German Politics and Society

Energy policy involves complex goal trade-offs between sustainability, affordability, and security. Germany's Energiewende long favored the first. The Zeitenwende prompted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine forced a rethinking of the long-held belief in reliable cheap gas imports, and thus the weight given to affordability and security. This article explores both the immediate crisis response and the lasting impact on broader energy policies. Contrary to widely held perceptions of deliberative decision-making, the crisis response was decisive, flexible, and (if at a high cost) largely successful. This decisiveness, however, did not feed through to tackling the structural challenges already plaguing the Energiewende before the war. 2030 policy targets increasingly appear aspirational while energy costs loom large for both households and firms.

The state response to the covid-19 crisis triggered fierce protests in German-speaking countries. Our study aims to provide an overview of the German and Swiss protest movement by examining the socio-structural make-up and worldviews of members of Corona-skeptical Telegram chats, the public appearance of protests, and the movement's collective identities. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed survey (n = 1089), interview (n = 45), and ethnographic data, all collected between 2020 and 2022. Our findings suggest a heterogeneity of Corona-skeptics, revealing three distinct worldviews that focus on esoteric, conspiracy, and right-wing topoi. We paralleled these patterns with qualitative data and linked them to three groups present at Corona protests. Additionally, we found that collective identities—specifically, the “critical expert” and the “heroic resistance fighter”—played a crucial role in unifying the movement.

Few policymakers and experts in Germany and elsewhere had expected the Russian attack against Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Retrospectively, mainstays of German political thought and policy—multilateral negotiations, minimal use of military means, and socio-economic entanglement with Russia—seemed flawed. In stark contrast, Russia's declared goal of violently preventing an eventual accession of Ukraine to nato seemed well in line with realist thinking. While some German scholars consequently argued that realism had unjustly been maligned and neglected in Germany, others claimed that realist thought yielded false and politically dangerous analyses of the conflict. The article argues that this controversy over realism can largely be resolved by distinguishing realism-as-theory from realism-as-heuristics. It shows how realism-as-theory can contribute to an improved understanding of the conflict, whereas the use of realism-as-heuristics in German discourse has confounded it. This article thereby provides pointers for increasing the quality of theory-based research and of scholarly interventions into public policy debates.

In July 2024, Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the new electoral law, reformed in 2023, is by and large in line with the Constitution. The Court also mandated some adjustments. This came after a decades-long search for electoral reform in a highly contested political process. The history of Germany's electoral law since 1949 shows that conflicts between the parties have been present from the outset, even though the law has been seen as a good combination of different electoral systems. The detailed description of the new electoral law in this article provides the basis for a discussion showing that the new law does not fundamentally alter the logic of representation in Germany and that conflicts in the process may have adverse effects on political trust.

Ross Campbell and Louise K. Davidson-Schmich, eds., The 2021 German Federal Election (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023).

Roman Sandgruber, Hitlers Vater: Wie der Sohn zum Diktator wurde (Vienna-Graz: Molden, 2021).

Sascha Schmidt and Yvonne Weyrauch, Right-Wing Terrorism in Hessen: History, Actors, Places (Rechter Terror in Hessen: Geschichte, Akteure, Orte) (Frankfurt, Wochenschau Press, 2023).

H. Glenn Penny, In Humboldt's Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021).

Mary Fulbrook, Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).

Peter H. Wilson, Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2023).