The far-right AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland) won a sweeping election victory in the German state of Saxon-Anhalt last Sunday.
I addressed the implications and motivations for the Alternative for Deutschland’s economic program.
While my work on the German economic decline of the past 10-15 years (teaching, talks) has focused on the German failure to embrace especially the tech/social/cultural/organizational/research imperatives of the Third Industrial Revolution in the country (in this interview I refer to the years-long trend of cutting of funding for such things), I did not refer to the other aspect.
That other key element has been the fateful and failed “strategy” of the German government and, following in Berlin’s footsteps, of the EU as well. That strategy was to substitute head-on competition with the USA in information technologies, to substitute coming up to speed in the digital economy (in production, communicating, computing, etc., in its requisite innovation and entrepreneurial culture, and the new, post-Fordist, information work culture of individual initiative, etc.) with a concerted strategy of building so-called “Green” and “Clean” tech to “leapfrog the USA information revolution” by “sparking a Fourth Industrial Revolution” based in Europe on the basis of renewables and associated green technologies.
This was a grave theoretical, historical and practical error, based on a combination of post-Great-Power hubris and a stubborn refusal to face the social-productive reality that Europe had NOT hosted the Third Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution, and had no option but to wholly embrace it, learn it and to catch up. But, it instead found a production/trade niche to fill with improved 1960-1970’s, Second Industrial Revolution technologies.
Instead of, like the USA painfully had done, joining the new “infomated” (E.g., S. Zuboff) ways of work and commerce, Germany doubled down on 1970s tech, and found a willing buyer in a China that was then rapidly developing and needed, for the time being, the electro-mechanical technology Germany was so good at providing.
Now, that infrastructure, that old productive base left over and revitalized from the late-Second Industrial Revolution, has to be “deindustrialized” to make way for a new German (and EU) “reindustrialization.” (Think Shopenhauer here.)
There can be no doubt this will be very painful – as this transformation was in the USA from the mid-1970s into the 1980s and again in managerial culture in the 1990s – and there is no guarantee it will succeed in Europe as, now, even this third IR has greatly evolved towards perhaps another leap. The fact that Europe avoided this transition for the past 15 years, deluding itself with an impossible panacea, the “ambitions” of a “green tech industrial revolution.” (Just think, it COULD HAVE simply done as the French did in the 1970=80s, under the Messmer plan, build nuclear plants massively, at the rate of several a year, sustainable decarbonizing, providing rock-solid reliable and cheap power, not needing Russian gas games, and be able to leave the grid as-is, and avoid any need for new grid-scale storage or carbon capture or hydrogen or alternative fuel technologies … most of which have not been developed after some 40-50 years of expensive R&D, because most of these were ALREADY well-known ideological-technological panaceas.)
For further reading -focusing on the usual approach of looking at macroeconomic issues and policies, an excellent historical overview of the evolution of the AfD’s economic orientation and program is given by a researcher at a Kyiv think tank, RESURGAM, here: https://resurgamhub.org/analytics/europe/germany/economics/ekonomichna-doktrina-adn-ta-yiyi-naslidki
“The Economic Doctrine of the AfD and Its Consequences,” Sep 5, 2026
By: Mykhailo Mazur, Graduate of CEVRO University, Intern at the Resurgam Analytical Center
The Global Barrel 