President Donald Trump famously campaigned to “drain the swamp” of corruption and crime in Washington, D.C. Across the pond, Europe is looking very swampy.

Rule by unelected bureaucrats and identikit politicians who all think the same, no matter which party or even which country they come from, has left European politics a stagnant, rotting mess, and no one is happy.

Europeans are ready for a big change in politics, and they are about to get one.

Europe’s Slow Agony

Even former European Central Bank head Mario Draghi, once the most powerful of all the unelected European bureaucrats, admits that the situation is dire.

Draghi’s long-awaited report on the European economy was published on September 9. In it, he said that he has “nightmares” about Europe’s future and that the “slow agony” of its decline can only be reversed with “radical change.” “For the first time since the Cold War,” he wrote, “we must genuinely fear for our self-preservation.”

Meanwhile, the European economy is stuck in the mud. Consider: Since 2000, income in the United States has grown twice as fast as in the European Union. Six American companies are now worth more than $1 trillion, all of which were founded in the last 50 years. Over the same time period, no European company has grown to even $100 billion.

“This is an existential challenge,” Draghi said. “Europe’s fundamental values are prosperity, equity, freedom, peace and democracy in a sustainable natural environment …. If Europe can no longer provide them to its people—or worse still, if it has to trade off one against the other—it will have lost its reason for being.”

Germany, in particular, is seeing its basic way of doing business collapse. For the first time in its 90-year history, Volkswagen is looking at closing factories within Germany. Audi is close to shutting down its electric car factory in Belgium. bmw, Mercedes and Stellantis factories are producing dramatically fewer cars than the plants are built for; some are manufacturing at half capacity.

Germany’s auto industry is a major driver of the national economy and of national pride. But governments around the world are pushing consumers to buy electric; and here, Germany lags behind.

In the decades since World War ii, Germany built itself into an exporting powerhouse, churning out high-quality industrial goods at a reasonable price. Now the war in Ukraine has pushed the cost of raw materials and energy sky high. Other long-term factors indicate that they will remain that way. Economically, Germany can’t compete any more.

Europe is also suffering social disasters, most obviously regarding immigration.

A Syrian migrant who should have already been deported murdered three people on August 23—at a diversity festival. In June, an Afghan migrant murdered a police officer in Mannheim. On September 5, an Islamist with a gun attempted to carry out a terrorist attack outside the Israeli consulate before he was shot dead.

These are the highest-profile examples. Meanwhile, knife attacks in Germany are on the rise, with over 430 reported in the first half of 2024, compared to 777 in all of 2023.

What will be the effect of these crises on German politics? The understandable outrage among German citizens has prompted the government to finally close its borders, affecting even the Schengen Zone. Within this zone, tourists and Europeans from 26 different nations can move freely. In place for three decades, it is one of the most visible examples of successful European unification.

Now German officials are spot-checking vehicles that cross the borders. The center-right Christian Democratic Union (cdu) wants to go even further and bring back the pre-Schengen days of halting all traffic at the border and requiring drivers to show their papers.

This will help reduce the flow of migrants into the country, but Germany’s neighbors don’t want to be stuck with them either, so they too are considering closing their borders. The chain reaction could destroy the Schengen Zone.

Meanwhile, overall crime is steadily rising. Police recorded almost 6 million criminal offenses in 2023, up from 5.4 million the previous year. Violent crime has reached its highest level in 15 years, despite the fact that the population is aging, which usually equates to lower crime.

This was on display to the world at the Euro 2024 Football Championship. Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006, a major moment in its postwar history. It proved to be one of the best host nations this major event has had: The world saw a modern, cosmopolitan and united Germany.

This time around, nations had to warn their citizens to dash from the station to their hotel as quickly as possible—because Germany’s large cities, especially Frankfurt, aren’t safe anymore.

The Solution?

The Germany you see today is not just the result of its cumbersome ruling coalition. It’s also the fault of the Christian Democrats, who ruled from 2005 to 2021. They and the other mainstream parties look increasingly the same. None has any big ideas to turn the nation around.

No wonder that in local elections in September, Germans voted for change—radical change.

Germany has three extreme parties that have gone from receiving tiny percentages of the vote or not even existing just a decade ago to becoming the dominant force in German politics.

The Alternative für Deutschland started out in 2013 by opposing the use of German taxpayer money to bail out severely indebted EU countries. It was a party of economists and lawyers who opposed the bailouts that were costing everyday Germans dearly for the “benefit” of creating a European superstate, and they didn’t want to be a part of it.

But during Germany’s migrant crisis in 2015, the party reached a new height of popularity. It pointed out the very clear, very real problems caused by mass migration while all the mainstream parties conspicuously ignored them. The AfD surged in popularity.

Now, several top party leaders go much further than opposing immigration. They are also pushing a radical new view of history, in which the Nazis were not so bad, World War ii should not have ended as it did, and Germany was unfairly punished by the Allies afterward.

Maximilian Krah led the party into European elections last spring. He has defended not only Germans serving in the army in World War ii but even those who fought in the Waffen-SS, the paramilitary unit most loyal to Adolf Hitler and most responsible for the Holocaust and for kidnapping, rape, torture, murder and other war crimes. His statements offended even the other European fringe parties, to the point that they severed their connections with the AfD. And Krah isn’t the only AfD leader to give voice to such radical views.

Another clearly radical top AfD leader, Björn Höcke, said in 2017: “German history is handled as rotten and made to look ridiculous.” He said German attempts to commemorate and apologize for World War ii are a “stupid coping policy,” and he characterized Germany’s Holocaust memorial as “a monument of shame in the heart of its capital.” He said the nation needs a “180-degree reversal on the politics of remembrance.” When he said, “The AfD is the last revolutionary, the last peaceful chance for our fatherland,” the crowd chanted, “Deutschland! Deutschland!”

The same year, AfD leader Alexander Gauland said, “If the French are rightly proud of their emperor and the Britons of Nelson and Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars.”

Last year, AfD leader Tino Chrupalla said, “I find it fundamentally problematic to always link commemoration with the question of guilt. … Historical guilt should no longer determine the way we act.”

Compact, a magazine by and for AfD supporters, presents a view of World War ii in which Germany is the victim. It has asserted, “The German soldiers fought mostly chivalrously and honorably in the Second World War.” It characterized the atrocities as committed by only a small number of criminals, and “offenses were usually severely punished by the military justice system.”

Remember what it is they are talking about! They are referring to Adolf Hitler launching the worst war in human history, killing 60 million people worldwide, and implementing an outright satanic Holocaust extermination of the Jewish people. To this day, Germany and other European nations have laws that forbid Holocaust denial. But certain people and certain movements are fed up with those laws, the governing parties, and the whole swamp.

But this gives a variety of views, from legitimate to deadly, ground to stand on.

In a probably counterproductive move, German authorities shut down Compact over the summer due to its far-right views. This is an indication that, with Germans thinking, feeling and speaking this way, there are no good options. You either empower the government to deny freedom of speech or you allow a strident movement to basically resurrect Nazism—and maybe you end up with both.

Despite this, the AfD won the election in the East German state of Thuringia, with 32.8 percent of the vote. The party now controls more than one third of the seats in the state parliament, meaning it holds a blocking minority. Its cooperation is now required to appoint new judges or to dissolve the state parliament early.

In Saxony, the AfD won 30.6 percent of the vote, only a little less than the one-time political juggernaut cdu, which won 31.9 percent.

The Rise of the Fringe

Die Linke (The Left) is another extreme party in Germany. It is the modern successor to the East German Communist party. Its leaders are so left-wing that they literally campaign alongside busts of Karl Marx. After an interview with one Die Linke leader, a columnist called “Charlemagne” in the left-leaning Economist wrote, “I found myself praying that these people never get anywhere near power” (Sept. 20, 2013).

And now Germany has a new fringe group: the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. Wagenknecht split off from Die Linke to create a new radical political platform. It keeps the false promises of communism, but drops environmentalism and mass migration. Like the AfD, it opposes support for Ukraine, and instead wants Germany to draw closer to Russia. In Thuringia, Wagenknecht’s group won 15.8 percent of the vote, and Die Linke, 13.1 percent. Combined, over 60 percent of voters chose one of these three extreme parties. Now, parties that are so extreme that the cdu outright refuses to negotiate with them control more than two thirds of Thuringia’s parliament.

If the cdu maintains this attitude, it’s hard to see how Thuringian politics can ever produce a functioning government.

Thuringian politics have always been a bit extreme. But all three formerly fringe parties are looking forward to great success in German national elections next year. It’s only a matter of time before they win significant local and national governing power.

We have already seen this in France. For about five decades, parties have maintained the cordon sanitaire: If the main French fringe party, the National Front (now rebranded as National Rally), ever got close to victory in national elections, the parties on the left and right would unite to keep them out.

This summer, it seemed like French voters would elect the National Rally into power. But thanks to tactical voting by other parties, the party was left in third place in terms of parliamentary seats.

Yet with no easy coalition possible, President Emmanuel Macron seems to have made what may be a fatal breach of the cordon sanitaire, and cooperated with the National Rally to help form a government. Michel Barnier is now France’s prime minister, but only with the sufferance of the National Rally. It is the first government in France’s postwar history to rely on support from the far right.

Germany seems to be treading a similar path.

How Bad Could They Be?

But doesn’t Europe need a change? Could the AfD or even The Left be much worse than the current leadership? And if the AfD can’t drain the European political swamp, who will?

European politics are indeed broken. And Bible prophecy says Europeans will soon try something very different. But it’s not going to make the world a better place. In fact, this new leadership will take Europe in a wildly new, powerful, aggressive direction—and lead Europe into almost complete destruction.

The Bible reveals the only sure hope for Germany and Europe—and the one and only hope is for new leadership that is even more radical.

Revelation 17 is a key Bible prophecy about Europe’s future. It describes an empire that rises and falls seven times. Complementing this with prophecies in the book of Daniel, you can see that it is describing the successive resurrections of the Roman Empire.

A very different Europe is coming. It will not be led by faceless bureaucrats, cowardly committees or divided parliaments, but by “kings.” Its military won’t be a joke, but the fear of the world (Revelation 13:4). Instead of remaining secular, vaguely Christian or increasingly Islamic, this version of Europe will be led, as past versions have been, by the Catholic Church. Europe will be dominated by a king ruling a religious superpower, something that this generation has never seen. And many around the world will cheer its arrival.

This resurrected European empire will use its great power. It will use that military, not merely to deter its enemies but to attack, conquer, decimate, “overflow and pass over” them.

Yet this version of Europe will prove to be a colossal failure. This new power will launch conquest after conquest and win victory after victory—until it is divided and absolutely destroyed.

Past versions of the Holy Roman Empire were a curse on its victims—and a curse to Germany and Europe. Yet Bible prophecy says that Germans will, once again, embrace this empire.

God will use this Holy Roman Empire to correct and punish the decadent modern nations of Israel—primarily Britain and America. (Request your free copy of The United States and Britain in Prophecy.)

God corrects modern Israel because He loves them. But He doesn’t correct only these nations. God says He will raise up the kings of the east to correct Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. And then He will personally correct these kings of the east. He aims to bring all nations to know Him.

None of these countries have to suffer this way. God is sending correction to bring about repentance. No matter what country we are from, it’s the way we are living that is causing our problems. The solution is not a change in political leadership or a revolution in political systems—but rather a change in our way of life. God is allowing curses to get us to repent and to change that way. Once we submit to Him, we can live a way of life that will cause good in every area of life.

God responds to repentance from any nation. And He responds to repentance from any individual. The solution to the swamp is not a radical new political party. It is repentance.

Look to a man for hope and God says you’re under a curse (Jeremiah 17:5). Put your hope in God, and even if the world around you is falling apart, you will prosper (verses 7-8).

Soon Europe’s swamp will be drained, and epic prosperity will flow out across the Continent. You can apply the same method to prosper in your life today.

Europe is broken. Get ready for the coming new Europe. Learn what it is about in our free book The Holy Roman Empire in Prophecy.