Danny Antonelli: The German Social-Democrats failed, because they have forgotten the social part [VIDEO]

Danny Antonelli, a Trieste-born professional lyricist living permanently in Hamburg, Germany, shares his insights and comments after the German parliamentary elections on 23 February 2025. Unlike many of the commentators, he is hopeful about both German democracy and its resilience against far right authoritarianism, and about the Germans’ capacity to remodel their economy to start innovating again. Among others, he also explains how failures of German reunification and society reintegration contributed to the rise of Alternative for Germany, and how Scholz’s Social-Democrats turned too much towards the business, ending up with a historically low electoral result.

A full transcription of the video is available below.

Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat: Hello everyone and welcome back to Cross-Border Talks!

We come back after a period of silence and we come back on a historic day, the day after the German parliamentary elections (which took place on 23 February 2025), an election that was followed with interest, with anxiety, with fear, but also with hope throughout Europe. We are talking about the historic election won by the moderate right-wing parties, but with the Alternative for Germany, a far-right party, firmly in second place, and with some of the parties that seemed certain to secure seats in the Bundestag below the threshold. Also the Social Democrats have a historically low result of 16% only, despite having won the previous elections. 

How can this result be explained? What can we expect from German society in the future? We will discuss these and other questions today with Danny Antonelli, who joins us from Hamburg. He was born in Trieste, Italy, and has lived in a number of countries, including Madagascar, India, Portugal and Croatia. He has a degree in English Literature from California State University and works as a professional lyricist for pop and rock metal artists in Germany. Danny is also the co-author of a series of articles on the rise of the far right in Germany published by Cross-border Talks. Welcome, Danny, to the programme! Thank you very much for being with us today.

Danny Antonelli: Thank you very much. I’m very honoured to be part of the programme.

I’d like to start by asking you about your first impressions after seeing the results, seeing the CDU first and Alternative for Germany second. What were your thoughts?

I was quite happy that it looked like it was going to be a two-party coalition, with the Greens being the safety net behind those two parties. In other words, it could be that the Greens go into opposition, but they’ll be the silent support for the two parties, the CDU and the SPD, if they need it.

And one of the great things that we really have to be grateful for is that 84% of the population turned out to vote. The higher the turnout, the higher the votes for the parties that like democracy. And it was a high turnout compared to the United States, where the turnout was 63 percent. And that was a high turnout for the United States! Therefore, here in Germany we’re doing well, I think.

Yet there is 20 percent of the vote for a party that is, let’s put it mildly, sceptical of liberal democracy. How do you explain the rise of the AfD?

I will explain it in two ways. First, we have to look at Germany as a country that is completely different from most other countries in Europe. Germany was divided in two after the Second World War.

The part that was occupied by the Soviets was, let’s put it this way, sort of denazified, but not completely denazified. In other words, some of the people who rose to the top of the East German parties and the Soviet-aligned power structure had the same kind of mentality: authoritarian, watching people, keeping an eye on everybody.

When the wall came down, instead of what might have happened in a country like the United States, where when the West opened up, everybody flocked to the West to get land, to start new things. They didn’t do that in Germany. They didn’t flock from the West to the East to buy land and start new businesses. They didn’t want to go there. They didn’t like the idea of moving from where they were. In fact, living in Hamburg is a lesson in that. It is not 100% true, but if you usually ask a person from Hamburg who lives here, who was born here, to move for a great job in Munich, they’ll say, no, thank you. They don’t want to go. 

People from the West did not want to go to the East. And when people from the East came to the West to get jobs, to get things, they were shunned. Western Germans said these are Ossies. They weren’t accepted. Western Germans didn’t like the Saxon accent. These people were made fun of. It’s not a nice thing. I can imagine that these people felt offended. They said, oh, now we’re Germans, but we’re not. We’re not accepted. So there’s a feeling of, how can I put it, revenge: we’ll show you. We’re going to vote for these people. 

On the other hand, you’re dealing with people who live in the countryside. They’re conservative. They’ve been convinced that people are coming in to steal their jobs. Nobody is stealing their jobs. They don’t have the kind of jobs that need to be stolen. They work on the land. They have crops. In fact, they could probably use some people to help them with their work.

And the people who come over here to the West, well, some of them have been able to prosper, but most of them have felt rejected. And when they go back, that’s the result. They join these groups of people who feel rejected. They feel: nobody wants me. And the AFD plays on that. They use social media.

Now, this is where we have to talk about what the man I call the Muskrat, you know, I don’t like to use his name very much, but the muskrat is an animal that lives in the swamps. And, you know, it looks like a rat. It acts like a beaver, but it looks like a rat. This guy is in control of the social media networks, along with the Tsar, who is currently in control of Russia. Now these two people have been working day and night for many years to convince other people that they should rebel against democracy. They don’t like democracy. They want to be in charge. And it works. 

It worked in this election too. But the social media worked in this election for the Left Party, the Left Party, the Left Party in Germany. As soon as Musk said I could ask the AFD for help, boy, they published a viral video. And the result is that they got eight and a half percent or something like that.

8.77 to be exact. Impressive result compared to what they had in the polls at the beginning of the campaign and also a step forward compared to what they had in previous elections.

Let us talk for a moment about the left. And I mean here both the radical left and the moderate left. Because we have the Left Party, which made progress, but we also have the SPD, which fell to 16 percent, which is really a historic failure for this party.

How do you explain that?

Well, there was an American president who once said that the business of America is business. And the SPD with Scholz… 

Scholz is from Hamburg. He was mayor here for a while and he’s a Hanseat. The Hanseatic League, you may remember, traded with everybody in the north and the northeast for 500 years. And the problem that happened with Scholz is that the business side started to take over the social side. They’re social democrats, and the social side has been neglected in the past, well, I would say for quite a while. The Left has been able to cash in on that side. They haven’t forgotten the social side. They said: we want rents to go down. We want people to have housing. 

Meanwhile the social democrats forgot the social side. They started to do business and business with business. And the problem is, of course, that on the other side they took in the FDP. Now the FDP is a neo-liberal party. They tried to get their neo-liberal ideas into the government and they succeeded to a certain extent. And the SPD allowed that to happen. And the people paid them back. Nobody likes neoliberal policies. Not the people. Maybe some of the businessmen, but the real people don’t like neoliberal policies.

The economy was indeed one of the biggest topics of discussion when it came to German affairs. And the experts also spoke of a historic economic failure, a real turmoil. I came across an opinion that Germany is trying to continue doing business with the tools of the 18th and 19th centuries, without seeing how the world has changed and how technology and business look completely different today. Do you think this impression is justified? And what can we expect from the new German government in terms of economic policy?

Well, the Germans fell into the same trap that the British fell into after the Industrial Revolution. The British had an advantage. They industrialised the country and they were at the top of the world and they were doing everything. But then when other countries started to industrialise, they had better and newer equipment. They had newer concepts of how to do the work. And that’s what happened here in Germany.

They forgot to innovate. They were selling, it was very interesting. At one point I knew some people who were in logistics and they were transporting old German factories to China, to Vietnam, to all these countries in the East.

They would put them in boxes, send them over there and unpack them. And so their old factories were gone and the Germans could build new ones. Well, with globalisation, they said, well, let them use our old factories and send us cheaper products. Why should we build new ones? 

Big mistake. You have to keep innovating. And they forgot that this is the trap you get into when you’re making money that’s coming in from somewhere else. It’s not your manufacturing base anymore. They still have very good engineers and they still have a bit of a manufacturing base, which is fine.

Personally, I am optimistic. I think they will be able to turn it around. But it’s like turning a big tanker in the water. It takes a while to turn it around, to get it on the right course. And I think the Germans are working hard. They’re industrious in the way they go about things. And they use logic. Logic is not dead in Germany. You need logic to learn the language. The verb comes somewhere at the end. So you better hold on to the main thought. Therefore, I’m pretty sure they’ll get out of this. In fact, one part they’re already getting out of is that all my electricity comes from green energy.

I have Hamburg electricity. It’s from the city. It’s owned by the city. All my electricity comes from green energy. So that’s a step forward. It might cost a bit more at the moment, because 

we don’t live in the tropics and we can’t have all the solar panels that everybody else can have. But we have wind. And we’re getting some stuff from Norway and Sweden. The cheap Russian gas is gone. So what they’ve done is they’re getting some LNG from the United States, of course. They had to do that. But now the SEFE, Securing Energy for Europe, and the Saudi ACWA power are going to supply 200,000 tonnes of green hydrogen. Green hydrogen. In other words, it’s climate-neutral. When you burn it, nothing happens.  It doesn’t pollute the world. And who else is working on this? BMW, VW and some of the other companies are already using the green car, electric car energy thing. That’s fine. But for that you need the minerals.

Who gets the minerals, the rare earth elements around the world? The Russians, the Chinese and the Americans. They’re the ones stealing it where they can, right? The Chinese are in Africa and South America, the Russians are trying to get as much as they can out of Ukraine. We can talk about that later. The Germans, the Americans want it from Ukraine and from wherever they can get it. But the Germans don’t have an army to go to Africa or anywhere else to steal this stuff. So they have to think outside the box. And thinking outside the box is what BMW is now doing with hydrogen. They’re making cars and trucks that run on hydrogen. And how do you get hydrogen? It’s a complex process and it takes a bit of time. But it’s water, isn’t it? You split the water molecules and atoms. And boom, you have energy.

So it’s a positive thing. You know, I think of Monty Python, look on the bright side of life.

Well, it’s a really rare positive message when it comes to Germany. Recently, as I said, Germany has been discussed mainly in the context of economic turmoil and the rise of the far right. And what you say shows that there really are things to be hopeful about.

But here I have to come back to another difficult question. I mean the issue of immigration, because that was the other issue that sort of dominated this campaign. So economic problems on the one hand and the question of Angela Merkel’s legacy on the other. You are based in Hamburg, a multi-ethnic city where people from hundreds of different countries have come and settled. Do you feel that Germany is falling apart because of the migration policies that have been put in place? Do you think that mistakes have been made in this area? Or is this all exaggerated by the extreme right and exploited in the political discourse?

Absolutely exploited. And it’s exploited through the social media channels run by people like Muskrat and Telegram channels, you know who runs that. And here’s the thing.

When I take the bus or the train or I go to Altona, which I love to go to Altona in Hamburg, it’s an area. It’s a multi-ethnic area. One of my good friends, Alex, a translator, lives there. She’s half Russian and half Scottish. She has been working with the Ukrainian refugees, translating for them and helping them through some of the things. It’s wonderful to sit somewhere in Altona and hear four, five, six different languages.

Of course, you have to understand that I have lived in all these different countries. And so I like the sound of foreign languages. But the people in Hamburg, especially in Hamburg, are very tolerant, extremely tolerant. Hamburg is a port. It has had trade for centuries and port cities, the ships come in, these are foreigners. Of course, they spend a lot of time on the Reeperbahn, but that’s the way it is. 

So the fact that Hamburg is able to do this is something that has to do with Hamburg. But if you go to other places, you find that the people who have integrated into the country, the Syrians, have integrated almost immediately. Why is that? Well, many of them who fled Assad had skills. Now, the problem for Germany is to recognise external skills. In other words, if you went to university in Syria and you were a doctor, you had to have your papers recognised. And if they wrote to Assad’s state, they would get an answer: no, I’m not going to give you any information. A big problem. But once these skills are recognised, then, hey, they’re in society. They’re there, their children go to school, they learn German, everything’s fine. The problem that really exists is the cultural difference between people who come from Islamic countries where the fundamentalists have a strong influence on society.

That is not the case with Iranians, Persians. I have Persian friends, Iranian Persian friends here. They’re all secular. They don’t care about the mullah. They don’t care. When they’re there, they visit their family, they wear a head covering. But in Europe they’re secular. In America they’re secular. In fact, there’s a section in Los Angeles, little Persia, little Tehran, you know, nobody wears anything. They’re all 100% secular. Now, that wasn’t the case with some of the people who came from, let’s say, the northern, eastern places like Afghanistan and so on. But once they get here, and usually it doesn’t take long, the kids become secular. Right? It depends on what kind of family they’re brought up in, but they become secular. So it takes one or two generations. It’s like being Italian Catholic. They don’t go around wearing things on their chest or wearing special things that say I’m Italian Catholic. They don’t even go to church, except maybe at Easter and Christmas.

So that’s the problem. The problem is the ones who can’t integrate, who can’t come in and become part of secular society, they are noticeable. You see them.

And for some people that is an affront. They look at them and say, ‘Well, what are they doing that for? Why are they wearing headdresses? And the women are treated so badly’. Well, yes, but that’s the cultural difference of that particular place. The other argument, and this is an interesting argument, is when Westerners say, when I go to their country, I don’t wear a miniskirt. Why should they come here and wear their full body covering, full face covering? We don’t do that here. So you have this problem. It is a cultural problem. People have not travelled enough. They haven’t been to enough places.

And now let’s come to the last question, namely Germany and international politics, because we can talk a lot about what mistakes the Social Democrats made, which actually cost them a lot of support. But we also have to admit that the Scholz government was there to govern, to govern in extremely turbulent times. At a time when the German economy was being shaken by the loss of cheap gas, but also by the fact that another war had started on the European continent. Ukraine was invaded by Russia, despite Germany’s long-term hope that trade with Russia would keep Russia a rational actor and a partner for Europe. So in this new context, when the situation has changed again in the last few days, with Donald Trump trying to make a deal with Vladimir Putin over the heads of the Ukrainians, where is Germany’s place in all this?

Well, Germany will be aligned with Europe. They’re trying to work on it together somehow. Of course you have some jokers in there, and one of them is Hungary, because Orban and Putin are the same kind of people. They think the same way, which I don’t understand at all, because if they remembered 1956, they wouldn’t have anything to do with Putin, nothing. The Czechs remember what happened in Czechoslovakia and they’re supplying Ukraine with as many bullets and ammunition as they can.

The problem we have at the moment, of course, is that the orange monster from the United States and the Tsar are getting together. Remember, I was talking about Alex, my good friend. Her family is still in Russia. And her father was in the Soviet army. And she said, well, this could be just a rumour and probably is just a rumour. But she said that Trump was in Russia in the 70s. And it’s very possible that during that time he was already being worked on in terms of being favourable to the Russian point of view.

And you have to remember, the real estate business in New York City, you have the five families, the five Italian-American mafia families that control all the construction. And in the northern part, Coney Island, you have the Russian mafia families. And you can’t do any business. You can’t do big business with the unions, or with the delivery of goods, or even the collection of garbage in New York and New Jersey without doing business with the various mafia families. So if you’ve been doing that kind of business from the beginning, Andrew, you have to remember that the Orange Monster’s lawyer  was also the lawyer for all the Mafia people. So there’s a connection. And it’s a connection that’s not ideological. We have to forget about ideology here.

It’s a criminal, money-making connection. These people are not interested in ideology. They’re throwing ideology at you as a screen to confuse you. The only ideology they have is money. You have to look at the war in Ukraine from the point of view that it’s a war to get something. It’s not an ideological war. They don’t care about Nazis. What they care about is all the stuff that’s going to get them money, like minerals. Ukraine is the richest country in Europe in terms of minerals. And they have these rare earth minerals. They want Donetsk. They want it because it’s the richest part of Ukraine.

The other thing they want, of course, is the grain. Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. The evil German dictator of the 1930s knew that. He said, well, we want Ukraine because it’s the breadbasket of Europe. If we can get all these grain places, we’ll be fine. So you have to look at it from the point of view of ‘I want the money’.

The orange monster from the United States suddenly said, hey, well, Mr Zelensky, if you give us your rare earth minerals, then maybe we can make a deal. Well, Mr Zelensky, I hope, or somebody turned around and said, yes, we’d be happy to. But you have to go and get them from the Russians who have taken most of them. So if there’s any possibility of peace, it’s on the money side. Who’s going to get what? Who’s going to make what? 

The other thing we have to look at is that the Tsar thought he could take Ukraine in two weeks. I’ll go in there, I’ll take the whole place and I’ll be the hero, the war hero, the guy who conquered a huge country in two weeks. Well, it didn’t happen. So now he’s not a war hero. He’s not a hero at all. We have a narcissist in the United States. We have another narcissist in Russia. And they don’t like not being number one. So he’s fighting the war now for the minerals, if he can get them. But he’s also fighting for pride. He wants to be the leader, the strong leader. He wants to be Stalin 2.0. That’s not going to happen. And in fact, from what I have heard, there are people in his own government who are tired of him. Of course, they have to be very careful because they could jump out of the fourth floor window. 

But, you know, Russia is not as stable as everyone thinks. And the economy is starting to go down. I mean, if you have to rely on North Korea, Iran and China to survive and win a war, what kind of place are you? 

As far as Southeast Europe is concerned, Germany needs Southeast Europe for two things. 

Firstly, the people who come to Germany from South-East Europe are skilled health workers, nurses, doctors, manual workers, construction workers. They come here. They earn money. 

They send money back home. And it’s not so far. They can drive. Some of them work on the construction sites and then they go home. 

Germany is still the centre of Europe. It’s the place that everybody has to cross from east to west, from west to east. Germany is right in the middle. That’s one of its strengths, but it’s also one of its weaknesses. In other words, if Napoleon wants to go to Russia, he has to go through Germany, right? So there has never been a single ethnic society. There’s no German race. There’s nothing like that. It’s all kinds of different people. In fact, here north of Hamburg, it was a Slavic country for a long time. You can go to different places there and you can see that there’s all kinds of Slavic roots there. So, you know. Germany is a central place.

There are 15 million people in the United States of German ancestry, and all those people left Germany because of war, because of famine, because of economic hardship, and they all left. They were all migrants, refugees. So the same thing is happening here. People are coming here because there’s war and strife and there’s no work in the places that are being devastated. Do you know how long? Afghanistan has been at war for 20, 25 years. I mean, the Taliban is not a great solution to that, but at the moment… Syria, under Assad, war, horror, terror, Libya, Libya is destroyed, right? Africa, Congo, all these places, who wants to live there? Nobody. 

In the past, the Germans ran away. They ran to the United States. Of course these other people will flee. You would too, if you had to. I would. 

One more question about the German presence in the region and in the European Union. What role do you see for Germany in the new situation where Europe will have to seek its own defence capabilities and its own strategic autonomy, given that cooperation with the United States might be impossible with the orange monsters at the head of the United States, as you said?

Yes, and here I am not completely disappointed in METS. METS and the SPD will somehow strengthen the German role in the European Union and try to get something like a European army together or a European defence strategy, which is like NATO without the United States. Well, you have to remember that the only nuclear powers in Europe are France and Britain.

The Netherlands and Germany are threshold nuclear powers. In other words, it would only take about six months for Germany to have a nuclear weapon. It would only take about six months for the Netherlands to have a nuclear weapon.

Nobody wants it, right? Nobody really wants it. But if you’re threatened by a nuclear power, we’ve seen that as soon as North Korea got a weapon, everybody said, oh well, there’s nothing we can do about it.

As soon as Pakistan and India got a weapon, they both sort of said, OK, we can have skirmishes, but we’re not going to attack each other anymore. So it seems that having a nuclear weapon, as horrible as it is, puts you in the MAD club, Mutually Assured Destruction, which has kept the world at peace for 80 years. It’s terrible. It’s the worst solution. It’s like, you know, everybody’s got a gun pointed at everybody else. And everybody can shoot at the same time and everybody’s dead. Nobody wants that. Everybody wants to keep making money. Everybody wants to go on making children, having new generations and so on and so forth. It’s a terrible solution.

But it’s on the threshold. And I think if the Russians are, and they are, there are intelligent people there, right? There’s no doubt about it.

Lavrov is one of the most intelligent people in the whole mix over there. Well, you can be sure that they don’t want Germany or the Netherlands to get anywhere near being a nuclear power. So, first of all, they want to destroy democracy if possible.

But the second thing is, how far can you provoke them before they feel in such a dangerous state of mind that they say, okay, if we don’t build a weapon, they’re going to come and get us? So I’m not sure. I think that Germany will work with Europe to build some kind of deterrent force.

Poland has the largest and best equipped army in Europe at the moment. Why is that? Well, excuse me, but, you know, they didn’t exist for a while.

And Germany took a bit. Russia took a bit. And for a long time there was no Poland.

And then Poland came back. And now they don’t want that to happen again. And they won’t let it happen again.

So I don’t know exactly how it’s going to be done. But I have a feeling that it will be done. And it will be done quite quickly.

The other thing is, how long, how long are the powers that be going to allow the orange monster and his muskrat friend to go on doing what they’re doing in the United States? I’m not sure there isn’t a lot of discontent among the people who really count, who really have the power behind the throne. And if they’re unhappy, these two guys could disappear.

And I sincerely hope that these people are unhappy and that these two guys disappear as soon as possible.

Well, we got a bit away from our main topic, which was the election in Germany. But I really like this hopeful message. I think the cross-border listeners who appreciate democracy and mutual understanding will also appreciate this message.

So I’d like to end today’s cross-border talk with Danny Antonelli, who joined us from Hamburg, Germany, to give us his insights, his impressions, his personal views on what’s going on in Germany. And what does this election result say about German society and its future? So thank you very much for joining us today.

Please don’t forget to subscribe to the Cross-Border Talks so that you don’t miss any of the talks. And, well, follow us on the social platforms that we present, follow us on our website. Danny, thank you again for being with us today and see you again.

Malgorzata, thank you very much. And Vladimir, thank you very much, both of you. It’s been a pleasure.

Cover photo: Rainbow over Bundestag, Berlin 2020. Photo by Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat.

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