AfD and the Euro exit: Germany benefits too much to actually leave

AfD promises Germany's exit from the euro: why Berlin won't do it

The AfD leader wants to close German borders and end the euro. This proposal, circulated by the German media FOCUS online and discussed for weeks, clashes with an uncomfortable arithmetic: Berlin is the partner that has benefited most from the single currency. In politics, this weighs more heavily than any electoral promise.

Why Germany has no interest in returning to the Mark

The argument is repeated in almost all analyses: the euro is a bargain for Germany. It is the most benefited country in the EU from the single currency because it no longer competes against a currency that appreciates whenever its trade balance is good. With the Mark, every surplus would have made their exports more expensive until they were out of market.

A calculation circulated in financial circles puts figures to this antiestéticar. The euro was born at 2 Marks. With the imbalances accumulated since then, today one euro would equate to 0.20 Marks, and at that exchange rate, German industry wouldn't sell anything. Translated: abandoning the single currency would be giving competitiveness to France, Italy, or Spain overnight.

The Brexit precedent and the fine print of an exit

obrexit already conducted the experiment. And the result doesn't invite imitation: it is unclear that the country fared better outside, and the process consumed years of uncertainty. With the euro, the procedure is even more complicated, because there are contracts, public debt, deposits, and payment systems denominated in a currency that would cease to exist for the country leaving.

That is why the less epic reading holds more weight. The promise to leave the euro might function better as a negotiation tool to curtail the power of European institutions than as a real government plan. No one has yet explained, with timelines, how an exit is executed without the country falling apart along the way.

The neo-peseta: the scenario Spain watches nervously

If Germany left, Spain would remain within the euro without its main supporter. And there the most repeated exercise in futurology in Spanish economic conversation begins: returning to the peseta. The scenario looks grim for fixed incomes. Civil servants and pensioners would be paid in a devalued currency, imports would suddenly become more expensive, and local businesses would recover a market protected by general poverty.

The Venezuelan mirror is cited to illustrate this: teachers paid less than 50 dollars a month, an extraordinary bonus of 3 dollars payable in four installments, and private classes at 5 dollars for two hours a day, three days a week, per student. When the currency collapses, salaries collapse before prices do.

Two pieces remain missing. The first: the countries that benefited most from the euro were the least frugal—Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Italy—so the narrative that the single currency impoverished the South is not entirely sound. The second: no one knows if the AfD would execute its promise or use it as a bargaining chip. There, exactly, the analysis stalls.