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Israeli Strike on Gaza Home Kills at Least 50 Palestinians
Most of the victims are reportedly women and children, including a 1-month-old infant.
May 23, 2025
Gaza officials said Friday that an Israel Defense Forces airstrike targeting a home in the northern part of the Palestinian enclave killed at least 50 people, mostly women and children, while separate IDF strikes killed aid workers and other civilians, and deadly starvation continued.
Local and international media including Al Jazeerareported 50 or more people were massacred when the IDF bombed the home of the Dardouna family in the northern city of Jabalia al-Balad late on Thursday. Victims reportedly include a 1-month-old infant and Dr. Ibrahim Dardouna, a physician at the Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals, both of which have been severely damaged by Israeli bombing and other attacks.
Drop Site Newsreported that people who survived the initial bombing but were buried beneath the ruins of the four-story home could be heard pleading for help. Neighbors and other first responders desperately dug through the rubble with their bare hands, as Israeli occupation forces have blocked most heavy equipment from entering Gaza and bombed bulldozers and other vehicles already in the strip.
Warning: The following video contains images of death.
Medical sources told Al Jazeera that a total of 84 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes in recent hours. Victims include six aid workers reportedly slain in an IDF strike in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.
"These individuals were performing purely humanitarian duties by securing two trucks carrying vital medicines and medical supplies for the health sector, to ensure their delivery to hospitals in devastated areas," Gaza's Government Media Office (GMO) said in a statement reported by Middle East Monitor.
"Targeting them is a full-fledged crime that exposes the true intent of the occupation to disrupt the flow of humanitarian and medical aid and to create chaos and insecurity in line with its plan to starve the population and deny treatment to the sick," GMO added.
On Thursday, Palestinian officials said that more than 300 people have died from malnutrition and lack of medicine caused by Israel's bombing and siege. Israel's blockade was tightened in March at the start of an intensified offensive that has killed or wounded more than 13,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Since October 7, 2023—when Israel launched its assault in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack in which more than 1,100 Israelis and others were killed and upward of 250 others were kidnapped—Israeli forces have killed at least 53,822 Palestinians in Gaza, while wounding over 122,000 others. More than 14,000 Gazans are also missing and feared dead and buried beneath rubble.
Israel's conduct in the 595-day war is under investigation by the International Court of Justice as a possible genocide. The ICJ has issued three provisional orders for Israel to stop attacking Gaza and allow entry of humanitarian aid into the strip. Critics accuse Israel of ignoring all three orders.
Almost all of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, by invading Israeli forces. IDF troops are currently waging Operation Gideon's Chariots, an effort to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse large swaths of Gaza. Members of fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Cabinet, the Israeli Knesset, and others have advocated the ethnic cleansing and Jewish recolonization of Gaza.
The latest Israeli attacks came as Steve Witkoff, U.S. President Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, claimed Friday that "great progress" is being made toward a new cease-fire agreement and the release of the 23 hostages still being held by Hamas. Israel unilaterally abrogated a January cease-fire in March.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Friday that "Palestinians in Gaza are enduring what may be the cruelest phase of this cruel conflict," while chiding the international community for "watching in real time" asr "families are being starved."
Officials in some of Israel's allied countries including the United States have grown increasingly frustrated at Israel's refusal to allow more than a trickle of aid to enter Gaza.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Thursday denounced the recent IDF strikes on Gaza as "unjustifiable and unacceptable" and urged Israel to stop bombing so that food and other humanitarian aid can reach those who need it.
On Friday, Germany—which has been one of Israel's staunchest supporters—reiterated its opposition to Trump's plan to forcibly expel up to 1 million Palestinians from Gaza and send them to Libya.
"The German government's position on this is very clear," German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Christian Wagner
told reporters in Berlin. "There must be no expulsion, direct or indirect, of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. I have also explained this very clearly to our Israeli partners and friends during my visit, and this is the basis of our future policy."
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Climate Hope—and Wisdom—From Abroad
As Trump tacks tariffs onto films from “foreign lands,” we can still be inspired by other countries’ environmental visions, from China’s affordable electric vehicles to Germany’s balcony solar.
May 06, 2025
Every once in a while our mad king hits on an accidentally poetic turn of phrase in one of his strangely punctuated missives. In one of this week’s movie-based announcements (not the one about reopening San Francisco’s notorious island prison, which apparently followed a showing of Escape From Alcatraz on the Palm Beach PBS station) (not PBS’ fault, support them here), he declared that he was henceforth “instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
It was the last phrase—“foreign lands”—that attracted me; it conjures up European monarchs of earlier centuries dispatching sailors to see if fountains of youth or dragons or some such might be found off the edges of existing charts. (No, as it turned out, just Indigenous people who could be forced to part with their “foreign lands”). It’s a reminder that for Trump, and for many of us, a myopic focus on what’s happening here is a mistake, because we’ve long assumed that we’re at the head of the world. That unconscious supremacy—born in the actual enormous lead we had in living standards in the rubble of World War II—no longer makes much sense. So just a quick survey of what those funny people in other places are up to.
The rest of the English-speaking world seems set to keep moving forward into a working energy future. And the rest of Europe too.
Take China, emerging as Earth’s first electro-state. The Wall Street Journal had an excellent account this week of just how far our economies are diverging. Autos are a key piece of technology, one that produces both a large supply and technology chain, and a clue to a country’s identity. In America, Peter Landers, pointed out, the “standard family choice” is a $50,000 gas-fired SUV; in China,
A majority of new vehicles sold in China are either fully electric or plug-in hybrids, and a look around the recent auto show in Shanghai showed that local makers have mostly stopped introducing new gasoline-powered models. In the U.S., by contrast, the traditional combustion engine still powers about 8 in 10 new vehicles.
The price difference is overwhelming. Chinese car buyers no longer need to debate whether an EV can be made affordable, not when a decent starter model costs $10,000 and a luxury seven-seater with reclining massage chairs can be had for $50,000. Because of customer demand, even the low-end models come with advanced driver-assistance software.
Ten thousand dollars for a “decent starter model.” We’re not talking junk: “a new Toyota electric-powered sport-utility vehicle for about $15,000, complete with sunroof and cup holders.” Some of this comes because Chinese automakers are paid less (enough, however, to afford a new car); some of it comes from increasingly roboticized factories; and some of it comes from government subsidy. Because the government has decided it wants to own the future: Whose cars do you think are going to do better in, um, “foreign lands”? Bloomberg, in March, reported that Chinese automakers were “taking over roads from Brazil to South Africa”:
In South Africa, China-made vehicles account for nearly 10% of sales, or about five times the volume sold in 2019. In Turkey, Chinese brands claimed an 8% share in the first six months of 2024, up from almost none in 2022. In Chile, they have accounted for nearly a third of auto sales for several years running.
China sends more vehicles abroad than any other country, and its passenger car exports surged nearly 20% to 4.9 million in 2024 alone, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers—from less than 1 million in 2020.
In Brazil,
Luiz Palladino, 61, an engineer who has owned GM and Honda vehicles in the past and currently drives a Haval H6 EV, compared the car with much more expensive luxury cars.
“The moment I got into the car I thought: It’s in line with BMWs, Audis, with top-notch car finishing,” he said. “It has everything I want.”
Ok, that’s China (where thanks to huge solar buildout the use of coal for electricity dropped 5% in the first quarter, even as electricity demand surged). Now let’s look at Britain, where humans first learned to burn fossil fuels in quantity in the 18th century. There, the Labor government is apparently set to announce that all new homes will come with solar panels up top.
Housebuilders would be mandated by law to install solar roof panels on new properties by 2027 under new rules, seen by The Times, which ministers have claimed would slash energy bills and reduce emissions.
The change was estimated to add about £3,300 to the cost of building a semi-detached or terraced house and just under £4,000 for a detached property.
However, it was expected that new homeowners would recoup the extra costs within four years, with an average three-bedroom semi-detached saving more than £1,000 a year on energy bills.
This makes eminent sense because
Fitting solar power during construction is much cheaper than adding it to older buildings, which requires costly scaffolding and often new wiring. The payoff will be lower bills for consumers and lower emissions from buildings, which have become the second-biggest carbon polluter after transport.
And it comes despite the efforts of former British Prime Minister (and current Saudi lobbyist) Tony Blair to scupper such advances. Keir Starmer has four more years on his electoral mandate; Canada’s Mark Carney five, and after last week’s smashing election win Australia’s Anthony Albanese has three; the rest of the English-speaking world seems set to keep moving forward into a working energy future. And the rest of Europe too.
In Germany, for instance, as many as 3 million apartments may now have “balcony solar” arrays, solar panels that can be bought for a few hundred euros at the equivalent of Home Depot, hung from the railing of your veranda, and plugged straight into the wall, where they provide a reasonable amount of power. As France 24 reported recently:
City authorities in Frankfurt gave Christoph Stadelmann, a 60-year-old teacher, half of the 650 euros ($676) he paid for his kit at the beginning of last year.
Stadelmann expects to make his money back within three years.
Mirjam Sax said she would recommend balcony solar panels in spite of Germany's sometimes grey weather.
"If you've got a balcony, if you've got a bit of sun, you can put up a panel or two to see if it's worth it," she said.
"It's easy, and there's a price for every budget."
You can’t do that in America, because our country has fallen behind these foreign lands. As Grist reported last week, Underwriters Laboratory, which certifies appliances, hasn’t bothered to do the work to approve the systems, which means they can’t legally be installed in most places.
These challenges will take time and effort to overcome, but they’re not insurmountable, advocates of the technology said. Even now, a team of entrepreneurs and research scientists, backed by federal funding, are creating these standards. Their work mirrors what happened in Germany nearly a decade ago, when clean energy advocates and companies began lobbying the country’s electrical certification body to amend safety regulations to legalize balcony solar.
In 2017, Verband der Elektrotechnik, or VDE, a German certification body that issues product and safety standards for electrical products, released the first guideline that allowed for balcony solar systems. While such systems existed before VDE took this step, the benchmark it established allowed manufacturers to sell them widely, creating a booming industry.
“Relentless individuals” were key to making that happen, said Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. Members of a German solar industry association spent years advocating for the technology and worked with VDE to carve a path toward standardizing balcony solar systems.
Happily, we have some “relentless individuals” here as well—Cora Stryker, for instance, who this year started Bright Saver—to bring the balcony technology to America. I talked with her at some length last week: I’ve stuck our exchange into question-and-answer format below
- Is America finally getting balcony solar!? Tell me about how you heard about this new development and got involved.
Yes! We’re already doing installations in the SF Bay Area and we are looking for early adopters to help us start a “balcony” plug-in solar movement in this country like the one we are seeing in Germany. As you know, plug-in solar isn’t just for balconies. It can go almost anywhere—in the backyard, the side of a house, in front of a garage, etc. My cofounders and I started Bright Saver because we believe that the benefits of producing clean energy at home should be available to everyone, not just homeowners with good roofs who can commit to spending $20-30k, although our system is also great for folks like me who have maxed out our rooftop solar capacity and want more power. Rooftop solar is all or nothing—what we are offering is a more modular, lower-commitment, more affordable, and versatile solar option as an alternative.
In this political climate, I think we are all looking for solutions that give the power to us, literally, rather than relying on government to solve climate.
I first heard about balcony solar when you started writing about it, actually! Then I met my cofounders Kevin Chou and Rupert Mayer—tech entrepreneurs who got the climate call—and I joined as the long-time climate advocate among us.
2) What's your hope for this project—how big can this get?
We can get big. Really big.
Seventy percent of Americans can’t get rooftop solar, but millions in that group want it. How can we produce more clean energy nationwide? We believe the solution is to address accessibility first, giving everyone an option to produce solar at home. This will give millions of Americans an option to become primary producers of their own energy, saving on electricity bills, and, we believe, bringing millions into the climate movement, giving us all hope that the power to address climate rests in our hands.
If we do this right, we follow in Germany’s footsteps, and produce several gigawatts of clean energy annually. However, unlike Germany, we can’t take the risk of letting it take 10 years to ramp up because we don’t have 10 years when it comes to climate. That’s why we started Bright Saver—to make this happen more quickly than it would on its own.
3) The U.S. has different wiring than Europe—explain if this is a problem and how it's overcome?
That’s been a structural—pun intended—concern for some time. In Europe, you can buy plug-in solar units at the grocery store for a few hundred Euros, plug them into the wall, and you’re done. Unfortunately, we can’t use those European systems because, as you point out, we have a 120-volt electrical system and most of Europe is on a 230-volt system.
Here, we are limited in the number of systems that are compatible with our electrical system and they are expensive and not easy to install. We exist to eliminate these barriers to adoption. For instance, as a nonprofit, we keep our prices low and we install the system, a complicated process that requires a licensed electrician.
My job is to put myself out of a job—if we jumpstart this movement now, we get more manufacturers into the game; competition drives down prices and increases ease of use, which stimulates more widespread adoption; and the virtuous cycle continues on market forces without us. In this political climate, I think we are all looking for solutions that give the power to us, literally, rather than relying on government to solve climate.
4) What do you need from local authorities to really make this happen?
We are primarily installing units in the backyard or front yard, where we believe permits are rarely a concern. I have young kids, and I can’t think of any parents who got a permit to put a trampoline or a slide in the backyard. Similarly, the 800 watt units we are installing are impermanent structures which you plug into an outdoor outlet like an appliance. They are half the electricity load of a hair dryer, and we include a smart power meter to make sure they never backfeed into the grid.
What we need is local and state legislation like what just passed unanimously in Utah. As you know, that legislation eliminates the ambiguity when it comes to mounted plug-in systems so folks can put them anywhere that is convenient for them. In fact, part of our nonprofit’s mission is to build a national coalition of advocacy groups to help pass such legislation in all 50 states—so please get in touch if you know groups that might want to join our coalition!
5) Why do you need donations to get this started?
Without donations, we stay small and grow slowly. I’ve been approached by several venture capitalists who say to me, you have huge market potential—let’s talk! But we want to keep lowering and lowering prices as we get bigger, not feeling the pressure of investors wanting us to raise prices and increase profits. We are a nonprofit because, well, w're not here to profit—we are here to bring solar to everyone who wants it.
We have a big vision to give all Americans the option to become energy independent. We plan to include home battery storage in the future, but we are only four months old, we have limited funding, and we need to start somewhere. Donating or becoming an early adopter will make it possible for us to stay true to our mission of serving everyone with solar energy and growing the climate movement so that every household of every means can start producing their own energy from the sun.
Many thanks to Stryker and her friends for getting this off the ground (and if you think it tickles me that she first read about the concept in this newsletter, then you’re right; that’s why I do this).
And here’s the thing. Though Americans aren’t used to it, there’s sometimes something useful in being behind all those other foreign lands. They’ve figured out what needs to happen, and all we have to do is copy. That’s what China did for decades—maybe it’s our turn. And now I’m going to go watch a bunch of foreign movies before the tariffs kick in.
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How Germany's Extreme Center Fueled AfD's Success
As they united around neoliberalism and an aggressive foreign policy, mainstream parties created a dangerous democratic vacuum. This vacuum can now be exploited in particular by extremist parties on the right.
Feb 25, 2025
According to the preliminary results of the Bundestag, or parliamentary, elections, the extreme right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has become the second-strongest force in Germany. It now has 20.8% of the vote, doubling its result compared to the last election. The conservative CDU/CSU got 28.5%. The Social Democrats and the Greens, who have been in government so far, were punished, receiving 16.4 and 11.6% of the vote, respectively.
However, the party Die Linke was able to achieve a success. For a long time, it was stuck in polls well below the 5%, which is the mark to enter the Bundestag. But in a final sprint, it was able to significantly increase the result and garner 8.7%. Above all, strong speeches by Member of Parliament Heidi Reichinnek against the anti-migration agenda of all other parties and for real social change were able to mobilize.
Now the established parties and the mainstream press are engaging in the usual complaints and soul-searching about how things could have come to this. In the face of the rapid rise of the Alternative for Germany, journalists and political commentators often say that dissatisfaction with the established parties is the reason why more and more people are voting for the AfD. The dissatisfaction is then mostly seen as created by "mass immigration," the rejection of climate protection, and a left-liberal view of society ("wokeness")—in other words, a growing front against overly left-wing, progressive, liberal politics. This is seen to be the central cause of the shift to the right in society. Politicians must now respond to this.
The political class is reaping what is has sown and now is shedding crocodile tears about the results.
This is a narrative that is not only convenient and leads to false right-wing solutions, but also distorts reality by blaming those who are supposedly rebelling against progressive politics and thinking backward. At the same time, the other parties and their supporters appear as a haven of reason and morality, striving to hold society together.
The thesis that a shift to the right in the population is the reason for the rapid rise of the AfD also obscures the root of the problem. Looking closer, large portions of today's AfD voters have by no means been attracted to the AfD and its better policy proposals.
Even significant portions of AfD voters agree with the majority of Germans on polls that favor a fair solution to refugee protection and a quarter believe that the energy transition is indispensable; only a few describe themselves as extreme right and "only" 40% have right-wing tendencies. Most of them demand a social policy that benefits them, as many of them are unemployed or low-income earners, while the AfD takes a diametrically opposed, extreme position on all these issues, and their neoliberal program would make the rich even richer and the poor poorer.
In fact, more and more people were driven from the so-called "extreme center" into the arms of the AfD. In some ways, the political class is reaping what is has sown and now is shedding crocodile tears about the results.
The term "extreme center" was coined 10 years ago by the British intellectual Tariq Ali in his bookThe Extreme Centre: A Warning. It essentially refers to what often is referred to as "bourgeois parties," "parties of the political center," "established parties," sometimes also as "democratic parties" or "parties capable of forming a government." In Germany, these are the CDU/CSU, SPD, the liberals FDP, and the Greens. They distinguish themselves from the "extremes" on the left and right, which they regard as a danger to society and democracy, and see themselves as a force that balances interests and creates harmony.
According to Tariq Ali, the parties of the so-called center have been indistinguishable from each other in important policy areas since the 1980s. In the Western industrialized countries, a kind of "government of national unity" has emerged. It has implemented and maintained extreme policies—including the neoliberal turn and an aggressively oriented foreign policy under U.S. leadership—against the needs of the general population.
In the process, the space for alternative policy proposals and democratic debate has been reduced to a minimum. It created a dangerous democratic vacuum. This vacuum can now be exploited in particular by extremist parties on the right.
Let's take a look at how the "non-partisan political class, beyond particular interests" has operated in Germany in recent decades. Since the 1990s (or even earlier, in the years under chancellor Helmut Kohl, CDU), various governing coalitions have implemented policies that have led to Germany becoming the country in Europe with the greatest material and social inequality.
On the one hand, the established parties created a high concentration of wealth through various neoliberal measures. On the other hand, parts of the middle class were put under financial pressure. A huge low-wage sector was built up, widespread poverty (especially child and old-age poverty) was created, and the welfare state was dismantled.
Many services that people in the country rely on to live in safety have been commercialized, privatized, and "streamlined." The state of Germany's railways, healthcare system, pensions, agriculture, real estate markets, and education systems shows where this has led. Once in comparatively good condition, these infrastructures are now dysfunctional, expensive, unjust, and environmentally harmful.
The austerity for the poor and many ordinary citizens, and the welfare state for the rich and super-rich, has led to Germany becoming increasingly divided—especially the eastern federal states that were hit hard by the inequality policy after reunification.
The Agenda 2010, introduced and enacted under the red-green government in the early 2000s, was pushed forward by massive pressure from corporate and business lobbying groups (see the tens of millions of euros spent on the so called "reform movement," including the Initiative für Soziale Marktwirtschaft led by the employers' federation of metal and electronics industry Gesamtmetall) has finally turned on the inequality turbo. As a result, the lower and middle classes have become poorer and the rich and hyper-rich fantastically richer.
This process is uncontroversial today. According to the Global Wealth Report, in 1970 the top 1% of the German population (around 800,000 people) owned 20% of the total private wealth. That, too, is enormous, meaning that Germany was by no means a balanced or even just society at the time.
By 2020, the share had risen to 35%. The super-rich, the top 0.1% (around 85,000 Germans), can now claim up to 20% of the national wealth for themselves (as much as the top 1% in 1970). The top 10% own around 67%, which corresponds to two-thirds of total private wealth. Like many large properties, corporate assets are almost exclusively in the hands of the top 1%. The lower, poorer half of the population in Germany, on the other hand, owns practically no wealth, apart from a few small credit-financed and self-occupied apartments, houses, or cars.
This extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of very few continues to grow without countermeasures being taken. For example, the number of millionaires in Germany rose from 2.1 million to 2.8 million between 2019 and 2024, an increase of 30% in just a few years. A similar curve can be seen among billionaires. In 2001, there were 69 billionaires in Germany; by 2022, this number had already risen to 212, and last year there were 249 (including extended families) who own a billion or more.
According to the Global Wealth Report and other studies, "wealth inequality in Germany is higher than in other large Western European countries. For example, the Gini coefficient [it measures inequality: 100% means that all wealth is in one hand, at zero everyone would own the same] for wealth in Germany is 82%, compared to 67% in Italy and 70% in France."
In other rich industrialized countries, a comparable process of concentration and inequality can be observed, despite slight differences. The division of society is increasing everywhere in Western democracies, deliberately set in motion and nourished by the politics of the extreme center.
The regime of inequality has been further expanded in the United States and Great Britain than in Germany. There, neoliberal programs were initiated under former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s, and were implemented particularly rigorously in the U.S. by the business class and the political establishment.
Above all, these were drastic tax cuts for the rich and super-rich, i.e. for capital, and the deregulation of the financial industry, while the real wages (purchasing power adjusted for inflation) of the lower and middle classes fell and the welfare state, on which large sections of the population depended, was forced to retreat.
The U.S. extreme center, both Republicans and Democrats, wanted it that way. The media celebrated the policy as a dynamic growth strategy, even though growth rates and productivity were significantly lower than in the three "golden decades" before.
The direct effects of these neoliberal measures are mind-boggling. A 2020 study by the U.S.-based Rand Corporation shows that the top 1% of income earners in the U.S. have siphoned off $50 trillion (50,000 billion) from the bottom 90% in recent decades.
If the more equitable distribution of the approximately 30-year post-war period had continued, with wages rising in line with productivity, the total annual income of the bottom 90% of American workers in 2018 would have been $2.5 trillion higher, or about 12% of gross domestic product. In other words, the upward redistribution of income has enriched the top 1% by about $50 trillion at the expense of American workers.
Or to put it another way, the average income of a full-time employee in the U.S. in 2020 was $50,000. If wages had kept pace with economic output since the mid-1970s, the average worker's salary would be around $100,000 today.
But politicians and corporations blocked wage increases in the wake of the growing national income and handed out ever greater proportions of it with "reform measures" (i.e., redistribution measures) to the hyper-rich. U.S. labor unions speak of a "trillion-dollar robbery," criticizing an extremely successful "class war from above."
For decades, the extreme center has offered the right something that it continues to deny the left to this day: mobilization platforms for its political proposals.
A similar redistribution from bottom to top has taken place in Germany, albeit not as blatantly as across the Atlantic. Even though there is no comparable study for Germany to that of the Rand Corporation, most Germans would earn significantly more today if it had not been for the neoliberal redistribution policy.
The structural change, or rather the structural break, has had of course far-reaching effects. Studies show that the effects of inequality range from very negative to destructive. Accordingly, inequality generates and promotes economic crises and ecological catastrophes and intensifies conflicts, wars, global injustice, and the plight of refugees. Kate Pickett, professor of epidemiology at the Department of Health Sciences, and Richard Wilkinson, professor at the University of York, have been systematically studying the effects on living standards in rich countries for many years.
Their research, summarized in the books The Spirit Level and The Inner Level, shows that income inequality—the gap between rich and poor—has a strong influence on people's health and well-being, as well as on human capabilities and social cohesion. Inequality causes health and social problems.
This ranges from lower life expectancy and lower levels of education and social mobility to higher levels of violence and mental illness. The scientists argue that inequality hinders the creation of sustainable economies that ensure the well-being of people and the planet.
Above all, inequality undermines solidarity, provision for future generations, and social cohesion, and encourages more and more people to vote for right-wing or even far-right parties—initially as a form of protest, but then increasingly out of conviction.
In general, inequality and isolation lead to selfish, even authoritarian and irrational attitudes that lack solidarity. When a large part of the population sees a tiny minority amassing enormous wealth and bathing in luxury while many others do not know how to make ends meet in the face of skyrocketing rents and prices and a lack of public services, this is toxic for any society.
Instead of addressing these problems and their causes, the parties and the major media have chosen a different strategy to counter the growing dissatisfaction in the country. And that has created a second mobilizing factor for far-right answers, alongside inequality.
In principle, it is the well-known logic of "Divide and Rule" or "Us" against "Them" that allows frustration to be deflected and groups to be set against each other. It is simple but very effective: It is not the hyper-rich, entrepreneurs, and profiteers of the redistribution from bottom to top (the 0.1 or 1% class), including the political extreme center and their accomplices in the media, who are responsible for the conditions and frustration. It is "the others." They take away the prosperity of the Germans and make them dissatisfied.
This has allowed the privileges of those who own the companies and large portions of German wealth, as well as the politics that serve their interests, to be protected from real reform, while also deflecting people's anger at inequality and grievances from the causes of that frustration.
To illustrate this, Guardian columnist Fatma Aydemir cites a joke: A banker, a welfare recipient, and an asylum-seeker are sitting at a table. In front of them are 12 biscuits. The banker takes 11 biscuits and says to the welfare recipient: "Watch out, the refugee wants your biscuit."
In this way, minorities were declared scapegoats, marginalized, and stigmatized as a danger to the lower and middle classes. In the 1990s, after the Yugoslavian wars and the NATO bombings, opinion makers and prominent politicians blamed refugees from the Balkans for social and economic problems and ultimately shredded the right of asylum enshrined in the German constitution.
The same spectacle has been taking place since 2015. In major waves of campaigning, people fleeing from war, persecution, and misery have been presented by the media and politicians as the central threat to the social order.
They are portrayed as illegitimate "social parasites" and ungrateful "misogynists" (see the artificially scandalized "Sodom and Gomorrah" of Cologne during New Year's Eve 2015-2016, of which nothing remained in the investigation committee of the NRW state parliament) or terrorists and knife murderers (see the exaggerated coverage of isolated acts by mostly traumatized asylum-seekers and refugees) who want to snatch the last biscuit from the Germans.
The AfD was finally able to reap the political rewards, the grapes of wrath. In 2015, the party was in a tailspin after a desperate attempt to capitalize on anti-E.U. sentiment. Internal squabbles weakened it more and more, so that in September 2015 it plummeted to 4% in the polls and was on the verge of disappearing into insignificance.
But then came the dramatic turnaround. In the fall of the same year, the party's unstoppable rise began when the extreme center decided to spread a historic moral panic through all channels in the wake of the so-called "refugee crisis" of 2015-2016. A year later, in September 2016, the AfD was at 16% in the polls. Riding the wave of success, it was able to push ahead with political radicalization and spread "Vogelschiss" (bird droppings) theories about the insignificance of the Holocaust.
The AfD did not become what it is today on its own. It was the political class and the mainstream press that served and continue to serve up the "illegal intruders" as the perfect scapegoats for the authoritarian right. Only then did the far-right experience a rapid rise, successfully campaigning on the issue of refugees, who were widely vilified, and winning votes.
It is often claimed that the refugees, their influx, and their numbers have strengthened the right wing. The blame lies with the "migration pressure." But that is not true. As stated in the 2018 annual report of the Mercator Forum Migration and Democracy (Midem) Migration and Populism, it was not the influx of refugees that was the central factor, but the media and political discourse about the crisis.
As long as the reduction of inequality and social grievances are not placed at the top of the political agenda and addressed properly, while the extreme center keeps pursuing right-wing cultural wars as a distraction, rational answers to frustrations will have to swim against a powerful current.
Support for the AfD fell, as already mentioned, to four% in the opinion polls between 2015 and late summer of the same year (from 9% the previous year), while—calculated from 2014—750,000 refugees came to Germany during this time. Support for the AfD was indeed negatively correlated with the sharp increase in the number of refugees in Germany. During this period, more refugees actually led to a decline in support for the AfD.
From October 2015, when the discourse of crisis was launched by politicians and the media, the AfD's poll numbers rose sharply, reaching a preliminary high of 18% in September 2018. During this "AfD growth phase," the number of refugees coming to Germany and the E.U. dropped significantly, so that by the end of 2018, when the AfD reached its peak, almost no refugees were able to enter Germany thanks to the brutal sealing of the country's borders under the leadership of the Merkel government.
Hence, also during the "crisis phase," support for the AfD correlates negatively with the influx of refugees, according to the rule: fewer refugees, more support for the AfD. The actual influx of refugees is obviously not the reason for the success or failure of the AfD. What the AfD has actually benefited from since 2015 has been the political discourse of permanent crisis and alarmist reporting on asylum-seekers and "illegal migration."
Even today, the rise of the AfD is still associated with a conjured up second "refugee crisis." Although asylum-seekers from the southern Mediterranean region make up only a small proportion of those admitted (190,000 compared to over a million Ukrainians in 2020), they are once again the focus of media debate, which, as with the last "refugee crisis," focuses on deportation and strengthening "Fortress Europe"—a "refugee crisis" that in fact was a crisis of the European repulsion regime that was met with even more sealing off.
Meanwhile, the Germans at the bottom of society are also being discredited in order to deflect the frustration of the groups above them, especially the middle classes, onto them (and not upward, onto the culprit of the frustration). Thus, journalists and politicians discredited the unemployed and welfare recipients as "social parasites" and "work-shy" in order to push through the Hartz IV reforms to pressure the unemployed and the dismantling of the welfare state against popular resistance. As surveys show, majorities were against it and wanted a different, more solidarity-based modernization.
And while today the multimillionaires and billionaires in the country can hardly walk because of all their wealth, property, and investment portfolios, more and more money is being put into their pockets, while for those who (due to a lack of jobs, low wages, or exploding rents and prices) have to stay afloat with state support, every euro is questioned. So the political opinion makers argue about a too-high support for the long-term unemployed, the so called "Bürgergeld" (now 563 euros for a single person per month), with the adjustment in recent years barely offsetting inflation, but they don't talk about the constant pampering of millionaires and billionaires.
The mainstream media continue to spread the myth that basically everything is fine and a few Band-Aids here and there would suffice: a euro more minimum wage, for example—which would do no more than compensate for inflation and is often undermined by companies anyway.
But anyone who wants to address the extreme salaries and wealth, the capital gains of investors and companies (often parked in tax havens), is either met with ignorance (see the left-wing demands in the Bundestag) or attacked with economic doomsday scenarios.
And yet another group has become the target of the political establishment. Politicians and journalists have fueled toxic narratives on climate protection. To appease fossil lobbies and slow down the transition to renewable energy, the establishment (or rather, significant parts of it) sabotages the energy transition, denounces calls for immediate action, discredits demonstrators as "eco-terrorists" and presents climate protection as an economic burden and a brake on prosperity, especially for the lower and middle classes. At the same time, wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars are drawn into culture wars.
This makes it easy for the AfD and right-wing forces to present climate policy as an elite project and to portray themselves as guardians of ordinary people, protecting them from the burdens and costs of the energy transition. Similar things could be said about the "wokeness" debate—pushed by conservative sectors of the extreme center, while the resulting defensive reactions in the population could be used by the extreme right for campaigns.
The "political center" has created an extreme social situation, from which only the AfD is profiting in Germany. Its rise is closely linked to the failures of the establishment, which has shifted the overall frustration onto the weak, while the representatives of the political class shed crocodile tears over the popularity and election wins of the AfD. The same is true in other European countries and the United States.
The question remains as to why left-wing solutions have not been able to fill the gap created by the extreme center in the same way as right-wing extremist ones could—although the surprising election result of the Left Party on Sunday shows that this does not have to remain the case. Certainly, mistakes have been made by left-wing parties. But the real reason lies elsewhere. For decades, the extreme center has offered the right something that it continues to deny the left to this day: mobilization platforms for its political proposals.
While AfD talking points such as the threat posed by refugees, an energy transition that is harassing citizens, and a mass indoctrination of wokeness have been flooding the media for decades, a debate on progressive measures that address the social causes of frustration is suppressed.
As the asylum law and the sealing-off regime are tightened ever further and the energy transition is blocked, people continue to wait for the reintroduction of the wealth tax in Germany (suspended in 1997), a real inheritance tax for the hyper-rich, a closure of tax havens and loopholes, the end of destructive subsidies, the regulation of the finance industry, or a revival of the welfare state. If anything, Germans are put off with vague promises before elections. After that, the popular ideas are put on ice or not seriously addressed.
The progressive political climate, as it existed to at least some extent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has been systematically deprived of oxygen ever since—a very significant process that effectively blocked democracy. However, as long as the reduction of inequality and social grievances are not placed at the top of the political agenda and addressed properly, while the extreme center keeps pursuing right-wing cultural wars as a distraction, rational answers to frustrations will have to swim against a powerful current. To the detriment of society, its prosperity, and stability.
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