Since early December, a bronze statue of Walter Lübcke, murdered by a far-right extremist more than six years ago, has stood in front of CDU party headquarters. According to the “Center for Political Beauty,” the group behind the action, it's meant to remind the Christian Democrats of their responsibility not to work with the AfD. Stuffed animals, wreaths, and German flags have lined the statue ever since.
Setting aside that the CDU under Merz now uses rhetoric barely distinguishable from the AfD's: what exactly is this “responsibility” the liberals keep saying the Christian Democrats just need reminding of? Look closely and you'll find the cooperation has long since happened: it's already reality at the local level, and earlier this year the Bundestag passed a CDU motion hostile to migration with votes from the far right, fully aware that the necessary majority was only achievable with the AfD.
The moment resistance stirs, it gets talked down, and of course it's the left doing the talking-down, I hear the liberals cry. But the times also dictate what forms of resistance are actually necessary.
Career politicians have always enriched themselves through their positions of power. But in the past, once a scandal became public, they at least resigned under public pressure. That era is over. These days, lobbying doesn't even need to be hidden anymore: Nestlé, mask deals, the auto industry, whose responsibility is there left to appeal to, once career politicians have become puppets of capital?
What's needed are more adequate forms of resistance than erecting a statue that appeals to the responsibility and morality of those in power. Forms of resistance that actually sting. Swedish political journalist Andreas Malm sketches out what that might look like in his book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire,” using social struggles in the face of the looming climate catastrophe as his example: the longer people stall and delay, the more drastic the measures needed to avert catastrophic consequences, including, in an emergency, acts of sabotage. Because one thing is certain: with Nazis in power, things get worse for everyone, just not for the rich.
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