Following the center-right Christian Democratic party’s return to power in last month’s snap federal election, Friedrich Merz, the man tipped to be Germany’s next chancellor, did not waste time in announcing his intention to practice an even more radical exegesis of the country’s already extreme pro-"Israel" raison d’état, known as Staatsräson.

One of his first acts as winner was to express his wish to invite to Germany none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an alleged war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for his role in the ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

He is specifically accused of “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhuman acts.”

Unimpressed by the serious nature of the accusations, Merz quickly revealed his contempt for international justice. “I think it is a completely absurd idea that an Israeli prime minister cannot visit the Federal Republic of Germany,” the chancellor-elect said at a press conference.

In true autocratic fashion, he even threatened to “find ways and means for him [Netanyahu] to visit Germany and leave again without being arrested.”

Merz’s open defiance of the ICC’s arrest warrant against Netanyahu, which Germany as a signatory to the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the court, is obliged to enforce, invited instant condemnation from global human rights actors.

Amnesty International Germany chided Merz’s unprecedented move as a “call to openly breach the law,” while Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian Territories lamented the “deranged reality” in Germany of “[t]reating human rights defenders like CRIMINALS, while receiving alleged int’l criminals with full honours.”

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Humanitarian aid, sans humanity

Albanese’s tweet is in reference to German politicians’ and the police’s unsuccessful intimidatory efforts to silence her when she visited the country last month as part of a European speaking tour to talk about human rights law and Palestine.

At a time when "Israel" is ethnically cleansing the West Bank and once again starving Palestinians in Gaza after reneging on the ceasefire deal with Hamas, Merz’s desire to invite Netanyahu, a fugitive from international law, to Berlin is not the only harbinger of what the CDU has in store for German democracy, already battered and bruised by the outgoing Social Democratic and Green party-led government’s authoritarian excesses

A day after the election, an information request made by the CDU and its Bavarian sister party CSU in the Bundestag accused several NGOs, the most prominent among them being Greenpeace and PETA, of constituting a “shadow structure which uses state funds to indirectly engage in politics.” Notice how the wording is hauntingly similar to Trumpian deep state rhetoric.

Consisting of a whopping 551 questions, the inquiry has been described as an inquisition and an assault on democracy by Merz’s critics. Understandably so, as many of the organizations CDU/CSU are attacking are the same ones that took to the streets in the lead up to the elections in protest against what Amnesty Germany has described as “Merz’s inhuman migration policies” following his pre-election abrogation of the anti-AfD firewall which forbids any cooperation with the far-right Alternative for Germany party, the runner-up in the election.

Just as the Trump administration in the US is waging war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and “draining the swamp” of federal bureaucracy of any opposition to its neofascist agenda (one which seeks to dismantle democracy from within and uses administrative means to consolidate power, rather than paramilitary force, as was the case with classic fascist movements), Merz’s retributive attacks on civil society actors seem equally motivated by an enmity towards democratic norms, the universality of human rights and “progressive” politics.

I have intentionally put inverted commas around the word because some of the organizations named in the CDU/CSU inquiry, such as the Amadeu Antonio Foundation (named after a Black man who was beaten to death by a mob of neo-Nazis in the East German town of Eberswalde in 1990) and Omas gegen Rechts (Grannies against the Right) are staunchly pro-"Israel" and have therefore been known to employ the infamous Palestine exception to their allegedly progressive politics.

While it is hard to feel sympathy for organizations that are nominally antiracist, but have zero moral qualms about supporting the virulently racist ideology of Zionism and its real-world application in the form of "Israel’s" settler colonial oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people, the CDU’s opening salvo in what could well develop into a full-fledged administrative war on democratic standards as a whole is deeply alarming.

As Merz and his party enter into preliminary coalition talks with the biggest losers of the election, the governing Social Democrats (SPD) who have proudly presided over Germany’s post-October 7 anti-democratic backsliding in the service of "Israel" and enacted draconian anti-refugee policies in the service of the domestic far-right, it looks as if Germany will continue unfazed on its dark path down the rabbit hole of authoritarianism.