Germany, India and the Question Nobody’s Asking

Some of my acquaintances believe Germany’s way out of its current mess is a rerun of the postwar playbook: import cheap foreign labor, the way West Germany once did and let it save the economy. Then it was Turkey and Italy. Now it’s Ukraine, India, Vietnam. There’s a critical difference nobody seems to notice. Postwar West Germany had in first place massive US backing like investment, credit, political cover, it had secured contracts for cheap energy from the Soviet Union. Labor was the one missing piece in an otherwise favorable setup. Cheap energy was the yeast - no economy rises without it.

Germany today has none of that. No comparable US backing. It’s entangled in a war in Ukraine that’s draining it and the cheap energy is gone - the one ingredient that made the postwar miracle possible in the first place. Importing labor into that setup is probably actively harmful - more strain on social systems that are already stretched, without the growth engine that once justified the strain.

Left, Right, and a System That’s Run Out of Moves

I’ve lived in Germany 25 years now, as an immigrant with German citizenship. When I look at the German left, I see something familiar to the Soviet Union I was born in. Credit where due - there was some stability, some floor under people, zou couldn’t fall too far. But you also couldn’t rise and you couldn’t leave, not without ending up somewhere worse like in Gulag.

The worst part of today’s left, across much of the world, is that it’s stopped being autonomous. It’s been infiltrated by political Islamism - an ideological movement, not a religion or its adherents as a whole, and that movement has managed to embed itself inside left parties almost everywhere, pushing an agenda the left’s own values would normally reject outright. Attitudes toward women is the clearest example: supposedly a movement built on “everyone is equal,” now making room for currents that don’t believe that at all. The clearest evidence, to me, is how this plays out on Israel. The line from these currents is always “we’re not against Jews, we’re only against Israel.” But October 7 showed what that distinction is worth in practice - an attack that made no such distinction, that treated being non-muslim as sufficient (and regardless of whether politically right-wing or left-wing). Whatever the stated framing, the actual target has never been that narrow and pretending otherwise is doing the framing’s work for it. For the political Islamism themselves, not for individual believers, but for the organized political project - integration was never really the end goal. Embedding inside Western institutions, including the left, has been a means to a longer-term aim: prevailing in the conflicts that project is actually fighting, wherever those conflicts happen to be.

Now look at the German right. Attractive packaging, same as the left’s. Deport the people who came here, broke the law and never contributed. Fine - reasonable, even. Broke the law as a guest? Then you should leave. But look under the packaging - it’s the same playbook as the 1930s. After the current target group, it’ll be Ukrainians, Indians, Chinese, Russians, Italians, Spaniards, French - everyone except the in-group. Underneath is an aggressive economic and military posture against every neighbor, dressed as national revival. We’ve seen this movie and it never ends well for the nation that runs it.

So: vote left, you lose. Vote right, you lose. Vote center, in Germany’s case, the center is already bound to the war and no matter what it does, the economy keeps sliding, the cheap resources aren’t coming back and it just ends up parodying whichever flank is louder that week. It’s a dead end in every direction.

India: The Caste Paradox

Scroll Instagram and you’ll find a wave of new voices in India: communists, gender-equality advocates, anti-caste, anti-Hindutva. On the surface, all of it sounds correct: equality, dismantling entrenched hierarchy - hard to argue against in principle. But here’s the parallel I keep coming back to. Unlike Germany, India has real external adversaries (China, Pakistan and Bangladesh), whose long-term interest is a weaker and fractured India. The caste system, for all its very real costs to development, is also one of the things holding the wider system together. It’s a brake, yes, but it’s also what’s kept the country from a Soviet-style implosion into a thousand competing factions with no coherent center of power.

Dismantle it too fast, without something ready to replace it, and you don’t get liberation - you get fragmentation. And fragmentation is exactly what a hostile neighbor is positioned to exploit. None of this is an argument for caste but an argument for sequencing and for asking who benefits if the internal cohesion goes first and the reform doesn’t stick.

One open question, genuinely: Pakistan and Bangladesh have an obvious interest in a fractured India and political Islamism has shown it knows how to work through left movements elsewhere. Is there a similar dynamic feeding these Indian anti-caste/communist circles like foreign-interest actors using the chaos of internal fragmentation as leverage in a longer confrontation or am I just pattern-matching from the European case where it doesn’t actually apply here? Curious what others are seeing on the ground.

So What Do You Actually Do?

Stop asking which party best represents you. In Germany right now, left makes it worse, right makes it worse and the center has no room left to maneuver. I suspect the pattern, with local variations, holds well beyond Germany.

The better question is: how do you make yourself stronger, sharper, more capable - regardless of which system you’re standing in?

Because that’s the one lever that actually works. Build your skills and you build your own optionality. You get to choose, in large part, which system you live under and not by hoping the right party wins, but by making yourself the kind of person any functioning system wants: Pakistan’s version of political Islam, Afghanistan - sure, if that’s somehow your preference, or India, or Malaysia, or the US, with zero social safety net, if you can hack it, or Europe, in whichever of its many flavors suits you.

Your birthplace shouldn’t choose your future - your training should. Build the skills and let the skills choose the country.