The Germans have a word for everything, as they say on this side of the English Channel. The German word, for the leader of opposition is Oppositionsführer, and suddenly in a strange twist of fate seems surprisingly apt. After 60 years of post-Cold war consensus, the far-right is back in German parliament in a poll defying show, scoring 13.5% of the vote. The unlikely Oppositionsführer however, is a lesbian West German single mother, academic and former banker, who is fluent in Mandarin, and whose partner claims Sinhalese heritage. Unusual for a far-right party in Mittel-Europa, whose standard demographic is anti-immigrant, primarily East German males, and who are instinctively opposed to LGBT rights.

Germany is a country which takes politics seriously. Chancellor Angela Merkel is an academic herself. So is Alice Weidel, the unlikely star leader of AFD. Yet, for a nation which is so thoroughly qualified and post-modern, and regarded the most stable in Europe, Germany proved once again, that even in 2017, it has not bypassed the golden rule of classical Burkean conservatism. For every forced social engineering and revolution, there is and always will be, a spectacularly large, disproportionate, and often asymmetric reaction.

There’s no question that AFD is a reactionary party—it is not conservative by any stretch of the imagination. Merkel’s Christian Democrats are still officially the “conservative” force in Germany. And yet, the signs of this upcoming shift were always there while often ignored by pollsters.

After a thorough drubbing in midterms, Merkel’s conservatives aimed to unify the country with what could be seen by some as a political gimmick—the introduction of gay marriage laws. Germany is not a country which persecutes gay people. So it was a calculated risk (as savvy Merkel knew) that the country would naturally vote in favour, while she could vote personally against—thereby playing both sides—and bolstering her personal credentials as a social conservative. Unfortunately for her, Weidel took this opportunity to highlight the logical contradiction of modern day mainstream conservatives. In characteristic Teutonic seriousness, she barked, “…[CDU]…is pushing through ‘marriage for everybody’ legislation, while the mass migration that has swamped the country over the last two years considers homosexuality a crime.” The emperor’s visible lack of clothes were observable for all.

Now, let’s be clear about the AFD. The majority of the original party members were hardcore anti-Semites. Numerous Jewish leaders, among many others, have repeatedly sounded the alarm.

That said, this time, the most extreme members of the AFD formed a minority and the surge in the party’s popularity appears to be due to the swell in the ranks by ordinary Germans who are simply fed up with mass immigration. The reason for AFD’s inevitable rise is due to Merkel’s slaughter of traditional conservatism in Germany and Europe more broadly, and her misguided plan of opening up the gates to millions of people, without any consultation with any other member countries of the EU. AFD scored more votes from past non-voters (1.2 million) than from the ruling coalition (1 million) or the traditional center-Left SPD (500,000). And there’s a simple reason why.

The massive increase in total crime, violent crime and crimes resulting in grievous bodily harm—including sexual assault and rape—when divided in three distinct categories of German suspects, Non-German suspects, and asylum seeker suspects displays a massive spike for the third category for all crimes reported:

Even with the highest employment in Europe, immigration overtook employment as the key concern among average Germans just before the election. The severe backlash against mainstream parties is primarily due to cultural anxieties and a reaction to forced social engineering. Contrary to what the liberal Euro technocrats and media pundits preach on both sides of the Atlantic, humans don’t necessarily vote on the basis of economic prudence when they perceive that their way of life is threatened. Germany is a country which in the last two years alone has absorbed over a million of mostly military age male migrants, has witnessed mass sexual assaults and murder and an increase in Islamic terrorism. Anyone who could not foresee this backlash has been deluding themselves.

As traditional European conservatives were pushed Left-ward by media and academic communities on immigration and social and religious rights, the vacuum was filled by the rise of blut-und-boden far right parties all across Europe. In a Sophoclean twist of fate, the European political center and center-Left is now dying, thanks to the very person that liberals like to portray as the “new leader” of the free world.

And that has been a pattern since 2016. In America, anyone who was not onboard with transgender pronouns from day one has been smeared as a “bigot”. Anyone opposed to mass migration and questionable foreign interventions have been vilified from both the Left and mainstream centre-Right. The “deplorables” joined the Trump campaign en-masse. In the UK, anyone who dared raise any question about EU human rights laws shielding Islamist terrorists have been described as an Islamophobic racists, even when there are on record over three thousand hardcore Islamists under direct MI5 surveillance.

The reality is that hundreds of second generation British Indians and British Chinese voted for Brexit—not out of racism—but presumably out of fear for their livelihood. Scores of LGBT people went on record to support someone as historically hideous as Marine Le Pen in France—due to their largerfear of Islamism. In New Zealand, far, far away from Europe, the fear of mass-migration has led to a populist party holding the balance of power. In Europe, East and Central Europeans, who are cautious about mass migration, watch as terrorism rips apart London, Paris and Barcelona, while being held under punitive pressure from Brussels and Berlin. The inevitable result is a hardening of far right sentiments in traditional and insular Poland and Hungary.

Make Expertise Great Again

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters is finally out this year. And perhaps no other topic can be as important, given the tectonic shifting year in global politics we just had.

QuilletteSumantra Maitra

And now, Germany. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. A phobia is supposedly an irrational fear. Fear of millions of people coming into your land, fear of losing your cultural identity and livelihood, and fear of being killed due to your religion and sexuality, are historically completely rational fears. The sole causal point of the rise of far-right movements all across Europe, is Chancellor Merkel’s willkommenskultur.

If the lesson of 2016 continues to 2017, it is this; as long as conservatives continue to compromise with the Left, the hideous anti-Semitic far-right will continue to encroach upon center-Right space. Hundreds of years from now if humanity survives—we will look back from a historical distance and wonder what kind of hubris drove leaders to experiments of ultra-liberal social engineering and what kind of impotence drove conservatives to be silent.