Fluctuat et mergitur (2)

Here is the second part of our press review following the regional elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. We will attempt to analyze the political upheavals affecting Germany and France in September 2026, marked by extreme polarization among the electorate. Joël-François Dumont highlights a striking symmetry between the rise of the radical left and the identity-based right on both sides of the Rhine, while noting that Germany is experiencing these shocks gradually through its federal system. In contrast, France risks a sudden collapse due to its excessive centralization, as it does not benefit from the same transitional mechanisms as its neighbor. The influence of foreign powers such as Russia and the United States is also identified as a factor exacerbating this European instability. Finally, the article suggests that current geographic and identity-based divisions could lead to a major democratic crisis, or even a form of civil conflict. Fluctuat et mergitur Paris’s motto promises it is battered by the waves yet never sinks. In Berlin, that promise no longer holds — while in Paris, it has never yet been tested by a genuine electoral shipwreck. The mechanism, however, is rigorously the same on both sides of the Rhine: a radical left learning to talk to people rather than lecture them; a radical right torn between polishing itself for the long haul and staying raw to convince; and two outside patrons — one in Washington, the other in Moscow — who need do nothing more than applaud at the right moment. What differs, then, is not the nature of the vertigo but its speed of propagation. Federal Germany experiences its upheaval Land by Land, within a coalition mechanics that absorbs each shock before it generalizes — which explains why it took three elections and two weeks for Berlin to understand what Saxony-Anhalt had already told it on September 6. France, by contrast, concentrates its power in a single election, a single man or woman, a single night: the day the vertigo strikes there, it will have neither a Land nor a regional laboratory in which to test itself first. It will strike all at once, like a tsunami rather than a tide. This speed gap is no longer merely an electoral curiosity: it worries people as far away as Brussels. “The Franco-German tandem remains an absolutely essential driving force for Europe. If one member of the tandem weakens, that slows the decision-making process even further,” warns MEP Bernard Guetta — before adding, more gravely still: “I see, in France, in Poland, in several other European countries, a rising fear, a rising distrust of Germany. That worries me more than anything else.” Socialist MEP François Kalfon broadens the point to the economy: on China, he says, “the Germans are on the front line against the threat, but their industrial base has been Sino-German for fifty years. This is a tipping point for them” — a structural dependency dating back to the 1970s-80s (Volkswagen set up in China as early as 1984, long before Beijing’s WTO accession) — and one that, better than any other factor, explains German reluctance to toughen its stance toward China — a Germany that, Kalfon regrets, has remained “very national on defense and space,” while France pushes for a common response. It may be the only real lesson Paris can draw from Berlin this week: not that it would be safe, but that it will not get the gradual warning Germany, however haltingly, ultimately benefited from. It remains to be seen whether one can learn from a shipwreck one has not yet had the leisure to watch coming from afar.