Shane Te Pou – The Old Empires never die

Folks who read my work know I’ve been living in Europe now for about a year and a half. And look, it does something to you, being surrounded by that much history stacked up on top of itself everywhere you go. You’re sitting in some dive bar as I often do having a beer and technically you’re on ground that’s changed hands four or five times in the last century. Had a bloke tell me this a few weeks back — mentioned I’d been through Slovakia, and he practically cut me off. No no no. That’s Hungary.” Not used to be. Present tense, mate. Like the border was just paperwork stuff.

That’s the great thing about dive bars, honestly. Looser than a coffee shop, a beer cost less than coffee, a bit more loose with the truth too or maybe just more honest, once a few beers in and nobody’s performing for anyone. The kōrero flows different in a place like that.

And that’s another thing about living in Europe. You meet people from countries you may never have heard of, or at least never given much thought to. I’ve recently had the experience of spending time with a group of very young, bright students from Northern Macedonia. And that was my first mistake, apparently. Calling them Northern Macedonian.

Turns out, that’s a bit of a loaded subject. Goes all the way back to Alexander the Great, who the Greeks see as their own, but of course the Macedonians see as the son of their soil. A couple of thousand years later, and you’re still stepping on the odd historical landmine just trying to have a conversation with some young people over a beer.

And no, I’m not suggesting there’s about to be an outbreak of war between Greece and Macedonia. But these guys may be young, bright and fresh-faced in 2026, and they’re carrying history around with them just the same. It’s not some dusty old story in a textbook. It’s alive, it’s personal, and it still matters to people.

Small thing, but it’s stuck with me. The old empires around here never really died, they just went underground. Nationalism never actually left this part of the world. It was just waiting for the economy to go bad enough to drag it back out. And boy, is it out now.

Which gets me to Alice Weidel, because her story tells you most of what you need to know here. She co-leads Germany’s AfD — a party their own intelligence agency calls right-wing extremist, though that’s still stuck in the courts. Weidel’s a lesbian. Her partner is a Sri Lankan-born Swiss film producer, they’ve got two kids, and Weidel keeps an official address just over the border so she can do her politics in Berlin. However, basically lives in Switzerland. Weidel has created an environment that is so unsafe who own kids cannot live in Germany.

She’s on record saying gay marriage isn’t a big deal either way. Meanwhile her own party voted last year to put “traditional family, mum and dad” into the platform. Not exactly her house, that.

Didn’t touch her, that contradiction. A few weeks back the AfD won the state election outright in Saxony-Anhalt — comfortably over 40 percent, more than double what the centre left party got. The best result the party’s ever had anywhere in Germany.

And here’s the bit I can’t get past. Saxony-Anhalt is old East Germany. Decades under a one-party state, told over and over how evil fascism was by the same people who’d lock you up for disagreeing. Now it’s the launching pad for a party its own intelligence service calls extremist, closer to running a German state than the far right’s been since the Nazis. You couldn’t make that up if you tried. One authoritarian regime should have taught people to spot the warning signs. Instead it just left them sick of “the system” altogether — sick enough to back anyone who sounds like they’re finally listening.

Worth saying too — German security people reckon Russian-backed disinformation, a campaign they’ve nicknamed Matryoshka, has been ramping up hard ahead of these votes, mostly aimed at trashing the mainstream parties rather than boosting the AfD directly, though plenty of German lawmakers reckon it ends up the same thing either way. Moscow denies all of it, obviously. Weidel herself has talked about patching things up with Russia, so make of that what you will.

So how’s it work, a party built on “traditional values” getting carried by voters whose own leader doesn’t fit the brochure? Easy. Nobody in Saxony-Anhalt was voting on Weidel’s love life. They were voting because wages are stuffed, the region’s been written off for decades, and nobody in Berlin’s ever fixed a thing. Immigration’s just the story they’ve been handed. The real story’s an economy and a reunification that never delivered.

Same rot, different flavour, over in Serbia. Vucic’s been fending off a student protest movement for a couple of years now, gone from mildly annoying to genuinely threatening. Started with a train station canopy collapsing, killed more than a dozen people, and the students reckon it was corrupt, botched renovation work that did it. They’ve now registered their own party for the snap election coming up in late October. Different flag, same story: people did everything right and the ground still gave way under them.

And when you stand back from it, that’s the bit that really gets me. Across Europe the centre-left had its turn and failed to fix this. The centre-right had its turn too and failed just the same. So now people are looking at the only option left on the shelf — the far right. Almost feels like it’s gone full circle, back to where this continent started last century. Bloody worry, that, however you slice it.

Can’t read any of this without thinking of home, if I’m honest, because we’re not immune, just further back on the same road. Ask anyone under forty what a full-time wage buys them these days. Not a house. Barely groceries some weeks. Rent eats the pay rise before it even lands. Not a border problem. An economy that decided, quietly, house prices mattered more than wages, and never bothered telling anyone.

And what’s the main driver for some parties on the right back home? A proxy culture war. Blame those entitled Māori. Stop the immigrants pinching our jobs. What is a woman anyway. All the while, the things that actually shape people’s lives — housing, wages, the cost of getting by — get pushed further down the list.

I asked a prominent New Zealander recently what actually fixes it once that gap’s calcified like this. Her answer stopped me — she said, sadly, historically it took a world war to reset things.

Don’t reckon that’s our only option, and don’t think she meant it that way either — more a dark comment about how stubborn this stuff gets once it’s dug in. But I can’t shake it.

I might be thousands of miles from home, propping up some dive bar that’s outlived four different flags, but what’s happening here doesn’t feel like someone else’s problem. It feels like a preview. Dive bar in Eastern Europe, ballot box in old East Germany, mortgage statement back in Auckland — same wound, different bandage.

And the thought that keeps me up is simple: if the anger back home gets loud enough, are we actually any different, or do we just end up handing it to our own version of Weidel?

I genuinely hope I’m wrong about all of it. I really do. But hope’s not a plan, and right now I don’t see anyone back home working on one.