Nils Schniederjann is a Berlin-based journalist.
Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, increasingly pitches himself as a pragmatist akin to Angela Merkel. But his mantra of stable leadership has its limits, with the far right on the rise and Germany beset by dismal economic prospects.
Right-wingers love to insist that members of Adolf Hitler’s party were socialists. But Nazism’s real economic policies upheld hypercapitalist principles rooted in social Darwinist ideas about the value of human life. They weren’t socialists at all.