There is a word that has been on everyone’s lips in recent days and weeks in Germany: “Brandmauer.” Meaning firewall, it refers to the consensus among the country’s mainstream political parties that forbids any cooperation with far-right parties.

That non-codified agreement was thrown overboard recently when the opposition centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), poised to win the upcoming snap federal elections on 23 February, proposed an anti-immigrant parliamentary motion that passed with support from the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The firewall against the AfD might have crumbled, but it was never very sturdy to begin with due to one key engineering flaw: mainstream parties’ complicity in the unstoppable rise of the far right.

A prime example of liberal Germany’s selective outrage is the utter lack of indignation at an anti- democratic resolution passed on the same day the AfD-supported CDU motion to toughen migration policy which shocked German complacency into action. Entitled “Anti-Semitism and hostility towards Israel at schools and universities”, it is an unprecedented state-sponsored attack on the constitutionally enshrined autonomy of universities and academic freedom in the service of “Israel”.

Nor has Germany’s centre-left coalition government’s steadfast support for the most fascist Israeli government in the Zionist entity’s history while it conducted the world’s first live-streamed genocide, described by Palestinian American legal scholar Noura Erakat in an X post as the “cruelest phase” of a 76-year-long Nakba, led to any kind of self-critical reflection among these so-called antifascist protesters, many of whom are Social Democratic and Green party loyalists.

On the contrary: The Greens boasted a record number of 5000 new membership applications in five days following Merz’s political sacrilege of collaborating with the AfD.