I read the news of Merkel stepping down by 2021 and the rise of AfD and the Green in the latest local elections. Such news spur a lot of fear discussions in my immigrants, mostly Egyptian circles.
I am not as scared as my friends express. Part is because this is something I can’t control. And part because I lived in Egypt between 2011 to 2015. This period was a real roller coaster of how things can turn upside down multiple times in few years and end up sideways or even far worse than what it was before.
I think this is the strongest test of the German system’s fragility since unification. One of the reasons I keep fighting for liberty and freedom of speech to levels I am sometimes unable to express publicly is because people underestimate the fragility of the political systems they live in. Those systems can collapse easily and the only barrier to preventing this is having strong civil liberties.
We give up our rights under the assumption of good intentions. We make the systems tightly coupled because it is easier and faster to make decisions. We shouldn’t. Because it takes a single bad actor to destroy all the progress we have made.