Germany’s Seismic Shift: The Rise of the AfD

0:00David McWilliams: It's all about Germany today, what the AFD's victory means, what it means for Germany, what it means for economics, what it means for European Union, what it means for the globe, and is this the moment where things begin to shift on their axis. So it is all Germany coming up in a couple of minutes. Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. Summer is here and with it, the hot and sticky weather. A morning working in the garden or maybe on the golf course can leave you more depleted than you realize. And plain water isn't always the most efficient way to restore the balance.

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1:41David McWilliams: To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you? How are you all German tonight? We are going full German today because the news this week, which is not just news, it can be seen as a seismic shift in European politics, economics, demography, not only demography and economics but also geopolitics, geoeconomics, has been a tremor from a small, I wouldn't say inconsequential, but not particularly important German state called Saxony Anhalt. And there, the AFD, the Alternative for Deutschland, got 44 % of the vote. I will just give you a little chilling, maybe not particularly interesting, but I think quite unusual anecdote.

2:42David McWilliams: Who else got 44 % of the vote in 1933? Mr Adolf Hitler. That's what he got. He never won an overall majority. He got 44 % of the vote. And that allowed in former government in 1933, a coalition government, which again, eventually, the Nazis decided to dispense with the coalition part of that. It's all about the AFD. We're going to talk, first of all, about why we think this happened, what the implications are for Germany, what the implications are for the EU, what the implications are for the globe. And then we're also going to see, is there any way that this trend in Europe, whether you're in Italy, whether you're in Britain, whether you're in France, now whether you're in Germany, can be stopped this move towards what would we regard as reasonably radical populism?

3:32David McWilliams: So there you have it, Johnny Boy. We have a full program, a full show today, a full podcast today. Absolutely. Well, let's get into this, because I am finding this absolutely fascinating. But let's just clarify a couple of things first. Yes. First of all, whereabouts is Saxony-Anhalt? Right. So if you want to identify somewhere which is smack in the middle of Germany, that is Saxony-Anhalt. It was the most Western province or state in East Germany. The capital is Magdeburg. If you are driving across Germany, for example, if you are driving from, let's say, from Frankfurt and or Cologne and or Dusseldorf or Duisburg to Berlin, you will drive straight through Saxony-Anhalt.

4:23David McWilliams: It is a very beautiful state, not particularly heavily populated state. In fact, in the book Money, I did a chapter on... That's your book, is it? It's a book that I wrote, yes, exactly. is a chapter on a place called Goslar. Goslar is a Saxony anhalt. It was the place where the Europeans, or they were at the time Saxons, found the biggest silver deposits in the medieval age. Ah, yeah. It was actually the place, ironically, in economic history, that sparked the re-emergence of money. So money disappeared in the Dark Ages. and in around 1000 AD or 1100 AD, lots and lots of silver was found in the Harz Mountains, which are right in the middle of Saxony Anahalt.

5:14David McWilliams: So again, Magdeburg is the capital. It's right in the centre of Germany. It was, again, as I say, the most western part of East Germany. That is important, John, in the context that it's also the state that has suffered most emigration out of it to the more prosperous parts of Western Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And that is seen as part of the background story because the people who emigrated out of, well, they didn't emigrate, they migrated out of that area to maybe the Bavarias or maybe the Hanovers, the Hamburgs, the Ruhrgebiet, those people were largely women, largely well-educated and largely young.

5:55David McWilliams: So what you get is an older population. But the interesting fact, John, is the demographic makeup of the AFD's supporters, number one. And number two, and I think maybe even more interesting, is the fact that if you look at the breakdown, while 44 % of people voted for the AFD, at least 30 % voted for various iterations of the extreme left. so the people are voting extreme right and extreme left and of course what that means is the profound decimation of the center the center that has run germany since the second world war largely the cdu the christian democratic union which has been the party of government in effect almost like the tories in england the tories in england are tend to be the party almost like the default government Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

6:52David McWilliams: Like your Fianna Fáil, Fianna Gael coalitions here have always been the Christian Democratic Union, of which the most celebrated recent leader was Angela Merkel, who many people think is actually to blame for what's going on. And the collapse also of the SPD, the Social Democratic Party. So there's all sorts of things in the mix, but that's where it is. It's right in the centre of Germany, pretty much a poor part of eastern Germany, subsumed into the new united Germany in 1990. And as a result of its geography, has suffered more migration out of it because it has been closer to, or it was physically closer to, more proximate to the much more prosperous West Germany.

7:34David McWilliams: So that's where it is. Okay, so, and it's worth noting as well that it was a very high turnout election. Something in around 75 % turned out, which speaks volumes in itself. But just staying on the demographics here for a second. We spoke before about how the male population were veering right and the female population tended, no, it's not strict, but tended to veer more left. Is that what was happening here as well? That's part of the story. So what we see all over the world is young males are leaning right wing and young women are leaning left wing. That's what we see all over the world. You see it in Ireland, you see it in the UK, you see it in the United States enormously.

8:22David McWilliams: And again, that may well be to do with the radicalization of young fellas through the internet and the radicalization of young fellas through what you call fake news, this news, that news. But also there is the sense that, again, this is a much more deeply embedded problem, is that young men in general have seen their economic position relative to their parents and relative to young women over the last 20 years decline quite substantially. And the reason for that is that what used to keep particularly young working class lads in employment were manufacturing jobs. And those manufacturing jobs have gradually migrated to China.

9:10David McWilliams: We're seeing that particularly in Germany, we'll talk about it in a little while, in the car industry, which is the backbone of industrial Germany. That's the first thing. Second thing is young boys are not doing as well in school. The third thing, young boys are not going to university in the same way. And as a consequence of that, as the economy goes more towards the service economy and the softer economy, the relative position of young men relative to young women has declined. and that is pushing them towards more what people would regard as radical, but maybe people could also say more logical positions.

9:47David McWilliams: And the AFD have certainly appealed to those young men. But the interesting thing is it's not just that they're going extreme, what you would call right. I don't even know if that's an opposite description anymore, but they're also going extreme left too. But what they're doing is they're rejecting the centre. They're rejecting the politics of their grandparents or their parents. Well, in the case of Saxony and Anhalt, it's very hard to say that because the politics of their parents would have been communist and the politics of their grandparents would have been Nazi. So they don't really have a long history, John, of liberal centrism.

10:19David McWilliams: And well, on the one hand, on the other hand, politics, they tend to go for, you know, somebody who tells them what to do. Yeah, but you're talking about the center of politics there in Germany, which could be summed up by the kind of pro-EU kind of approach. Very much so, yeah. So you could say that there's a big growing anti-EU sentiment in Germany. So what does that mean for Germany's relationship with the rest of Europe? Well, I'm not sure. It's like, I think that still West Germany is probably the most pro-European country in Europe. The reason being, anytime you go to Germany, if you have German friends, if you've tried to learn the language, if you've spent any time there, there's two major dilemmas in Germany.

11:09David McWilliams: One is Europeans don't want Germans to lead on a fundamental cultural and historical basis, right? And the other one is we like the Germans paying the bills, but we don't like them cracking the whip. But number two, since the Second World War, Germany is afraid of itself. It's that idea that Willy Brandt said, we are an economic giant and a political pygmy. And even since unification in 1990, which people should really remember, nobody voted on. This is the interesting thing. The Germans didn't vote on unification. There was no plebiscite. There was never a referendum. It happened because Helmut Kohl drove it through.

11:51David McWilliams: Now, it was kind of inevitable, but it wasn't necessarily something that was democratically elected by the Germans. But the key thing is that Germany has never, ever felt since the Second World War that it has the maturity to lead the European Union. So you've had this very ambiguous relationship where Germany has always paid the bills of the European Union, has always been genuflected to by the European Union, but the Europeans don't want them to lead and the Germans don't want them to lead themselves. Now, what the AFD have basically said is... But has that not kind of changed? Like, is this not a signal that that attitude has changed?

12:30David McWilliams: Yeah, I mean, the AFD's idea is Germany first. They are going to take down, for even symbolically, they said we're going to take down all European flags. We're going to put up the black, red and gold flag of Germany everywhere. They have said what they want to do in the Constitution is they want to have, and this could maybe is a bit spine-chilling, they said in history, German in school, they're going to have more Bismarck, less Hitler. So basically they're going to say, we've done our penance. We've done our sackcloth and ashes. We know what happened, etc. So what you're looking at is a very, very severe rupture in what was regarded as the most stable state in Central Europe.

13:13David McWilliams: Because don't forget, after the Second World War, all efforts, particularly on the part of the Western powers, that's particularly America, Britain and France, but particularly America, was to anchor West Germany into the Western European alliance. This is a sort of Atlanticist thing, that there's an Atlantic alliance of which Germany is part of. And that, of course, is the deep cleavage between the AFD and the Berlin government and previously the Bonn government. And I think that's probably one of the biggest changes. In the mix, John, of course, is anybody with any semblance of political now will say when Angela Merkel opened the door to many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of migrants, now 20 % of the German population is first generation or actual migrant.

14:04David McWilliams: So that's one in five. That's a very, very high proportion of the population. Up until, you know, let's say 2012, 2013, European politics in general was kind of stable. And once immigration has become the big issue, all these other factors tend to become more acute. So the notion that the people in Saxony and Hout are poorer, the fact that after the end of North Stream gas from Russia, after the Russian war on Ukraine, what you find is the cost of living, the cost of energy for the average German has gone up. So you've got an increase in the cost of living, you have a decrease in the standard of living.

14:51David McWilliams: You put on top of that a new message, which is that Germans don't need to be humiliated anymore. They don't need to constantly genuflect to the past anymore, that in fact the past is over. And you add on top of that immigration, even though, ironically, Saxony and Halt would be one of the states in Germany, or the landers in Germany that have leased immigrants, simply because immigrants go to areas that are richer. So the immigrants will go to Hamburg or they'll go to Berlin or they'll go to Bavaria. But the fact is that it has become part of the cocktail. And then there's this final piece, John, which is called Ostnostalgie.

15:34David McWilliams: And Ostnostalgie is a nostalgia for East Germany, which is very evident now in the former lands of East Germany. and it's not so much a nostalgia for the Stasi or for the single party government or for the German Communist Party. What it is is a nostalgia for the stability, for the security, for the sense of permanence, for the economic comfort, ironically, of East Germany, for the fact that you are not being exposed to pressures from America, you're not being exposed to pressures from China, you're not being exposed to economic hardship. In fact, the notion that you were all part of one communist country meant that at least there was a sense of equality.

16:17David McWilliams: And again, what you're finding in Germany is that people are nostalgic for those days of what they would call the security of East Germany. So you put all those into the mix. Hang on, that's really odd, you know, because my understanding anyway is that's a bit of a short memory. because there might have been that security and stuff, but it was a pretty low standard of living, pretty miserable. It's a little bit like Irish people harken back to the 40s and 50s, you know. Well, you're absolutely right. But, I mean, you see it all over Central Europe. I mean, I really experienced it this summer in Croatia.

16:55David McWilliams: A lot of people in Croatia and certainly in Serbia, but certainly Croatia is even unusual, have a certain type of nostalgia for Tito, for Yugoslavia, for what they would regard as the sort of the good life of the 1970s and 80s. And the good life was you really didn't have to worry about things like paying rent, paying electricity. Imagine in East Germany, there was no electricity bills, no telephone bills. There was no rent. There was no house prices. I mean, all these things were provided by the state. Obviously, as well, your job was provided by the state, and there was no unemployment. There was no actual unemployment.

17:33David McWilliams: There was obviously underemployment, but everyone had a job and all this. So what I'm saying is that on a very immediate memory, what you have is a collective nostalgia towards an image of East Germany that I think you're absolutely right. I mean, there's nothing more problematic, the human condition, than selective memory. We all remember the good times. Or we all remember the bad times. But what we don't remember usually is the actual bit in the middle, the boring times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you put all that on top of a society which has been totally dislocated by immigration. It's been totally dislocated by reunification.

18:14David McWilliams: It's been totally dislocated by the fact that actually, when you look at the relations between East and West Germany in the last 20 years, there has been a consistent patronizing attitude towards the East Germans coming from the West Germans. I remember years ago being in Germany at the time of reunification and the Wessies just laughed at the Aussies all the time. The Aussies were the butt of the Wessies jokes. And that has had a permanent impact. So what you see in East Germany is mortality rates are higher still. Obesity rates are higher still. Levels of education are lower still. Levels of income are lower still.

18:56David McWilliams: There is a whole gamut of sociological indicators which suggest that the division between East Germany and West Germany has not been in any way, on a steep sociological and maybe psychological basis, has not necessarily been healed by the fact that the West Germans wrote a large check over the course of two decades for the East Germans. So from the East German side, there's a lot of resentment. And from the West German side, there's an equal amount of resentment because the West Germans believe, look, we dragged you out of communism, we wrote the check, we paid your bills, and what do you do? You vote for Die Linke, which is the left-wing party, or the AFD.

19:43David McWilliams: And again, these are deep, deep, deep divisions within the country that we know as Germany. We think as non-Germans that Germany is a reasonably homogenous people defined by language and history. When you actually scratch the surface, it's not at all. It's a highly divided society. And it's divided across very fundamental lines. Geography, history, demography, all that sort of stuff. So you said a few minutes ago that there wasn't a referendum about the unification of Germany. Are you saying that because East and West Germans are possibly fundamentally different as people and outlook and all the rest, that if there was a referendum, perhaps they wouldn't have reunited?

20:33David McWilliams: No, they definitely would have reunified. And the reason they would have reunified was that West Germany was such a prosperous, such an ideal country, such a country that the East Germans looked up to. The East Germans used to watch West German television. You know, the East German government had to build the Berlin Wall to stop East Germans leaving to West Germany. They had to actually hermetically seal the country. So there was always going to be, there was such a euphoric time in 1990, in the early 90s, about the unification of Germany. It's just interesting that there was never a referendum.

21:14David McWilliams: Helmut Kohl says, well, look, we're doing this and this is the way it's going to do. And he did a deal with Mitterrand and Thatcher and Gorbachev and Bush, the elder Bush, to affect German unification. What I'm saying is that these are very different people. they are in a way divided by a common language. So the fact that they all speak German, we would think, ah, that's the unifying force. But they all speak Hochdeutsch. And many of these people have a Plattdeutsch vernacular, which is really, really quite different. That's the first thing. Yeah, I don't know the difference between those two.

21:52David McWilliams: So Hochdeutsch is the sort of Deutsch that you'd learn in school. So the German I learned when I was learning German is Hochdeutsch. It's called High German. And what it is, it's a standardization of German, which came in under Bismarck to try and codify Germany. And you get it in all languages. I believe in Irish, John, there's a thing called which is the standardization of Irish, which is to try and to put together, you know, Irish from Donegal and Galway and Amsterdam. So all languages have that, or many languages have that. The French, for example, would have imposed French, which is in effect the language of the Loire Valley, onto various different dialects and various different languages.

22:36David McWilliams: All that sort of stuff. So we think because Hochdeutsch is the language of communication of all the Germans, that they're in effect all the same people. They support the same football team, etc. But when you actually scratch the surface in Germany, I've always felt, and I really, really feel this, that there are two broad types of Germans. there are what we call the Charlemagne Roman Germans who emerged actually defined by the Roman Empire. They are the people who live in West Germany, the people who are defined by the River Rhine. If you look at Germany, Germany is defined by three or four big rivers, right?

23:15David McWilliams: You have the Rhine on the left-hand side, you have the Danube on the south side, and then you have the Oder and the Elbe on the eastern side, right? And so in effect, Germany is a square in the middle of Europe, which is defined by three or four great rivers. And of course, that is a function of geography, because what you have is you've got the Alps in the south of Germany, and you've got the Polish and Czech mountains on the southeast. So all those rivers flow. And the Baltic Sea in the north. Yeah, and then the rivers flow either into the Black Sea, the Danube, into the Baltic Sea, the Oder, the Elba, are into the North Sea, the Rhine.

23:54David McWilliams: And that Germany there is defined by history. So if you think of West German people, the area that we grew up with as West Germany, they are in effect Roman people. They are defined by their relationship with Rome. Then you have another huge tribe of Germans, which used to be called, people don't use this expression anymore, East Elbia. And East Elbia were people who lived around the Elba River and to the east. And they were largely Prussians and they were defined by hundreds of years of expansion to the east of German into what were called the Slav lands, Poland, Russia, Czech Republic. And those people ended up in the rump of the GDR, the East German, after the Second World War.

24:45David McWilliams: And their historical and genealogical and maybe even their DNA is different. They are Prussians. They come from a very conservative background. They are Yonkers. So it was large agricultural holdings and a sort of a feudal peasantry. And that would be the stout German peasant idea. But they're defined by two things, John. First is Protestantism. They are overwhelming Lutherans and they've become actually atheists, number one. And they're defined by a dislike of the Slavs. so they've always been threatened by the Slavs and their view is that the great threat to Germany is the Slavic races around them and this goes back to the sort of the Teutonic Knights and feudal Germany and all that and they became the essential driving force of Prussia and Prussia became the essential driving force of German militarism etc and they were always poorer and much more likely to fight and much more militaristic.

25:49David McWilliams: They were called the Junkers, you might have heard of them. That was the aristocratic crowd of which Bismarck was one. So that's over in the East. Those people after the Second World War got kicked out of Memenland. They got kicked out of East Prussia. They got kicked out of all those Konigsberg and all those places where they were living. And they ran for their lives away from the Red Army and they settled in what was the most eastern part of what was left in Germany, which became the GDR. And the German Democratic Republic are the East Germans. So I think they are one particular tribe. On the other side, John, you have the much more largely Catholic people of the former West Germany.

26:34David McWilliams: So Catholic in the sense of Bavaria, Baden-Wittenberg, even all the way up to the Mosul, the Rhineland. These are Catholic Germans and they are very, very Western. They are very West European. They were occupied by Napoleon. They have Republican values. They are liberal. They are tolerant. They are quite, quite different. And of course, the cleavage, ironically, in Germany, since we were kids, East versus West, we were told in school that the difference was capitalism versus communism. Yeah. That there was a capitalist West Germany and a communist. But that's far too easy. I think what we were looking at was something really, really different.

27:18David McWilliams: We had Charlemagne's Germany, your friend, in the West. It's no surprise that Charlemagne even put his capital in Aachen. Aachen is on the Dutch border. It's a most Western city. And they tried to build this new Rome. and their idea is we were... He unified all those small little kingdoms of that area. All those kingdoms. And his basic idea is that we are the direct descendants of the Roman Empire. At the same time as he was doing this, the Prussians or the East Albians were strapping with the Slavs, creating a totally different sociological font of culture, of history, of biases, of prejudices.

28:04David McWilliams: So then what you see is, and this I think is fascinating, the AFD are the party of East Elbia. This is what I want to say. Right. This is the party of Prussian Germany. This is the party of the people for whom fear of the Slavs, fear of the outsider, fear of the immigrant is much, much, much more real because it's in their DNA. and Saxony-Anhalt is the most Western state of that Eastern psychological block. And one of their major factors, John, and I think this is really crucial for listeners to understand, is an anti-Americanness. Right. And why was that? Because America was very, very much the guarantor of German prosperity and independence since 1945.

28:58David McWilliams: The Germans allowed themselves or were occupied by American troops. Germany was the foreground of the American defense of Europe. American rock and roll, American movies, all things American were elevated in West Germany as being the pinnacle, the be-all and end-all of civilization. all German mainstream parties were Atlanticist, and I'm going to give you some details. None of that happened in East Germany. They were Soviet. They were occupied by the Russians. They learned Russian in school. And they are now, part of their appeal is Putinism, that the AFD reject America and think that Germany's natural alliance should be with Russia, which is again a very very deep deep alliance.

29:56David McWilliams: But you just said that they were anti-Slav. I don't understand that. They are anti-Slav and pro-Putin which is bizarre which is really really bizarre because I mean you need to be a very strange German to be pro-Russian given the history of Russia and Germany. But what they are is they are anti-American in their outlook. And that has pushed them towards Putin. They are anti-Ukraine. They're very, very against Zelensky. They are very much part of we should have the North Stream pipelines back online. We should get our gas from the Russians. We should do a deal with the Russians. There is a part of Central European historical thought which argues that the great alliance in Europe is always between and should always be between Germany and Russia.

30:52David McWilliams: And there is no doubt that British and American foreign policy for the last 200 years has been to divide Russia from Germany. That's their big fear. So that's why, for example, Russia went into an alliance with France and Britain, Germany with an alliance with Austria. You know, all these old alliances don't make any sense. Like the idea that Russia will be an alliance with France only makes sense if, this is again pre-First World War and Second World War, if you think that isolating and surrounding Germany is the main central plank of your foreign policy. So I think that that's a fascinating part that hasn't been really looked at so much, John, is this anti, it's not even anti-America, it's anti-globalist America.

31:37David McWilliams: And that's what brings Trump and Musk and all those guys in on the AFD side. Yeah, I was wondering about the Musk effect, but let's not go down that road just now. What I do want to ask you about is what is going to be the ripple effect in the EU, given that Germany is, as you said, that big square block in the middle of the continent. So what's going to be the ripple effect on the EU and also the wider global geopolitics? But before you answer that, let's go do a bit of this.

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34:08So, Mark, the center didn't hold, as the old poem goes. As Yates would have said. Yes, indeed. So what's going to be the ripple effect? What's going to be the impact of these election results on the rest of the EU and then we can broaden it out to the globe after that?

34:30David McWilliams: Well, I think one way to think about this is to look at very, very briefly the history of the EU within Germany and the German relation. The person who is most identified with the EU is Conrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of Germany. And his obsession was to make West Germany an anchor state of the Western Alliance, genuflecting to the United States. Now, a lot of EU federalists and European enthusiasts will say that the European Union was set up as a counterweight to the United States. I steadfastly refuse to believe that. I believe that the European Union was tolerated by the United States under the military umbrella of NATO, which allowed the Europeans to begin the process of unifying as long as the Americans acquiesced to it.

35:32David McWilliams: Because if you look at what happened is the Americans were insistent that the Europeans wouldn't have their own proper defense and that the European Union would be a free market alliance, openly trading with the United States, allowing American companies and American capital and American people to move freely between Western Europe and the United States across the Atlantic. So the EU is really very much part of the Atlantic idea that the Americans imposed upon Western Europe after the Second World War. And Adenauer is completely fascinating because if you look at Adenauer, who's the man who built West Germany, right?

36:13David McWilliams: Yeah. He really didn't. I'll give you one amazing snippet. In 1961, when the Berlin Wall was first mooted, Adenauer offered something extraordinary. Adenauer said to the Americans that he would abandon West Berlin to the Russians. Right. If they could do a deal which would give, amazingly, given the area we're talking about, a swap of Saxony, Anhalt and Thuringia to central German provinces, to West Germany, abandoning Berlin to the Soviets. And the reason he felt it, he didn't think there was any percentage in having Berlin. He felt that Berlin was emblematic of the Prussian state and that West Germany would be better off without Berlin.

37:06David McWilliams: So that shows you really how he was thinking about it. And that, of course, has all come to light in subsequent papers, etc. And his whole idea... How would the German people have gone along with that? Would they have gone along with that? Well, I think at the time, the German people went along with almost anything because they were so humiliated after the Second World War. So I'll even give you an example. The way in which they changed the currencies. The Deutsche Mark came in in 1948. The conversion rate was something extraordinary, which was that the savings of the average German people were wiped out by the emergence of the Deutschmark.

37:46David McWilliams: It was one Deutschmark to every 15 old Reichmarks was the conversion rate. So if you had 15 Reichmarks, you only got one Deutschmark. That meant that your savings were wiped out. That was for people. But what Adenauer did, and a guy called Friedrich Erhard as well, who was an economist, they converted the assets of German businesses at one-to-one. So what they did was they unbelievably elevated the assets of businesses and they unbelievably deflated and devalued the savings of people. Now what did that do? That in one switch, that switched the economy in 1948 in Germany away from people to business, right?

38:33David McWilliams: It was the most Thatcherite thing you could ever do. Yeah. Because basically it meant that the German industrial base remained the same. And an amazing statistic is despite all the bombings in Germany, all the carpet bombings, all the Dresdens, all the Hamburgs, all that firebombing of German cities, at the end of the Second World War, think about this, John, only 8 % of the industrial capacity of Germany was obliterated. Only 8%. Really? Wow. So the Allies killed people, but they didn't kill industry. They happily bombed civilians, but after all their efforts, they never really dented in German industrial production.

39:17David McWilliams: So ironically... But they carpet-bombed the likes of Dresden, which I always thought the purpose of it was to wipe out the industry. They carpet-bombed the likes of Dresden, which was not a particularly industrial town. It was an artistic town. It was a symbolic town. So what they wanted to do is they wanted to destroy German culture, the German sense of superiority, the German sense of them being, in effect, as Hitler said, the chosen race within Europe. But after the Second World War, every effort was made to jaundice bias policy towards German industrial might. And that is the beginning of what they call the Wirtschaftswunder, this huge German expansion, right?

40:00David McWilliams: It was hoped that that would happen after unification. The idea was that we'll do the same thing and in effect East Germany will blossom, as Helmut calls it, but it didn't. And in actual fact, East Germany has remained a net recipient of West German money ever since. It's never been able to pay for itself. But to come back, part of all that, John, was anchoring West Germany to this thing called the European Coal and Steel Community, which is 1957, then the European Economic Community, which was 1973, and then the European Union, which was the product of the 1990s. And fundamental to that was that Germany would lead, but without being leader, would pay the bills.

40:45David McWilliams: Now what the AFD are saying is, you know what? Germany no longer needs the EU. Germany can go it alone. Germany needs to look after itself. And this is, I think, for me, the biggest consequence of what is happening. Because don't forget, the AFD came into being as a result, believe it or not, of an economist revolt in academic university chambers against adopting the euro. So there is an anti-European, anti-Euro strain within the DNA of the AFD. And that, of course, seems to be appealing to lots of Germans because they're saying, look, why do we need the EU? They blame the EU for immigration. They blame the EU for high taxes.

41:34David McWilliams: They blame the EU for Germany having to bail out Greece, you know, in the last great financial crisis. They blame the EU for being the vanguard of NATO. So they blame the EU for supporting unambiguously Ukraine. More importantly, they blame the EU for diluting German sovereignty. And that's where they're winning. So are you saying then that, based on everything you just said there, that Germany are going to pull out of the EU or the writing's on the wall for the EU, that the EU either has to change drastically or fall apart? Well, the question is, is this victory of 44 % in a small German state the beginning of something major or an aberration?

42:31David McWilliams: If you think it's the beginning of a shift in fundamental German politics, in the same way as Le Pen is a fundamental shift or Farage or Brexit or Maloney. Now, Maloney's interesting because Maloney came up with all sorts of anti-EU rhetoric, but once she got into power, realised Italy can't go it alone. So she's very much pro-European, at least in her external messaging, maybe not in her internal messaging. Le Pen is a more interesting one because Le Pen has taken two generations of the same family to get to the cusp of power. The question is, will it take two generations of Germans to get to the cusp of power?

43:14I'm not saying that the German post-war,

43:18David McWilliams: post-unification settlement is over. But what I'm saying is that if you think this is the beginning of some process, that the AFD is the coming movement in Germany, then, of course, what you will find is a significant groundswell of German opinion, which if they vote for the AFD, we'll have to come to terms with the AFD's anti-European message. I think certain people in Germany are voting for the AFD as a protest vote. I think they're voting it as two fingers to Berlin, two fingers to the elite. But ultimately, if you vote nationalism and if you vote nationalist, at the end of the day, you will have to support or come down on one side of the fight between the nation and the super national institution, the EU.

44:10David McWilliams: And at a certain stage, that fight will have to be had. And if you think now it's the beginning, then you would be sitting in Brussels and you would be thinking as an EU bureaucrat, this is maybe the beginning of the end for our position as being the voice of Europe because what we're seeing in the voice of Europe is there is no voice of Europe. There are many different Europes. There's many different languages. And as the AFD in Saxony and Halt have actually evidenced, there are many different dialects, John. So we leave it with the dialectization, of the European Union. That is what we are seeing here in Germany.

44:58David McWilliams: It's a fascinating moment. I think it's a significant moment. And I think we will be defined by, over the next 10 years, the tremors that we felt this weekend in a little part of central Germany. Yeah, and it'll be all eyes on France and Le Pen next year. France and Le Pen next year is the big one. So let's watch that. We'll leave you there. Thank you.

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