The far-right AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland) won a sweeping election victory in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt last Sunday. I addressed the implications of and motivations for the AfD’s economic program.
In the interview, we spoke mostly about macroeconomic policies of the AfD, and its anti-immigrant social policies. However, the AfD seems to not have a fundamentally different economic orientation from other German parties over the past couple decades. It too is backward looking, full of nostalgia for “what worked” previously in the post-War German economic model. However, it also prioritizes going back to when there were fewer immigrants in Germany.
My work on the German economic model, however, especially my teaching and talks, has focused on the failure of Germany to embrace the tech, social-cultural organization, and research imperatives of the Third Industrial Revolution, the Information Age.
Germany, and the EU as well, have long failed to catch up with the USA, or for that matter Asian allies Japan and South Korea, in information technologies and the modernization of work organization-and-culture within the spheres of production, communication, commerce, research, education and business. This would have required reforms fostering a risk-tolerant culture of innovation, personal initiative, flexibility and entrepreneurialism, sweeping transformations away from the old, mid-20th-Century Fordist model “with German characteristics,” so to speak.
This strategy was both a theoretical and practical mistake – not because it addressed global warming, which indeed is a significant problem though, in my view, not the predominant global problem it is made to be in the last 15 years of German policy, but because it was offered as an alternative model of economic development to Europe embracing the “American” Information Revolution.
In reality, Europe had no option but to wholly embrace what it terms “digital technologies” and catch up to tje USA.
In addition to embracing its peculiar “green”, “clean” energy path to reindustrialization, the other German strategy, in parallel, was to double down on improving its renowned 1960-1980’s electro-mechanical technologies, which are typical of the previous Second Industrial Revolution, and massively export these into the Chinese market.
Nevertheless, Gerany did have a plan to move, at some point, beyond this hold-over tech. The strategy was to bank on development of “green” or, more recently, “clean” technologies.
It was widely claimed, for about 20 years (influenced by futurist green-energy theorists like US physicist Amory Lovens, that Europe could “spark a Fourth Industrial Revolution” by carrying out a “green energy transition” based on developing and deploying a “totally new” energy system” using only renewable sources such as windmills and solar panels along with all their required grid-expansion, -connection and energy storage technologies.
However, this two-pronged German economic strategy is now collapsing.
For one thing, China is now perfectly capable of not only producing the older-school electro-mechanical devices at scale, and generally at much lower production costs, but, to add insult to injury, it has also leapfrogged Germany in development and production of “green” technologies that were to be Germany’s future by gradually replacing its electro-mechanical technologies and constituting its exports of tomorrow.
In short, the green-tech-based, European-centered “Fourth Industrial Revolution” boat has already sailed. All along, it was a deeply flawed economic-productive policy – as I elaborated in university seminars in the USA and Berlin for over two decades).
It is now clear from the present German deindustrialization that the hoped-for Fourth Industrial Revolution, leapfrogging Europe ahead of America and its Silicon Valley, is not going to happen. That strategy has clearly failed.
However, no German party, including the so-called “Alternative” for Germany, has a comprehensive, forward-looking, realistic plan for what to do now. I don’t get a big pushback anymore for saying that Germany is deindustrializing – not from any party. However, I see no party – AfD included – that has really faced up to what is needed to succeed at national reindustrialization on a modern basis.
The deindustrialization crisis now unfolding in Germany will almost certainly increasingly fuel the far-right’s nostalgic economic panaceas. And there can be no doubt this deindustrialization will be very painful, as it was in the USA from the mid-1970s into the early 1980s (the period when I worked in the USA automobile industry), and again in its managerial culture in the 1990s.
The fact that Europe, and especially Germany, has yet to coherently critique and move on from its green-tech-centered model, is only making matters more difficult.
Aside: Just imagine. Germany could have simply done as the French did in the 1970-80s, under the Messmer plan, and massively build nuclear plants, at a rate of several per year, resulting by now in sustainable decarbonization; reliable and cheap electricity generation, and with no need to play Russia’s gas games.
With nuclear, Europe could simply leave its grids as they are and also avoid any need for new grid-scale storage, carbon capture, hydrogen or alternative-fuel technologies … most of which have still not been developed at-scale despite 40-50 years of expensive R&D. Indeed, most of these technologies were already known to be highly problematic in the 1970-80’s.
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
