>Germany holds its federal snap election this Sunday, a few months after the government collapsed following Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s lost vote of confidence. Germans “will decide between four mainstream parties and three parties at the political fringes, left and right,” including the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose rise in popularity has caused significant concern among those following EU politics. The AfD is currently sitting in second place in the polls, closely trailing the center-right Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union alliance, led by Friedrich Merz. Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats are in third.
Germany’s current list of challenges to tackle seems to grow longer by the minute. The country, “once so solid and predictable,” now seems to be a “bit of a mess.” On top of the political concerns, Germany is also facing a persistently stagnating economy. For decades, Germany has been a model EU member with nearly undeniable strength. However, with the snap elections poised to “expose the fault lines beneath the country’s political landscape like never before,” many questions have been raised about whether Germany’s status as an EU superpower may come to an end.
On a more positive note, does Germany’s recent history of overcoming massive challenges suggest it will do the same this time? Three particular challenges Germany has confronted since 1989—reunification, the eurozone crisis, and the migrant crisis—all suggest that when Germany faces hardship, it ultimately prevails.
A Unified Challenge: When East and West Germany Became One
Europe changed forever when the Berlin Wall crumbled and East and West Germany were finally reunited, in October 1990, for the first time since the start of the Cold War. Upon reunification, Germany faced many new economic challenges as former East German businesses needed restructuring to fit with the West German capitalist model. The plan for reunification caused fear among economists, who worried that “a resulting surge in government debt and inflation would destabilize West Germany and derail broader European economic integration.” By the early 2000s, the unemployment rate in the former East was still about ten percentage points higher than in the former West. While that gap has significantly narrowed over decades of progress, Germans on both sides of the old border say that “living standards in the former East have not yet caught up with those in the former West.”
Reunification posed political issues for the new Germany as well as economic. The early 1990s saw a rise in right-wing radicalism in the form of riots and protests, particularly targeting foreigners. The year 1992 witnessed right-wing riots “on such an unprecedented scale that violence became a real problem, particularly in East Germany.” These “atrocities shocked Germany, and saw large-scale repercussions in the media.” As noted in a 1992 article in Current History, “the costs, changes, and uncertainties engendered by reunification have been so great that it is not uncommon to hear Germans talk as if their country is weaker than when it was divided.” It was difficult for Germans in the East to forget their portion of the country’s “leading role in the Soviet Empire,” and many found it difficult to confront feelings of inferiority to their western counterparts. A poll taken in 1993 by the Opinion Research Institute “made clear the depth of the gap between East and West Germans in the third year after the reunification,” as just “22 percent of West Germans and 11 percent of East Germans answered that they felt ‘together like Germans.’” From the beginning, it became apparent that “the process of psychological unification would be much more difficult than the physical one.”
Even with the variety of challenges that reunification presented—economic, political, and even ideological—the coming together of East and West Germany “remains the world’s most successful geopolitical experiment.” Although the former East Germany has experienced its share of struggles post-1989, it is “now at the same level of GDP as many French regions, while even Poland—considered a post-Cold War economic success story—is much further behind.”
Germany’s Survival Through the Financial Crisis
Decades later, the financial crisis of the late 2000s that affected large portions of the world did not leave Germany unscathed. “For a while,” according to the International Monetary Fund, “it looked as if Germany could escape the full force of the financial crisis.” Despite the fact that two of Germany’s banks, IKB Deutsche Industriebank and Sachsen LB, were “early victims of the subprime meltdown in the United States, Germany’s industry remained confident that its competitive edge would see it through the worst of the downturn.” But the German economy experienced a steep drop in business confidence due to a significant “decline in foreign orders.” According to the IMF mission chief for Germany in 2008, exports were “falling sharply, which is a particular setback to the German economy as it relies so heavily for its growth on exports.”
Germany’s eurozone trading partners experienced severe economic hardship during the financial crisis, which caused problems for Germany. A 2011 article in the German publication Spiegel claimed that if Germany’s European partners suffered slowing growth, “it could force Germany to devote further billions to shoring up over-indebted euro-zone member states.” At the time, Germany shouldered around €120 billion of the euro bailout fund, which totaled €440 billion. Fortunately for Germany, the “recession was short-lived and the economy recovered strongly: by the first quarter of 2011, GDP was back to its pre-recession level.”
Germany was able to survive the euro crisis and in many ways even thrive in the aftermath of it, demonstrating the country’s resilience. The German economy recovered “with revitalized export industries and record-low unemployment” while the country experienced “low borrowing costs, a balanced budget, and a growing housing market.” Germany amazingly “emerged as a world champion of the economic rebound.”
Germany’s Leading Role in the 2015 Migrant Crisis
Another crisis that rocked Europe (and in which Germany again played a major role) was the migrant crisis of 2015. More than one million people crossed Europe’s borders that year, “sparking a crisis as countries struggled to cope with the influx, and creating division in the EU over how best to deal with resettling people.” Most immigrants arrived by way of the Mediterranean, although some first trekked through Türkiye. Out of the top ten origins of people applying for asylum in the EU during this time, seven were non-European countries. The main country of origin––by far––was Syria, where a devastating civil war was destroying the nation.
Germany was the EU country that received the highest number of asylum applications in 2015 (442,000), granting about 141,000 claims. However, the German Interior Ministry claimed that in reality, more than a million new refugees actually arrived that year. Hungary received the second-highest number of asylum applications, reaching fewer than 200 thousand. Throughout the EU, on average, there were 260 asylum applications per 100,000 citizens; in Germany, that number was 587. In September 2015, EU ministers voted to relocate 160,000 refugees within the European Union (although it only applied to those currently in Italy and Greece), and Germany agreed to take in more than 25,000 from those countries. Overall, Germany was at the forefront of the migrant crisis, essentially more so than any other EU country. Today, Germany is the third-largest refugee-hosting country in the world and largest in the EU, home to 2.5 million refugees, more than a million of whom are from Ukraine as of 2022.
A 2024 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that “Germany is doing a better job than many of its European neighbors when it comes to integrating new arrivals.” This may be partly due to the fact that Germany has a long history of hosting refugees and migrants, even dating back to those fleeing the former Yugoslavia. Five years after the migrant surge of 2015, more than half of Germany’s newcomers had found employment, even while facing challenges like language barriers. Also in 2020, 81 percent of Germans “expressed confidence that” Angela Merkel—Germany’s leader during the migrant crisis—“would do the right thing when it comes to world affairs,” suggesting that the vast majority of Germans agreed with her course of action at the time and did not hold ill feelings toward her decisions.
Current Challenges Facing Germany: Will it Come Out on Top Yet Again?
Germany is again confronting a series of challenges both politically and economically. Chancellor Scholz’s lost confidence vote in parliament in mid-December put the “European Union’s most populous member and biggest economy on course to hold an early election.” This came after Scholz announced in early November that he would fire Finance Minister Christian Lindner, “signaling the collapse of the ruling three-party coalition that relied on Lindner’s pro-business party.” The end of 2024 was an “inopportune time for Germany to be plunged into a grueling winter election campaign and a political freeze that could last until a new government takes power.” The international community will closely watch how Germans vote this Sunday.
The rise of Germany’s hard-right AfD party represents a serious challenge in the country’s political landscape. State elections held in early September in Saxony and Thuringia “deliver[ed] the strongest-ever turnout for an extreme right-wing party in the postwar era” as the AfD secured 31 percent and 33 percent of the vote respectively. These results have “raise[ed] resounding questions for modern Germany,” in particular why the “phenomenon” of the AfD’s success is “so pronounced and radical in the country’s east, the territory of former communist East Germany… 35 years after the Berlin Wall fell.” This right-wing surge has been blamed in part by negative sentiments toward the large numbers of refugees that have settled in Germany over time, though this contradicts the fact that Ukrainians (the newest and most significant refugee wave in a decade) were so recently “welcom[ed]” and “embrace[d]” by Germans.
Germany has encountered a multitude of challenges and crises before, all of which raised urgent questions about how the country would handle them—yet it has always found a way to succeed. It has been a world superpower for decades, throughout the ups and downs. Even with the current political instability and economic struggles the country faces, Germany’s place as a European leader will likely endure. If the past is any indicator of the future, Germany will still remain a success story in the end.