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Berlin attack: How Germany put itself back on the path to extremism

There are guards outside the asylum-seeker centres dotted across Germany, but no one is sure who they're guarding and from whom. Them or us? "Tja," says my friend the Harley mechanic in his cynical Berlin drawl, "dat wissen wir nucht." Translation, "dunno, mate".

When I last sat with them, in September, his Polish wife was less unsure. She is scared of the menacing youths that crowd the U-Bahn in the evening, the unpredictable men who have made her country of refuge feel unsafe. Today she is counting her blessings. A year ago, she was selling souvenirs at the Christmas market under the iconic bombed out church on Breitscheidplatz where the December 20 truck attack occurred.

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In a brewery bar on the edge of the Turkish-Arab ghetto of Wedding, Nikki is more circumspect. His girlfriend works in an asylum-seeker centre. We roam across topics, drinking the beer that's bubbling through the pipes around the cellar walls. Then he intermeshes his fingers with crossed thumbs forming a triangle before him, in imitation of Chancellor Angela Merkel's signature pose. "Wir schaffen das," he quotes her, "we'll succeed".  "But how? She keeps on saying it and she hasn't told us how. Just like her mentor, Kohl: stubborn, there's no other way but mine."

"I don't know if we can do it."

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There are plenty more like it. For instance a cab driver, a self-described Green voter, who doesn't trust Merkel but sees no alternative to voting for her. After years of "grand coalition" with her party, the CDU, some top talent has resigned from the "opposition" SPD and politics altogether. The social democrats haven't put forward a credible alternative chancellor – their man, Sigmar Gabriel, polls about 17 per cent – and their former natural coalition party, the Greens, haven't been able to get it together since Joscka Fischer retired.

Merkel has been in power for nearly 11 years. She has shown immense strength of character and stability. During the financial crisis, she stood firm and prevailed. While Europe wobbled under the Greek default crisis, she almost single-handedly propped up the European project. She gives the impression of someone who, through her personal strength of character, could do anything. So when she said that Germany could manage the enormous wave of immigration, there was some reason to hope. We waited to hear her plan. There was no plan.

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As Germany enters an election year in 2017, media around the world are fretting that the "right-wing populism" of Brexit and Trump could spread to Germany. But the German "right-wing populists", the Alternative for Germany (AfD), are not especially right wing – nor arguably are the Brexiteers or the Trumpists. The AfD are simply the only viable party in Germany that has consistently argued for controlled immigration.

Other policies of the climate-change sceptical AfD are to withdraw from Europe "in an orderly fashion", ban mosques funded from overseas, as well as minarets and burqas (the latter now also a position held by Merkel's CDU), and reintroduce compulsory military service. They would like to withdraw Germany from free-trade agreements (a position they share in common with Die Gruenen (Greens) and Die Linke (The Left), and introduce a minimum wage (in common with the SPD, Die Gruenen, Die Linke and parts of the CDU). The policies are similar to UKIP, Trump and, in Australia, One Nation. But immigration is the deciding issue here.

Because whatever Germans think of the AfD's broader policy platform, the party will benefit most from its approach to immigration at the polls. Neither of the major parties, and none of the "significant others", have held a similar stance.

In 2010 the former Social Democratic finance senator Thilo Sarrazin published a book called Germany Abolishing Itself, in which he argued for controlled immigration. Very few people who criticised the book have actually read it. But the book was so controversial that Sarrazin was expelled from his party. With that, the last opportunity for sensible public debate on controlled immigration in Germany was aborted. As a result, the public debate that would have been needed to form centrist policies has not occurred.

Now in 2016-17, the debate will be hysterical and polarised instead. The Christmas Market terror attack in Berlin has underscored that Merkel's recent conversion to the idea of controlled immigration is too late, and as planless as her previous open door policy.

2017 will be a year of immense instability for Germany. It will require strong leadership as never before. But the only "centre" available is a co-implicated Grand Coalition of "left" and "right" major parties trying to differentiate themselves pre-election, like a two-headed beast tearing itself to death.

The great tragedy is that Germany's post-WWII determination to quash "extremist" and "populist" speech is now once again leading it down the path of populism and extremism.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is a German-Australian and director of communications agency Thought Broker.  Twitter: parnellpalme

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