An unsettling future

Unexploded bombs from the Second World War are resurfacing in the beds of Europe’s dried-up rivers, drained by the climate crisis. The image seems like an obvious warning from history, but this column argues that Europe did not need vintage bombs to know it was playing with fire. Ukraine, it notes, is already covered with explosives made in recent years.

The article cites novelist Theodor Kallifatides, who said in an interview published in the Culture section: “I have never been so aware of living through a period of such frantic preparation for war.”

Against that backdrop, the far-right AfD has secured an emphatic victory in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt and could reach government. The column describes the party as more extreme than many other European far-right movements, noting that some of its leaders have flirted with Germany’s Nazi past and that the party does not hide its sympathies for Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The result also carries federal significance, the article argues, because the AfD leads national election polls as the parties supporting the governing coalition decline. It casts another shadow over an anxious Europe, with the French presidential election approaching and Marine Le Pen, also from the far right, currently the favorite.

The column turns to the past for another warning. It recalls that Adolf Hitler reached power through elections, while citing Henry Ashby Turner Jr.’s book “Thirty Days to Power,” which argues that political intrigues and rivalries, rather than electoral support alone, helped him become chancellor. The lesson, it concludes, is that political fragmentation and democratic condescension toward the far right can pave the way to disaster.

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I have never been so aware of living through a period of such frantic preparation for war.