Germany, the Centre and the Lessons of the 1930s

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 8 October 2026

There is a dangerous habit in European political discussion of treating the 1930s as a museum exhibit. We look at black-and-white photographs of torchlit marches, collapsing parliamentary coalitions and men in peculiar uniforms, and reassure ourselves that all this belongs to another age. The circumstances were different, the personalities were different and the institutions were different. All of that is true. Yet history does not repeat itself by reproducing costumes. It repeats itself by recreating political temptations.

One of the most important lessons of the destruction of the Weimar Republic is not simply that extremists can become popular. Everybody knows that. The subtler lesson is that democratic politics becomes exceptionally vulnerable when the constitutional centre ceases to regard itself as a common enterprise. Moderate conservatives decide that social democrats are intolerable. Social democrats conclude that conservatives are enemies rather than opponents. Liberals disappear into doctrinal disputes. Everyone becomes convinced that collaboration across the centre represents betrayal, while movements openly hostile to the constitutional order acquire the advantage of clarity, anger and momentum.

This lesson has acquired renewed importance in contemporary Germany. The growth of the Alternative für Deutschland cannot sensibly be explained merely by declaring millions of German voters wicked, stupid or secretly nostalgic for National Socialism. That explanation is intellectually lazy and politically disastrous. The AfD has prospered because it has attached itself to genuine anxieties: migration, economic stagnation, energy costs, industrial decline, cultural disorientation, the consequences of the war in Ukraine, distrust of established institutions and the widespread perception that mainstream politicians sometimes speak a language remote from everyday experience.

A successful democratic response must therefore do two things simultaneously. It must take seriously the grievances upon which the far right feeds, while refusing the far right’s answers to them. That requires something considerably more sophisticated than moral denunciation.

Germany’s moderate conservatives have an indispensable role in this process. A healthy European democracy needs a democratic right. Millions of people believe in controlled immigration, fiscal restraint, national traditions, strong policing, military preparedness, private enterprise and caution about rapid social change. These are legitimate positions within democratic politics. If mainstream politicians imply otherwise, they effectively invite voters holding such opinions to seek representation beyond the democratic centre.

The Christian Democratic tradition therefore matters far beyond the fortunes of any particular politician or election. Germany’s post-war centre-right helped construct one of history’s most successful democratic states precisely because it reconciled conservatism with constitutional liberalism and European integration. The achievement of Konrad Adenauer was not to abolish the German right but to domesticate it within democratic institutions. That distinction remains fundamental.

Yet moderate conservatism cannot preserve German democracy alone. Social democracy is equally indispensable. Germany requires politicians willing to defend organised labour, social insurance, affordable housing, public services and the proposition that economic transformation cannot simply abandon those whose livelihoods disappear along the way. Political extremism frequently flourishes not among the poorest but among people who fear downward mobility, loss of status and disappearance of the world they understood. Social democracy exists, at its best, to demonstrate that democratic institutions can respond to those fears without inventing ethnic or cultural enemies.

The Greens likewise perform a function that their critics sometimes underestimate. Climate change, energy security and the technological transformation of European industry are not imaginary problems. Germany cannot indefinitely preserve an industrial model built around assumptions about cheap Russian energy, Chinese export markets and American security guarantees that have become increasingly uncertain. Green politics, stripped of occasional moralism and excessive regulatory enthusiasm, represents an important constituency arguing that prosperity must be reconciled with the physical and strategic realities of the twenty-first century.

These three traditions disagree profoundly. They should. Democracy is not a project for eliminating political disagreement. Conservatives may reasonably believe that Greens underestimate the costs of environmental transition. Social democrats may believe conservatives underestimate inequality. Greens may consider both too attached to industrial arrangements whose foundations are disappearing. Arguments of this sort are not symptoms of democratic failure. They are democracy itself.

The essential distinction is between politicians who disagree about how the constitutional state should be governed and political movements whose rhetoric, personnel or instincts raise questions about their commitment to the liberal constitutional order itself. Europe’s moderates must recover the ability to recognise that distinction.

This is where the analogy with the 1930s becomes useful, provided that it is employed carefully rather than theatrically. Contemporary Germany is not Weimar Germany. Its institutions are stronger, its society is richer, its constitutional safeguards are more sophisticated and its democratic culture is vastly more deeply established. There are no mass paramilitary armies fighting one another in the streets and Germany is not labouring under the particular combination of military defeat, revolutionary upheaval, hyperinflation and depression that poisoned the interwar republic.

To say that Germany today is simply Weimar reborn would therefore be absurd. But to conclude that Weimar has nothing to teach us would be equally foolish.

The catastrophe of the early 1930s was facilitated by a progressive collapse of cooperation amongst people who, whatever their disagreements, had vastly more in common with one another than they did with the enemies of parliamentary democracy. Conservative elites imagined that extremists could be manipulated. Parties of the centre became weaker and increasingly incapable of creating durable governing arrangements. Political language hardened. Compromise became disreputable. Emergency increasingly replaced ordinary politics. Eventually people who believed themselves too clever to be consumed by extremism discovered that they had catastrophically miscalculated.

The lesson for Europe today is therefore not that every politician on the populist right is Hitler, nor that every vote for an anti-establishment party represents embryonic fascism. Such language cheapens history and usually strengthens the people against whom it is directed. The lesson is instead that constitutional democracy requires active maintenance by politicians capable of recognising one another as legitimate competitors within a common system.

That principle has practical consequences beyond Germany. A British conservative ought to be capable of supporting a German social democrat defending constitutional institutions against the far right. A French socialist ought to recognise the value of a German Christian Democrat who keeps conservative voters inside democratic politics. A Polish liberal ought to understand why pragmatic German Greens may be essential to a coalition preventing extremists from acquiring power. European political families naturally support their ideological relatives, but there are moments when the preservation of the democratic spectrum matters more than which portion of that spectrum prevails.

This does not mean suppressing the AfD by administrative manoeuvre whenever it becomes inconvenient. Nor does it mean constructing permanent coalitions whose only programme is excluding one party. A democracy that appears to tell a substantial proportion of its electorate that their votes do not count creates precisely the resentment upon which populism thrives. Constitutional safeguards may sometimes be necessary, particularly against genuinely anti-democratic conduct, but they cannot substitute for politics.

The more durable answer is competition. Moderate conservatives must persuade voters attracted to the AfD that legitimate concerns about migration, security and national identity can be addressed without radical nationalism. Social democrats must persuade economically anxious Germans that democratic government can still deliver material security. Greens must demonstrate that ecological transition can produce industries, jobs and energy independence rather than merely restrictions, bills and lectures. Liberals, where they remain electorally viable, must recover the case for individual freedom, entrepreneurship and restraints upon an increasingly complicated state.

Above all, these politicians must occasionally support one another.

That can be uncomfortable. Democratic politicians naturally wish their opponents to lose elections. Yet there is a difference between wanting one’s opponent to lose and wanting one’s opponent to disappear. A functioning constitutional order requires credible alternatives. Conservatives need social democrats because governments eventually fail and power must be transferable to a responsible opposition. Social democrats need conservatives for precisely the same reason. Greens need both because environmental politics without broader social legitimacy becomes brittle. Each democratic tradition depends, paradoxically, upon the survival of the others.

Europe should therefore abandon the increasingly fashionable idea that politics consists of two enormous hostile camps in which everyone must choose an existential tribe. The democratic centre is not a single ideology. It is an ecosystem. It stretches from moderate conservatism through Christian democracy, liberalism and social democracy to pragmatic environmentalism. Its members can argue ferociously about taxation, migration, welfare, defence, climate policy and Ukraine while nevertheless agreeing upon elections, constitutional restraints, judicial independence, human dignity and the peaceful transfer of power.

Germany has a special responsibility in maintaining this ecosystem because German democracy is not merely a domestic achievement. It is one of the central political achievements of post-war Europe. The Federal Republic transformed a country that had experienced catastrophic dictatorship into an anchor of constitutional government. The European Union itself was constructed partly upon the assumption that Germany’s political conflicts would henceforth be conducted within democratic institutions and embedded within a wider European constitutional culture.

For that reason Europeans should care about the quality of German conservatives, German social democrats and German Greens even when they disagree passionately with them. The objective should not be to homogenise German politics into an indistinguishable centrist mass. Quite the contrary: Germany needs vigorous political competition. But it needs competition amongst parties whose disagreements end at the boundaries of the constitutional order.

There is another lesson from the 1930s worth remembering. Extremism thrives upon fatalism. Once citizens become convinced that democratic government is incapable of addressing their problems, radical solutions become steadily more attractive. The antidote is therefore not principally censorship, ostracism or historical scolding. It is competent government.

Germany must control migration competently. It must revive economic growth. It must reconsider an industrial model under severe pressure. It must determine how to defend itself in a Europe facing Russian aggression. It must reconcile climate objectives with affordable energy. It must maintain social solidarity between prosperous metropolitan centres and regions that feel forgotten. It must do all these things while preserving the freedoms and constitutional restraints that distinguish democracy from authoritarian efficiency.

None of this will be easy. That is precisely why Germany requires the full breadth of its democratic political traditions.

The great mistake of moderate Europeans would be to imagine that because they disagree with one another, they are one another’s principal enemies. They are not. A conservative who accepts constitutional democracy, a social democrat who accepts political pluralism and a Green who accepts peaceful alternation in government inhabit the same political civilisation, however furious their arguments may become.

The 1930s demonstrated what can happen when that elementary fact is forgotten.

The appropriate response today is not panic and certainly not historical melodrama. It is solidarity amongst democrats combined with vigorous disagreement amongst them. Europe’s moderates should support responsible German conservatives when they defend democratic conservatism, social democrats when they defend social democracy and Greens when they reconcile environmental politics with constitutional government and economic reality. They should criticise all of them when criticism is deserved, while understanding that the continued existence of each is part of the architecture protecting everyone else.

Democracy survives not because everyone agrees. It survives because people who profoundly disagree nevertheless understand that they need one another.

That may be the most important German lesson of the twentieth century. Europe would be unwise to learn it twice.