The woes of Olaf Scholz offer a warning to Keir Starmer

The borders are going up around Germany. As of next week, security checks will take place on all nine of Germany’s land borders in an attempt to tackle illegal immigration, smuggling gangs and Islamist terrorism.

The German government’s sudden embrace of border controls – which will effectively nullify the EU’s Schengen Agreement on passport-free travel – reeks of desperation. It is a tacit admission that Olaf Scholz and his coalition have lost control – of irregular migration, of law and order, and of the political narrative.

The Islamist terror threat in Germany has ramped up considerably since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October last year. Just last month, three people were killed in the west German city of Solingen. The suspect was a Syrian refugee and avowed supporter of Islamic State. In June, an Islamist stabbed six people at an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim, south-west Germany, killing a police officer. At least six potentially deadly attacks have also been foiled in the past 11 months. Yet it has taken until now for the government to take this problem seriously. In announcing the border checks, interior minister Nancy Faeser warned about the ‘acute danger of Islamist terror’. This is the same Nancy Faeser who, immediately upon entering office in 2022, abolished an expert government working group on Islamism, such was her complacency towards this threat.

So what’s changed? I dare say it isn’t the bloodshed on Germany’s streets that has spurred the government into action. As just about every observer has noted, the new border controls are ‘political’. They are primarily a reaction to the shock success of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in two state elections in eastern Germany earlier this month. The right-populist AfD came top in Thuringia and a close second in Saxony. There are fears it is on course for another victory in state elections in Brandenburg, on the outskirts of Berlin, in just over a week’s time. Should another state fall to the AfD not only would it leave Scholz fighting for his political life, it could also destroy the legitimacy of the coalition government, leading to its collapse a year before Germany is due to hold its next federal elections.

It’s not just soaring illegal migration or fear of Islamist extremism that have led Germans to turn their backs on Scholz and his government. The chancellor is widely viewed as weak, with three in four Germans telling pollsters he lacks leadership qualities. His nickname, the ‘Scholzomat’ (Scholzomaton), reflects his robotic, formulaic and deathly dull speaking style.

Even Scholz’s party is fed up with him. Only one in three SPD members wants him to lead them into the next federal elections. And no wonder, with the SPD currently on track to win only a risible 15 per cent of the vote. This would be only one percentage point higher than its worst-ever result – achieved in July’s European elections, also under Scholz.

The dire state of the German economy is also adding to the government’s woes. VW, the crown jewel of the German car industry, threatened job cuts and production-line closures this week for the first time in its 87-year history. Major firms like chemical giant BASF, tech conglomerate Siemens and steelmaker ThyssenKrupp are also cutting jobs or offshoring their factories.

Much of this is down to the exorbitant cost of energy. While some of the recent energy-price hikes can be blamed on the global gas-price shock following the war in Ukraine, Germany’s green policies, pursued enthusiastically by Scholz’s coalition, are the real culprit. Government ministers have actively celebrated the closure of Germany’s last nuclear power plants (even though nuclear power is carbon-neutral). Germany has also invested more in renewables than any other nation on Earth – with predictably dire results, given the inherent unreliability of intermittent sources like wind and solar.

Not all of Germany’s woes can be attributed to Scholz and his government, of course. Germany has been the slowest-growing economy in the G8 since 2018. The green Energiewende (energy transition), which is proving so economically ruinous, began in 2010 under Angela Merkel.

But instead of distancing himself from her disastrous legacy, Scholz came to power posing as continuity Merkel. During the campaign for the 2021 federal elections, he even adopted the former chancellor’s signature hand gesture – the Merkel rhombus – to ram the point home. The strange death of the once-dynamic Germany has the fingerprints of the entire political class all over it.

Olaf Scholz’s woes offer a warning for the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer. Not least because the two plodding centre-left leaders, who have struck up a close relationship of late, have a lot in common. The SPD chancellor has governed by sticking to a failed elite consensus. His supposedly sensible centrism has made Germans poorer, less safe and ripe for a populist revolt. Starmer is in serious danger of repeating the same mistakes.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.