(CN) — Is Germany going off the rails?
This question is taking on ever more urgency as the European Union's powerful economic engine and its central political pillar copes with a sinking economy, a teetering ruling coalition, a surging far-right party and a wave of protests led by farmers angry over government policies to tackle climate change and turn off Russian energy supplies.
Only a few days into 2024, there's little doubt this year will be turbulent for Germany — and by extension for the EU as a whole.
The country is bracing for nationwide strikes by railway workers, truckers and farmers on Monday. Huge disruptions are expected, adding more pressure on the weak and fractious ruling coalition of center-left Social Democrats, liberal pro-environment Greens and Free Democrats, a liberal pro-business party.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a 65-year-old Social Democrat, has historically low approval ratings. In early December, the pollster DeutschlandTrend found only one-fifth of Germans supported him, the lowest approval rating of a German chancellor since the firm began tracking political sentiment in 1997. The same poll found the Free Democrats not getting enough votes to remain in the Bundestag, the German Parliament.
Germany got a taste of this bitter political climate Thursday evening when hundreds of protesters, many of them farmers, showed up at a ferry dock in the German town of Schlüttsiel to confront the country's second-most powerful politician, Robert Habeck, the economics minister and a co-leader for the Greens.
Habeck and his wife were returning by ferry from a vacation on the northern German island of Hallig Hooge when they were blocked from leaving the vessel by a crowd of protesters. Videos showed police and ferry workers struggling to keep crowds from storming onto the ferry, which was forced back to sea.
The incident highlighted the toxic atmosphere in German politics, many German media outlets said.
Then there are growing fears over the rise of Germany's far-right Alternative für Deutschland, whose popularity has surged in the past year as anger has grown over the country's economic troubles. The cutoff of cheap Russian energy following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and a slowdown in China have hit German industry hard. The International Monetary Fund has projected Germany was the only major Western economy to contract in 2023 and economists expect very limited growth, if any at all, this year.
Polls show 22% of Germans now support AfD, making it the second most popular party. Only Germany's mainstream conservatives, the Christian Democrats, are ahead with about 32% while the ruling parties have seen their support drop significantly.
Germany is scheduled to hold three regional state elections in eastern Germany this September and the AfD is on track to win all of them.
Perhaps the most immediate problem facing the ruling coalition is a severe budget crisis.
In November, the government coalition's plans to boost the ailing economy by investing in green and digital technologies were blown apart by a ruling from Germany's constitutional court.
The court found it illegal for the government to fund its investment plans with 60 billion euros ($65.7 billion) in emergency loans meant to deal with the coronavirus crisis. Reallocating the loans, the court ruled, violated the country's mechanism to rein in debt, the so-called debt brake.
Under this mandate enshrined in the constitution, German governments must commit not to rack up debt by limiting federal structural deficit to 0.35% of gross domestic product.
In the wake of the ruling, the coalition entered into crisis talks with the Social Democrats and Greens pushing to get around Germany's limits on borrowing but the Free Democrats refusing to compromise on the debt brake.
In December, the coalition finally devised a new budget that relied on spending cuts and tax hikes. But some of the tax hikes hit the agriculture sector, in particular a plan to cut subsidies for diesel used by farmers, and that has prompted large-scale protests.
The farmer-driven protests in Germany echo those that rocked Dutch politics last year and helped lead to the victory of far-right politician Geert Wilders in parliamentary elections in November.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
Follow @cainburdeau
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