GERMANY’S election result confirms trends evident across European politics.

The far right continues to advance: the Alternative for Germany (AfD) took second place, with over 20 per cent of the vote.

And the traditional ruling-class parties double down on the policies behind its advance. 

Changing faces at the top are presented as a break with the past: it was true of Emmanuel Macron in 2017, and even attempted, without any public buy-in, of Keir Starmer last year. 

So it is with Friedrich Merz, likely next chancellor. The BBC call his post-election remarks as a “seismic shift” in transatlantic relations.

But are they a seismic shift in policy? Three years ago outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a Zeitwende, or turn of the times, in which Germany would make deep cuts to social spending to fund a new era of militarism. 

That was billed as a response to war in Ukraine. Now, the prospect of peace in Ukraine is used to argue for the same thing: Merz says Donald Trump’s U-turn makes it urgent that Germany rearms.

Merz’s pre-election flirtation with the AfD — winning an anti-immigrant vote in parliament with its support — indicates he will continue to dance to the far right’s tune there. 

And Germany’s shameful diplomatic and military support for Israel, which has included repression of any expression of Palestine solidarity, will be doubled down on too. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court and is currently expanding an ethnic cleansing operation in the West Bank, says he has already been asked by Merz to pay Germany an official visit. The anti-war BSW party of Sahra Wagenknecht narrowly missing the threshold for Bundestag representation will make this worse: it was the only party that opposed conflation of support for Palestine with anti-semitism in the last parliament.

We are therefore likely to see a new German coalition following all the main policies of the defeated one.

That traps Germany in a doom loop: internationally, as it is a jingoistic myth that Russia invaded Ukraine due to European weakness. The invasion followed years of eastward Nato deployments and giant military exercises along its borders. Arms races provoke wars rather than deterring them.

And domestically. Deindustrialisation and social cuts will continue, feeding an anti-system vote which is still mainly secured by the far right.

There are lessons on battling the far right too. Merz has ruled out ending the taboo on deals with the AfD: a tribute to the huge anti-AfD protests of recent months.

Those protests are valuable in preventing the normalisation of the far right we have seen in Italy. But they have not succeeded in stopping its growth.

Left party Die Linke’s own improved result, securing 64 Bundestag seats, is attributable to renewed militancy on bread-and-butter working-class issues and courage in fighting demonisation of immigrants. It also did very well among the young, though this is no guarantee of future success: so did Corbynism.

Securing the anti-Establishment vote for the left requires opposition to, and grassroots organising against, attacks on working-class living standards in the here and now: fighting cuts, closures, rising prices and falling wages. The BSW made policy errors, but criticism that it avoided building a mass membership base to maintain top-down control may also be pertinent to its disappointing result.

And protesting against the far right plays an important role, but is not enough to stop it. 

For that the left needs to win working-class opinion to socialism, a real rupture with the existing system, rather than authoritarian and xenophobic embellishments to it. 

Accommodation to liberalism is self-defeating, and only through leading local and national struggles can we demonstrate that the left, not the right, has the answers to the suffocating social and economic decline afflicting Europe.