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We’ve never been in a situation like this. Germany is now governed by one of the smallest coalitions it has ever had, yet one that defines itself as a strong centrist alliance. Right-wing populists are again gaining support, while approval of the progressive parties taken together is weaker than it has been for decades. After half a year marked by the collapse of the traffic-light coalition (SPD, Greens, FDP), a turbulent electoral campaign, opinion surveys, coalition negotiations, and then the party chairs‹ hand-picked new cabinet, the public’s modest expectations match the coalition’s narrow majority.

None of that changes the fact that the new coalition will confront challenges unlike those faced by almost any previous government. Those challenges will be partly geopolitical and partly about the rise of far-right extremism in this country. If its efforts to stabilize the political center are to turn out well, it will have to formulate new responses and display greater aptitude for getting things done. As yet the coalition contract reveals little in the way of demonstrable progress on those tasks. There are to be fifteen commissions, two new boards, thirteen reviews of laws, and eighty-eight inspection orders. In the wake of the symbolic activism of the government’s first days in office – mainly, the enhanced deployment of border police – numerous question marks still hover in the Berlin skies. For the most part, it remains to be seen what the coalition’s concrete policies will be.

The coalition might have unraveled had its members begun to quarrel immediately about its defensive strategy toward the rise of far-right populism and extremism. The fact that many in the CDU/CSU barely reacted to the Constitutional Protection Office’s report on the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) revealed the trap into which they could have fallen. The challenge of the new right will cast a shadow over the governing coalition. Nevertheless, even calm governance will not prove to be the most suitable way to discredit widely shared doom-and-gloom rhetoric. What is needed instead is a policy in which the government, parties, and democratic civil society mutually inspire one another in positive ways so as to promote and preserve the internal liberality of society.

How will society be brought in?

It would be very dangerous to think that politics at the level of the state apparatus alone would be an effective answer. But there is more. The dwindling »big tent« parties would be overestimating their political potential if they thought they could reverse society’s mood without making an effort to invite greater participation and integration. One of the crucial challenges of our time is to figure out how to maintain an open democracy devoted to constructive policies in the dawning digital age. And even though it is urgently necessary to regulate the world of the new digital oligarchs, political committees cannot decide how to do that by themselves.

»What we need now is the political vigilance of ordinary people coupled with new forms of political intervention.«

Questions also arise about the expectations of society itself, especially expectations coming from the progressive segment of the political spectrum, which always has championed an open society. No one should overestimate the ability of the new government to reverse the trend of public opinion in such a brief span of time. The party in government that once again is playing the leading role, the CDU/CSU, actually has blurred the lines separating it from the hard right. What we need now are both the vigilance of ordinary people and new forms of involvement that go beyond organized civic participation, which remains limited to petty issues. Progressives in this country should not feel thwarted just when they are most needed, as is the case now.

But progressives have some open questions that they too will need to clarify. In an age skeptical of progress, what does »progressive« mean? To what extent did supposedly progressive politics contribute to the negative mood swing in this country? What should its goals be in the future, and how will those goals translate into specific contents and preferences? What paths can be imagined and which of those are realistic? How can the power of society be mobilized once again outside of existing institutions? It is time to begin those debates

Taken together, three progressive parties − the SPD, the Greens, and the Left − won only 35% of the vote in the last election to the federal parliament. The unprecedented strength of the right across the globe and the new defensiveness of the progressives, including in the cultural sphere, are mutually reinforcing phenomena. Far-right movements, which by this time have gotten a foothold in centrist parties as well and pushed them to the right, have managed to showcase themselves as emancipatory movements vis-à-vis the state’s current positions on migration, ecological transformation, and cultural matters. In this sense the extreme right understands itself to be the successor of left-wing movements against the status quo and identifies itself as the force that truly opposes the establishment. It exploits the unkept promises of liberal, democratic modernity – primarily promises of equality and freedom. It also takes advantage of the output weakness of the political and economic systems, which blockade each other by setting up all manner of regulations and checks and balances, however well-founded those might be.

A twofold challenge for progressives

But progressives themselves have a crucial weakness when it comes to representation. On the one hand they take up the cause of the lower and lower-middle classes, which demand to have their voices heard, even though the progressives themselves often do not come from those classes. On the other hand, they seem not to offer opportunities for members of disadvantaged groups to participate directly in political deliberations. To worsen their dilemma, the progressive parties are overstressed by a twofold challenge, first by their competition with other parties within the centrist spectrum itself, and then by the need to cooperate as much as possible with those very parties in opposing the far-right forces, an endeavor that would presuppose a stable, democratic center.
»For some time now there has been an implementation gap at the heart of progressive political projects.«

Moreover, technocratic patterns of communication and behavior all too frequently dominate the progressive scene. And for some time now there has been an implementation gap at the heart of progressive political projects. That is, progressives have not figured out how to advance distributive justice in solidarity-deprived market mechanisms while also adhering to the guidelines of Realpolitik. Within complex political decision-making structures, especially in federal systems, clear-cut policies favoring the interests of those at the bottom have proven difficult to implement. Meanwhile, doubts about the capacity of the system to adapt have spread. Such uncertainty offers right-wing ideologues an opening to reach the disaffected. One crucial reason that progressives have had such a difficult time establishing ties with those in the lower and lower-middle classes has been their own understanding of rationality and the state. It all begins with a tendency to »talk past« people. Instead of stating clearly how things really are, they indulge too often in a technocratic mode of communication that tends to obfuscate rather than illuminate the challenges we face. Even progressives themselves often have an overly skeptical attitude toward the role that the general public can play in developing new answers. Instead, they focus exclusively on the state and its resources.

Distributed roles, common discourse?

However, we need new, open-ended approaches to designing the future of a commercial society and a society of migrants, assessing our security requirements both domestic and foreign, and carrying out the indispensable ecological transformation. The Merz coalition will grapple with all of this, yet it will soon bump up against familiar controversies, because in all these cases blatant issues of distributive justice both national and international must be addressed. In this context it makes an enormous difference whether one sees the lines of conflict running between poor and rich or between transfer recipients and those who already have jobs – in short, between those who have almost nothing and those who have just a little. The right traditionally has enjoyed success in playing up the latter line of conflict. To render progressive policies roadworthy for everyday uses, their advocates must find their own answer to that conundrum. Progressive thought on the issue should not reason exclusively from aspirations toward an ideal society. Instead, it should understand and address existing paradoxes and contradictions in society, including the emotional impact of social isolation, without embracing the resentments of the right.

At the federal level, parliamentary roles are now distributed differentially among the progressive parties. The danger of growing emotional distance that arises from that role-reallocation is part of the new reality. Nevertheless, in strategic discourses the focus should not be mainly on parliamentary role-playing and its outcomes. Those conversations should be based on a different question: how should we be talking about society’s major issues in the future? Ultimately, this discourse must also help foster an approach featuring a division of labor that would keep progressive politics in the game.

»Whether the idea of a militant democracy will endure depends on the CDU/CSU.«

Conservatives are caught in a strategic dilemma between strengthening the political center and the attractions of far-right, socially exclusionary topics. Here, the Union parties are the decisive factor in defining whatever role the AfD might continue to play in the political system. Whether the idea of a militant democracy will endure depends on them. Alternatively, the CDU/CSU may perceive the democratic consensus as a form of bondage from which they must attempt to break free in order to promote right-wing policies clearly at odds with the issues that progressives care about. That scenario would signal a quick end to the centrist coalition. In this respect the unresolved strategic questions confronting the Union parties are now consistently and directly relevant to strategic debates in the progressive camp in ways not seen previously. And in that context, it certainly will not do for progressives to define themselves merely as anti-right-wing. The bottom line is that progressives must be sensitive to the changes taking place in the Union parties, especially to the forces within them determined to resist authoritarian temptations. 

The strategic challenge

Around the globe we have now entered a time of transition in which liberal democracies either will fail or manage to re-establish stability. There are major foreign policy expectations concerning the future role of Germany as well as urgent needs for reform of its internal structures. Those include matters such as state capacity,and the resilience of social welfare systems in the face of demographic shifts and immigration. So far, discourses about those matters have remained strangely bloodless, reduced mostly to sloganeering. That has to change, at the latest when the new government’s policies become more concrete. At that time, social forces will need to emerge that make demands of this government, but do so in constructive ways. There will be no way to defend even the social and liberal status quo without a concrete image of what the future might look like – one that society is willing to support.

Although it is in the minority in terms of power politics, the progressive camp should not downplay its own importance. The progressive impulse must not weaken when it comes to the coalition agreement, which on many points remains undefined. Yet it is also clear that we are not only talking about finding programmatic answers to deepening social divisions, but also seeking concrete ideas that will mark positive steps within our common lives as members of society. Here, the political model of participation is the key principle. Far from being just padding, it is the central presupposition in the irreversible process of transformation affecting all developed societies.