Matthew Syed in today’s Sunday Times says the unsayable about lovely cosy “Mutti”, the German leader praised universally for her decency and her common sense – Angela Merkel was the true extremist of our age:
If extremism is defined as acting out of proportion with context, history or consent, I suggest Merkel’s tenure represented the high point of postwar European extremism. It was not just that she opened the door in 2015 to almost a million unvetted, largely male asylum seekers, but did so knowing perfectly well what the consequences would be. We know this because she alluded to many at the time of her (again, widely acclaimed) “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”) speech. She knew it would impose ruinous fiscal cost on the German people but she went ahead anyway, prioritising the projection of her own virtue above the interests of her voters. She knew it would add huge pressure to schools with tens of thousands of extra pupils needing German-as-second-language teaching in an already short-staffed system, not to mention adding huge tension to a tight housing market. She knew this would shaft her neighbours as migrants moved westwards, making a mockery of Schengen and adding to the drumbeat for Brexit. She must also have surely known there would be a spike in crime; rape and sexual assaults rose by 13 per cent in 2016 and asylum seekers were overrepresented sixfold in the numbers. On New Year’s Eve in 2015 more than 500 sexual offences were recorded in Cologne on a single night.
You’ll doubtless have noted the increasingly Orwellian terminology applied to parties such as the AfD, Reform and the like. It started with “far” right, then moved to “hard” right, then “radical” right. Soon they will be labelled the “rabid right” by politicians who sit like blancmanges as tens of thousands more young men stream into Europe while they throw billions of taxpayers’ money at a system that hands huge power to evil people smugglers and tyrants like Putin. So let me ask again: who are the extremists here? Is it the people who want to rip up a chronically out of date legal framework or “moderates” who follow in the footsteps of Mutti by waving them in?…
Isn’t it time, in this context, to reorganise our categories and vocabulary? The extremists are not the “populist” right, regardless of the label we attach to them. It is the likes of Merkel and that broader generation of western leaders who presided over the two great sins of hyperliberalism: open borders and the betrayal of Nato. Liberalism as an ideology is muscular and realistic. It recognises that defending freedom requires powerful militaries, solid alliances and strong borders, otherwise fifth columnists will enter our nations and wreck that which we value. As Karl Popper, the great theorist of open societies, put it: “If we extend unlimited tolerance to those who are intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
In this sense, hyperliberals have been the enemies of freedom by allowing militaries to atrophy and borders to dissolve. My sense is that the leaders of the various uniparties believed their legacies would be defined by the tenets of wokeism, seeing this ideology not as a passing cultural spasm but a new moral paradigm. This is why we got trans ideology (was this not extremist?), net zero zealotry (was this not extremist, at least in its implementation?) and more. It is also why I believe history will judge the likes of Cameron, Johnson, Trudeau, Hollande, Macron and von der Leyen as the most disastrous in postwar history since they undermined both the concept of the nation state and the alliance that defends our version of it.
He has a point.
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