoning leading politicians, seeking foreign support from Russia, and taking over the government in a coup, in the process re-establishing the German Reich.
But of course this is 2022, not 1928, so there are a number of things that make this present-day plan distinctive.
For one thing, the coup-plotters (including its alleged ringleader, Heinrich XIII, Prince of Reuss) appear to be members of the Reichsbürgerbewegung (Imperial Citizens’ Movement), which blends a denial of the legitimacy of the modern German state, tried-and-true conspiracies about the Rothschilds and Freemasons, and a more recent American import—QAnon’s suggestion of an insidious “deep state” running the show behind the scenes. Some of the several dozen people under investigation for involvement in the plot are also figures in Germany’s large and vocal anti-vaccination movement, which takes its inspiration from likeminded activists around the world, including in the United States. And, finally, there is the chilling fact, recounted in the Guardian’s coverage of the story, that the group of would-be right-wing revolutionaries was inspired to pursue its plan by the insurrectionary attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Where America once prided itself on helping to spread democracy around the world, we now play a leading role in disseminating the political toxins of the antiliberal right.
A Country Unified but Still Divided
But it would be misleading to suggest the plans of the coup-plotters had any realistic chance of succeeding. That’s another way in which our moment differs in crucial ways from the Weimar years, when a range of conservative parties and various groups in German civil society (shell-shocked veterans, military leaders, wealthy industrialists, small-business owners, remnants of a fading aristocracy, and a handful of mandarin intellectuals and academics) united in opposition to the left and allowed themselves to be seduced by the far right’s promises of renewed national glory and unity at a time of intense political polarization, national resentment, and economic dislocation.
Contemporary Germany could not be more different. Economically well off and politically stable, German democracy is institutionally entrenched and dominated by parties of the broad liberal center. Law enforcement in Germany, meanwhile, has, like in most liberal democracies, greatly increased its investigative powers since the September 11 terrorist attacks. That has enabled the government to thwart several plots by extremists in recent years, up to and including the one revealed with Wednesday morning’s raids.
Yet the very existence of those plots points to problems. Since its founding in the mid-2010s, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has stood alone on the far right, floating between 10 and 15 percent support in polls and elections. That makes it considerably weaker than comparable parties in France, Italy, and other European countries. But Germany’s uniquely appalling history with right-wing extremism leads many to find the revival of any far-right politics in the country unnerving. News that one of the leading coup plotters, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, has served as an AfD MP is bound to increase those concerns. So far, it appears the group included at least one other AfD politician, a former city council member from Olbernhau, in the eastern part of the country.
That news points to the worrying way the rise of extremism interacts with Germany’s regional cleavages. What I said above about the stability of German democracy, which has been consolidated for nearly eight decades now, is only partially true. The current German nation is of course an amalgam of the former West Germany, in which democracy was imposed by the victorious Western allies after World War II, and the former East Germany, where the Nazi regime was immediately succeeded by a communist dictatorship ultimately controlled by the Soviet Union.
Germany today is a synthesis of those two countries, unified 32 years ago, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. When I lived in Berlin six or so years after unification, it was common to hear the phrase “die Mauer im Kopf” (the wall in the mind) used to describe the persistent divide in sensibility separating “Wessies” (people from the former West Germany) from Ossies (those from the former East Germany). Later on, the terms were modified, with Ossies complaining about “Besser Wessies” (arrogant know-it-all former West Germans) and Wessies rolling their eyes at “Jammer Ossies (whining former East Germans).
The persistence of the divide isn’t surprising. At the time of unification, the former East was much poorer than the West, and its citizens lacked any experience or living memory of life in a liberal democracy. The German government spent considerable sums trying to bring the former East up to the level of the former West, but these efforts were only partially successful. Eventually the unified nation settled into a new normal, with the former East lagging behind the former West in employment, wages, life expectancy, and other indicators of quality of life.
In political terms, this has translated into greater support for the ideological fringes in the former East. At a national level, Die Linke, a party ultimately descended from the Marxist-Leninist ruling party of East Germany, won just under 5 percent of the vote in 2021, but it does much better than that in many of the states of the former East. And then there’s AfD on the right, which also enjoys much stronger support in the former East than it does in the West.
Fertile Soil for Far-Right Sedition
We will soon learn much more about those arrested this week. Will many of them turn out to have ties to the former East? Will connections to the AfD end up being deeper and more widespread among the 25 (so far) being held in custody? Far more than serving as evidence that Germany faces a serious threat of an insurrection that overturns its democracy, this week’s events may indicate that more than three decades out from unification, German society is far more deeply and dangerously divided than its normally placid politics would lead one to believe.
As we know all too well from the American political context, the antiliberal right thrives under conditions of polarization and distrust of centralized authority. The liberal state defends itself against a threat from the fringes that’s animated by amped-up skepticism of centralized power—and that very effort comes to serve as evidence of an elite-liberal conspiracy to stamp out dissent, confirming the right’s suspicions. And then another, more disruptive cycle of centrifugal turbulence begins.
We’ve seen more than enough to know how this process unfolds—but not yet enough to see a clear path through it with our institutions intact. The world’s liberal democracies may well have no choice but to keep muddling through, learning from each other’s mistakes, making course corrections along the way in response to what works and what doesn’t, and hoping we can ride out the populist storm until it passes.
After this week’s events in Europe, we now know for sure that Germany will be among our closest allies in the struggle.
The NYT did a 5 episode podcast called Day X that goes in detail on the background behind this attempted coup. It was released in 2021 and I listened to it at the time and found it fascinating. I will need to listen to it again.
I don’t know enough to make an intelligent comment. I can say thank you for this solid explainer of the Who/what/why and how. I had no idea about the east/west disparities but it makes sense. I’ll be interested in any follow up you do.