IN GERMANY, as in France, America and elsewhere, 1968 is as much a shorthand as a reality. Yes, there were the crowd scenes: the sit-ins at the Free University in West Berlin and the mass protests in Bonn; the shooting of Rudi Dutschke, a student leader, and the first terror attacks of what would become the Baader-Meinhof gang. But there was also the wider, deeper social evolution associated with “1968”: a younger generation’s confrontation of its parents’ Nazi past, the emergence of a more relaxed society, the loosening of civic life from traditional institutions, the birth of the modern environmentalist, anti-racism and personal liberation movements.

Back in 1968 Angela Merkel was practising her Russian verbs as a 14-year-old student at the Polytechnic High School of Templin, in East Germany. Over the Iron Curtain, Martin Schulz (until last Sunday her Social Democrat (SPD) rival at the election) was a 13-year-old pupil at the Holy Ghost Grammar School in Würselen, in the Rhineland. Alexander Gauland, now the leading personality of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), was studying law at the University of Marburg, near Frankfurt. Cem Özdemir of the Greens was the two-year-old baby of Anatolian gastarbeiter living in the hills outside Stuttgart. Christian Lindner, now leader of the free-market FDP, would not be born for nine years. Today’s average German, aged 47, was born two years later in 1970.

And yet. The more closely you look at German politics today, in the aftermath of its election, the more important 1968 and all it stands for becomes.

The most recent chapter of its aftermath began in 1998, when Helmut Kohl—the last chancellor who experienced 1968 in middle-age (well, at 38)—folded. In the subsequent SPD-Green government former soixante-huitards like Gerhard Schröder, Joschka Fischer and Otto Schily were running the show. They liberalised and modernised Kohl’s stuffy old Germany (symbolised by his favourite dish, Saumagen, or stuffed pig’s stomach), rolling out green energy and gender equality measures. Mrs Merkel, though “my girl” to Kohl, has governed within this post-Kohl consensus, moving his creaky old party into the centre, building on the Schröder-Fischer environmental advances and, governing with the SPD, nodding through quotas for women on company boards and a Bundestag vote that legalised gay marriage.

Poetically, Kohl died earlier this year. That point might come to be seen as the beginning of another era. Sunday’s election augurs a new period in which the 1968-era consensus is simultaneously more dominant than before, but also—and therefore—more contested.

Take the rise of the AfD. It started off in 2013 as a “professors’ party” opposed to European bailouts, but has morphed into a party of cultural struggle: the anti-1968 party. It even acknowledges this identity. Talking to me recently Jörg Meuthen, the AfD's co-leader, said its great strength was that 1968 values had “gone too far”. Addressing his members at the party’s conference in April he was less restrained: “Away with a left/red/green-infected 1968 ideology and towards a strong national state in Europe and the world!” he intoned to applause and cheers in Cologne.

In many respects anti-1968-ism is the AfD’s calling card. Walking down a street in Schwerin last week I noticed that there was a poster promoting the party on every lamp-post: “Burka? We’re for bikinis!”, announced one over an image of scantily-clad women—taking aim at once at multiculturalism and women’s liberation. “‘New Germans?’ Let’s make them ourselves” bellowed another over the photo of a pregnant white woman, darkly reminiscent of a pre-1968 ethno-nationalism.

That the AfD did so well in the former communist east (taking just over 20% of votes, compared with under 13% nationally) proves the point: it outperformed in the very part of Germany denied a 1968, where liberal, post-national politics have shallower roots than in the west. It is not entirely coincidental that the AfD got its best results in the south-eastern corner of the former East Germany, the so-called “valley of the clueless” where Western TV and radio signals did not reach. In a similar vein, to witness gentrifying inner suburbs of Berlin like Friedrichshain and Lichtenberg today—where native Ossis brush shoulders with hippies from Stuttgart and San Francisco—is in many ways to witness two worlds: one in which 1968 happened and one in which it did not.

“1968” defines the AfD's future, because opposition to it is one of the few things holding the Bundestag’s new third force together. The party contains traditional, western CDU voters who think Mrs Merkel too liberal (epitomised by Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s dominant personality); anti-Islam “libertarians” (epitomised by Alice Weidel, his lesbian fellow lead candidate); east Germans opposed to Western values (epitomised by Frauke Petry, the party’s former leader); and Nazi-era revisionists (like Björn Höcke, the party’s most prominent firebrand). They disagree on lots. But not on the evilness of whatever “1968” means.

The subject is a fault-line through Germany’s left, too. In the election last Sunday the SPD lost votes to almost every other party thanks partly to tensions between its different voters. On the one side were 1968ish metropolitan voters whose priorities include things like personal freedoms and environmentalism; on the other more conservative left voters for whom such priorities are incidental at best, and a narrower pre-1968 band of priorities—jobs, crime, the welfare state—loom largest. To visit traditional SPD strongholds in the Ruhr Valley is to experience places still yearning for a return to the post-war Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle): places where blue-collar pubs play old-school Schlager (hits) in which singers croon about home, landscape, tradition, the romance of the mountains and of faraway, exotic countries like Spain.

Like many social democratic parties in Europe, the SPD is transfixed by this divergence, incapable of reconciling voters splintered out by “1968”. Even the socialist Left party is struggling, torn between leading figures like Sahra Wagenknecht, who prefers a traditional authoritarian course rooted in the small-town east, and Katja Kipping, whose Greenish, more 1968ish politics contributed to the party’s gains among well-educated, left-wing voters in the urban west (similar to Jeremy Corbyn’s base in Britain). In which direction the party ultimately goes is not clear—but it might decide, for example, whether it eventually enters a federal coalition with the SPD and Greens, on which Ms Kipping’s tendency is much keener.

From Saumagen to sushi

As for the rest of Germany’s political spectrum, one only has to look at the parties now eyeing each other suspiciously across the negotiating table. The SPD’s withdrawal from the grand coalition means the only arithmetically possible coalition is a “Jamaica” one, so-called as the country’s flag contains the colours of the CDU (black), the FDP (yellow) and the Greens (I won’t patronise you). The very fact that these parties will probably create the first ever federal government of its sort in the next few months speaks to the enduring influence of 1968.

Consider the back story. The Greens emerged in the 1980s as visceral opponents of everything Kohl (and his FDP coalition partners) stood for. Confronted by the suggestion of a Jamaica coalition in 2003 Mr Fischer said he’d never heard of the phrase before and ridiculed it: “I imagine myself sitting there with dreadlocks and a spliff in one hand”. Yet when I spoke to him earlier this month in Frankfurt—where once he ran a radical bookshop and defended student radicals in the courts—he was optimistic about Green participation in a new government led by Mrs Merkel, even if it involved the FDP.

Mr Fischer’s evolution, and that of his party, is the visible tip of a sociological iceberg. Many in the 1968 generation now enjoy nice flats and foreign holidays. Some, like Winfried Kretschmann, the moderate Green prime minister of Baden-Württemberg who governs with the CDU, are even happy to be seen in a Mercedes. To get a sense of these shifts watch The Edukators, a 2004 German film about a group of young left-wing activists who kidnap a wealthy businessman, but suffer an identity crisis when they discover he was once one of the “68er” they venerate.

If the Greens have moved into, and colonised, parts of the centre, the Christian Democrats have converged from the other direction. Symbols of this sociological shift abound. In August, for example, Mrs Merkel gave her first interview to taz, the house newspaper of the 68ers.

Back in 1968 protesters in West Germany took to the streets in opposition to Georg Kiesinger, the CDU chancellor, and the Bild-Zeitung. Both seemed to them symbols of a conservative, unreconstructed German establishment. Yet in the last year or so the Bild-Zeitung has been the most influential champion of Mrs Merkel’s refugee policies. And last month I visited Friedrich Kiesinger, the former chancellor’s nephew and a tea-sipping psychologist with flowing white hair, who runs one of the largest refugee homes in Berlin. CDU Germany has changed.

Another sign of this is that even under Kohl, young CDU MPs in Bonn would dine at Sassella, an Italian restaurant, with Greens and discuss common interests. Many protagonists of this “pizza connection” are now at the heart of the Jamaica negotiations: Cem Özdemir (who may yet follow Mr Fischer and become Germany’s second Green foreign minister) and Katrin Göring-Eckardt for the Greens and Peter Altmaier, Mrs Merkel’s liberal chief-of-staff, were all at the table by the Rhine.

The pre-eminence of the likes of Mr Altmaier in today’s CDU speaks of how far the party has moved towards 1968 values—and helps to explain why Kohl-era traditionalists (especially in the CSU) bridle at the party’s shifts under Mrs Merkel. For all its conservative overtures during the election campaign, the FDP has undergone a similar change; endorsing gay marriage and measures to get more women into work, for example.

The story of 1968’s enduring relevance in Germany is by no means unique. Rising populism and culture wars across the West are written up as a reversion. I find it more convincing to see them as an expression of the success of the 68ers, who ultimately have won many of battles of past decades (just compare the electoral platforms of most European conservative parties today with those of their predecessors 20 or 30 years ago). In many countries, the seemingly final success of “1968” has fuelled the rise of a minority, sometimes large and sometimes small, not prepared to accept that fact.

It is a contradiction that should give those who believe in “1968” values heart, especially going into the year of its 50th anniversary. The West’s populist wave has economic causes like inequality, the decline of industry, loss of status among ageing males and the rise of precarious work for young people. These will take some managing. But the cultural drivers—hostility to the freer and more heterodox Western societies of today—might just turn out to be the swan song of a pre-1968 world.