What will the New Year bring?

New Year’s Eve at the Brandenburg Gate. Img: Ricky7524 CC BY-SA 3.0

I love New Year’s Day. Yes, depending on how you spent New Year’s Eve, there is the potential for hangovers or a mess to tidy up from last night’s party. But who cares? There’s a brand new year ahead full of opportunities. Like many people, I like going on a long New Year's Day walk to contemplate it all.

I’m not one for über-ambitious resolutions, but nonetheless there is some excitement in the idea of hanging up new calendars, starting a new diary and leaving 2024 behind. I like to imagine the next Christmas and what my memories of 2025 will be then. Will I look back on the year with joy, pride or sorrow?

Personally, I hope this will be the year when I finish my next book on WEIMAR 1919-1939. It’s proved to be a huge project with tons of primary research in the archives, and if I’m honest, I probably underestimated the work it would involve.

But I have already learnt so much about the time period as well as society in general, and about myself. As I found out with Beyond the Wall, immersing yourself deeply in people’s life stories will do that to you. It makes you think: What would I have done in their place? Did they look back at the end of their life and thought it was a life lived well? Will I? It’s rewarding and disturbing in equal measure.

As for the subject of most of my thinking and writing, I expect Germany will look towards 2025 with more anticipation than excitement. Change is in the air and not all of it will be controllable. First up, snap elections are scheduled to take place on 23 February. If nothing drastic happens in the next few weeks, these elections will reflect seismic shifts in the public mood in Germany over the last few years.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way coalition of his own centre-left Social Democrats, the Green Party and the Free Liberals collapsed early in November after months of very visible squabbling. The latest polling puts them on less than a third of the vote combined, about the same as the conservative CDU/CSU might get on its own.

Nonetheless, for the conservatives, their current 31% would also be their second-worst result ever (the worst was last time, in 2021). It’s fair to say, that many people have turned their backs on mainstream politics. The anti-immigration AfD is now polling in second place with roughly a fifth of the vote and this may rise further following the horrific attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market by an asylum seeker from Saudi Arabia.

The new leftwing-conservative party Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), founded this time last year, isn’t quite as strong as the AfD but will also probably make its parliamentary debut. Combined, those two anti-establishment parties might get around a quarter of the vote. Add the non-voters to that and you end up with a huge proportion of people disaffected with the political mainstream.

The most likely scenario for the immediate future is that the conservatives will win and form a narrow majority with the centre-left Social Democrats. But if they don’t enact meaningful change quickly and end up squabbling like the previous coalition, people’s anger will rise further and the tensions may spill out onto the streets as we have seen in other countries. It’s a frightening scenario when combined with the current ungovernability of France and the ongoing conflicts around the world.

If a stable government can be formed, it immediately faces a huge amount of challenges. Apart from controlling mass immigration while addressing labour shortages, there is the sluggish and outdated economic model that is further hampered by kafkaesque levels of bureaucracy.

Last year, I wrote a lot about energy, but looking at the figures for 2024 is still shocking. Germany imported far more electricity than it exported, spending billions extra and wrecking markets in friendly European countries like Norway and Sweden who were not happy with these developments and will likely act on that in the coming year. Any new government will have to find a way to stabilise energy production or the extremely high prices Germans already pay will rise further and cause social and political upheaval.

I could go on and on. The list of pressing concerns is long and urgent from concrete things like housing, crumbling infrastructure, unreliable public transport and an army that needs to become fighting fit to cultural issues like the ongoing battles around ‘wokeness’, language and identity.

Surveys have shown that many young people are particularly worried and uncertain about the future, yet many of them feel politicians aren’t doing enough for their generation. Many young voters have now turned to the AfD if the European and state elections last year are anything to go by. The mainstream parties will have to work hard if they want to win them back.

2025 will bring a dizzying amount of change, threats and challenges. But with those, will also come opportunities for Germany. Europe’s largest economy is like an ocean liner – steady in its course and relatively safe from buffeting wind and waves, but also slow to turn even when icebergs loom in the distance. Perhaps the new urgency on all levels will finally trigger changes and modernisation that should have happened years ago.

I for one will spend much of 2025 watching, thinking and writing as the country of my birth attempts to navigate the stormy waters ahead. Of course, I’ll keep you, dear ZEITGEISTERs, in the loop.

In Scotland, there is the tradition of first footing where the first person to enter the home on New Year’s Day is said to bring good fortune for the year ahead. Ideally, this is supposed to be a dark-haired person. Well, if this newsletter by its dark-haired author was the first thing in your inbox this morning, I reckon this counts.

I hope you can look forward to 2025 with a degree of optimism, whatever challenges you may face. In any event, I wish you a successful, happy and healthy New Year.