Wer finanziert Sie?

With the German elections just days away, there is a sense of dread and boredom. Germans are not generally a very political people. They prefer conformity and stability, or at least the appearance of it. That’s why they’ll accept every new tax and regulation with only a short grumble. However, since the beginning of the year, this deceptive tranquility has been severely shaken by deadly attacks by failed asylum seekers. 

As soon as an attack happens, you can be sure that a cynical protest against the Right will take place, with demands not to “politicise” the attack, as if they are a natural phenomenon like the weather. On January 29th, however, the “firewall”, in which all the parties agree not to work with the hard right Alternative for Germany (AfD), cracked after the CDU accepted AfD voters for a non-binding motion on migration.

Ever since the CDU have had a taste of what it is like to be the AfD. Staffers had to flee their HQ in Berlin after protestors surrounded it, offices were occupied by Antifa, the media condemned them, and hysterical claims that they had opened “the gates of hell” were heard. All this for the temerity of accepting the voters of a party backed by around 1 in 5 Germans in order to tackle an immigration crisis which most voters want ended.

The German media is so biased that there is a whole blog dedicated to cataloguing its failures

It might seem curious that these protests were mounted so quickly and were so coordinated but the answer lies in that left-wing talking point: who funds you? It rapidly became clear that many of the groups leading and attending these protests were recipients of government largesse. The “Protest of the Decent People” in Berlin, for example, was organised by Together Against The Right. Who are they? Well, behind them is a group called CAMPACT, which is the main part of the charitable association HateAid. In turn, HateAid is the recipient of 2.5 million Euros from the Ministry of Families. 

This complicated web of charities and activist groups is described as “filz” (sleaze) in Germany. Another example is Grandmas Against the Right, who can be found in many major cities with their anti-AfD signs and cringe attempts to rap about why fascism is bad. Guess what, they too get money from the same ministry, via the Democracy Lives programme. The Antonio Amadeu Institute which is linked to the Greens has received 8.8 million Euros since 2015 to combat the far-right, and spends part of that training these elderly ladies. So, yes, taxpayers subsidise pensioners to rap.

Or there is BUND, an environmental NGO, which got 2 million Euros in 2023 from the Ministry for the Environment and Economy, in order to help with the “strengthening of civil society and the implementation of national climate policy”. They were prominent among the NGOs calling for protests against the right-wing parties. Unsurprisingly, they did not feel the need to protest when a speaker at a The Left party event called for the top 1 per cent in Germany to be shot. Thankfully another member intervened to call for moderation: they should be put in work camps instead.

A bigger issue is the German media, which is so biased that there is a whole blog dedicated to cataloguing its failures. Every year the public broadcasters call for more money because they can barely survive on the 9 billion Euros a year they currently get, almost double what the BBC has. Unlike Britain, you can’t opt out of the license fee, because the constitutional court decided a few years ago that public broadcasting is crucial for our democracy. In addition, it turned out that the government had paid 1.5 million Euros between 2017 and 2022 to 500 journalists, half of them in the public sector, for services like media training. As the German idiom goes, “whose bread I eat, whose song I sing”.

No story sums up this cosy media-political elite alliance than Correctiv, a journalistic non-profit which last year broke a blockbuster story about the AfD holding a secret conference in Potsdam to discuss how to remigrate non-ethnic Germans. It flashed around the world. Here was what everyone had feared: the AfD really were the second coming of the Nazis. The only problem? It wasn’t true. In a series of court cases, the major points have all been established as false. While Correctiv claims it is funded through donations, it emerged that since 2015 they’ve received 2.5 million Euros in taxpayer funding. Despite their story proving to have more holes than a Swiss cheese, they were given an award for the best journalism of 2024 by Medium Magazine.

These cases are hardly exhaustive; everywhere you look in Germany there is “filz” to be found. If Friedrich Merz — likely to be the next Chancellor — is serious about governing then he will have to tackle it. Much like “the Blob” decried by Dominic Cummings, it will seek to frustrate any real reform he wants to do. If Germany is to sweep away the dead hand of creeping regulations, to end the asylum crisis that makes our streets unsafe, and reject the narrow range of policies that the German elites consider acceptable then he will need to look to figures like Trump or Milei who took on their own bureaucracy. Perhaps Merz should take comfort in the fact that Stihl still make some of the best chainsaws in Germany. Afuera!