Democracy Envy

Since last fall, I’ve been taking German language classes at Deutsches Haus at NYU. German has a somewhat different structure from Romance languages like Portuguese and Spanish, so progress has been slower than I’d hoped. And in contrast to when I learned Portuguese, I don’t have the benefit of immersion. Yet.

So why German? Because my late husband’s parents were stripped of their citizenship as Jews under Hitler’s regime, he was entitled to receive German citizenship. So were both of our children, as well as their children. Jonah and Reed currently enjoy dual citizenship, and both Maddy and Derrick have German passports. I, unfortunately, do not, though I appear to be the only person in the family (outside of Richard’s Aunt Ruth, who was born in Germany and fled with her mother and sister to the U.S. at the age of four) who knows any German at all. As a result, I will consider myself indispensable if any of my progeny find it necessary to flee back to the Old World for political reasons.

I spent the better part of today watching the election returns from Germany and feeling envious, as their people seem to have chosen democracy and moderation over right-wing extremism. The voters of my country did not, and we’re now facing the consequences in the form of a military that’s being taken over by loyalists to a dictator rather than to the Constitution, the abandonment of the rule-of-law democracies of Europe in favor of an alliance with the brutal tyrant and war criminal Vladimir Putin of Russia, the upending of honest Federal workers’ lives, and threats to our health, safety, security, and freedom at home. In fact, our American oligarchs and would-be despots visited Germany before the election to offer Nazi salutes and endorsements of the extremist AfD party that has denied the Holocaust, sought to deport all immigrants, and allied with Putin against Ukraine.

It appears now that the endorsements of Musk and Vance didn’t move the needle for AfD. The party had about 20% support in the polls before their visits, and ended up with about 20% of the vote. Yes, it was double what the AfD received in 2021, and the party will be the second largest in the German legislature, the Bundestag. Friedrich Merz of the center-right CDU, a strong supporter of Ukraine and European alliances, came in first with nearly 30% of the vote and will form a coalition with one or both of the center-left parties. The only other party that qualified for seats in the Bundestag is Die Linke, the left party, which has no love for AfD. The center has held. Democracy has won.

In addition — and the other reason for my democracy envy — the German election had the highest voter turnout since reunification in 1990, with around 83.5% of eligible voters going to the polls. The voting appeared to be smooth, with few complaints about lines or conflicts in polling places. Contrast that with the U.S., where turnout declined between 2020 and 2024, and only 63.7% of registered voters bothered to vote. While the actual gap between Trump and Harris in November 2024 was only 1.5% — a narrow percentage that voted to end democracy — I would argue that the anti-democracy faction in the U.S. should include those people who didn’t care enough about free and fair elections to bother voting in the one in which those free and fair elections were actually on the ballot.

So as I look across the ocean and see a country where a solid majority of the people voted to reaffirm their democracy, I can’t help but feel envious. And I understand why so many millions came to the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, seeking the freedom and safety that they lacked in their own countries. I wish I could do the same. All the teenagers living under dictatorships in my historical novels Gringolandia, Torch, and Eyes Open set their sights on places where they could follow their dreams free of the tyranny that constrained their lives and crushed their hopes for the future. In fact, there’s a poem in Eyes Open, “Imagining Mariana,” in which Sónia describes the fun-filled life she imagines her older sister, who has left Portugal for the U.S. in the 1960s, has: “without the gray stone weight / of a Leader, his rules / the chains that confine us / to a black-and-white world / longing for the colors / we’ve lost / and those / we cannot have.”