There are weeks in the life of a capital when the air in the government quarter thickens, when a chancellor steps before the microphones not to announce a policy but to name a danger. Wednesday in Berlin was such a day. Friedrich Merz, his approval rating sinking and his parties freshly punished in local elections by forces of the far right and the far left alike, came out to pronounce the word the centrists of Europe reach for when the ground moves beneath them: extremism. As Reuters reported for Al Jazeera, the chancellor hit out at what he called political “extremism” after the stinging defeats, and promised that the fight against it would be his own.
This is a task for our society as a whole, and it is one I intend to play my part in.
The thief of chairs
The immediate wound has a name and a place. In Saxony-Anhalt, in the old East where the Alternative for Germany has long fed on the resentments of the forgotten, a member of the far-right party — Ulrich Siegmund — was elected president of the state parliament, the Straits Times reported. It was that capture of a legislature’s chair that prompted Merz’s warning on Wednesday that extremism was entering the country’s parliaments. Note the choreography: first the party is shunned, then it wins votes, then it takes the procedural crown of an assembly itself. The firewall, so loudly proclaimed, is breached not by storm but by ballot and by gavel.
Squeezed from two directions
What makes the chancellor’s predicament distinct is the geometry of the siege. The gains came not only for the AfD but for parties of the far left, a pincer on a political centre that once took its permanence for granted. Those who rule from the middle have always consoled themselves that the extremes cancel each other out; history suggests they more often feed on one another, each outrage from one flank recruiting for the other, while the centre is left explaining itself. Whether Merz’s promise of a whole-of-society fight amounts to a programme or merely to a posture, the reporting does not yet say. But a leader who must announce that he intends to play his part has already conceded the doubt that made the announcement necessary.