The real winners of the German election are the hard-right leader Alice Weidel and her White House friends, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. Whatever Friedrich Merz’s plans are, he must expect barrage fire from the Weidel-White House connection. Looking back at the election campaign, it looks like he’s actually inviting it.

This long-read offers a different explanation for the hard-right surge in Germany. It shows that German unification in 1990, signalling the triumph of liberal democracy and the onset of neoliberal globalization, unleashed a new form of nationalism—Deutschmark nationalism—which, after mutating into export nationalism for a while, became the ideological seed for the AfD.

As Vladimir Putin amassed troops near the Ukraine border, Joe Biden pressured Olaf Scholz to cut natural gas imports from Russia. Yet Scholz put diplomacy before sanctions and sabre-rattling. Then came the turnaround: two days after Russia’s invasion, Germany cancelled the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and announced its largest rearmament program since the Second World War.

Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals want to form a government in Germany but are unable to come up with a program that would point in the direction of fixing the most pressing issues. They are heading towards a lame-duck government that will reinforce the recognition of urgently needed change and a fear of change that was reflected in the outgoing Merkel government.