This week, the right-wing Alternative for Deutschland party suffered one of its first setbacks of the year, after it failed to win the mayoral election of Nordhausen, a small town in the region of Thuringia. Normally, Germany wouldn’t have much interest in the likes of Nordhausen, population 40,000. But this election has gained outsize significance for Germans worried about the seemingly unstoppable rise of the AfD. The party is currently on 22 per cent in the polls nationally and is set to become the largest party in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg in regional elections next year.
The AfD has been underestimated in Germany for some time. When it first came to prominence in the 2017 federal elections, winning a stunning 12 per cent vote share, Germans were shocked, but thought the party wouldn’t last. The refugee crisis of 2015-16 was still fresh in voters’ minds, and many presumed the populists would fade away when immigration became less salient.
In the end, that didn’t happen. Today, the party is the second strongest in the country, only behind the centre-right CDU. For the first time in modern history the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is in charge of a party that is third in the polls.
The AfD’s success comes as Scholz’s so-called traffic-light coalition – with his red Social Democrats, yellow Liberals and Greens – looks increasingly helpless. His government – the first three party coalition since the Weimar Republic in the 1930s – is polling at record lows, with 73 per cent of Germans unsatisfied with it.
Meanwhile, the AfD has made significant headway in the east of Germany. In Thuringia and Saxony it is already the strongest political party, with roughly one third of the vote. So far the AfD has been kept from power by the other parties who have erected a Brandmauer (fire wall) and refused to work with it. But the fire wall doesn’t seem like it can last. Over the summer an AfD politician became county mayor for the first time. And recently the CDU in Thuringia won a vote on tax reduction with the help of the AfD. With the AfD set to win the Thuringian regional elections, it will be increasingly tricky for the other parties to keep it at bay. To gain power there, the CDU would potentially have to rely on the support of the extreme left party, Die Linke. This would inevitably alienate many of the CDU’s more conservative voters.
Thuringia, the home of historical cities like Weimar and Erfurt, has not only become the main AfD stronghold but its radical hotbed, where its most influential politician, Björn Höcke, is in charge. Höcke is now on the radar of the German authorities. The ‘Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz’, a German version of MI5 designed to ‘protect the constitution’ has officially declared the Thuringian wing of the AfD an extreme right-wing party that requires monitoring. In the rest of Germany the party is classified as under ‘suspicion’ which allows the Verfassungsschutz to use undercover agents to infiltrate the party.
The AfD calls the Verfassungsschutz a politically biased institution. The body is under the authority of the home ministry which is run by a Social Democrat, in Thuringia as well as on the federal level. But there is little doubt that Höcke and his allies are fundamentally opposed to the values that have united Germans since 1945. Höcke once called the Berlin memorial to murdered Jews of Europe ‘a memorial of shame’, he has openly used terms like the ‘African life-affirming propagation type’ and has uses phrases linked to Germany’s Nazi past.
Is the AfD a danger to the democratic system? Should the party be banned as many on the left want? The AfD’s official manifesto doesn’t make for radical reading, at least not by British standards. Large parts would go down well with the right wing of the Tory party. It calls for more traditional (family) values and tends to support free market policies, and less uncontrolled migration and EU integration. The AfD despises wokism and climate change missionaries and calls for a focus on national interests and more direct democracy. During the pandemic it spoke of a ‘corona dictatorship’. The party is also deeply suspicious of Nato and is pro-Russian, as are many Germans in the former communist East. In this respect the AfD differs fundamentally from the Tories or their Italian counterparts led by prime minister Giorgia Meloni.
The main problem with the AfD is what lies behind the scenes. Parts of the party are said to be linked to neo-Nazism. But more and more voters don’t care about that. They see the AfD as the only electable alternative to the established German parties with their broadly shared set of values. Many of these voters are concerned about migration in particular. The number of asylum seekers coming to Germany has almost doubled this year to an estimated 350,000. Only a portion of them will be recognised as legitimate asylum seekers or refugees, but almost all of them will end up staying in the country. A rapid demographic change is increasingly visible in the streets and triggers complaints about pressure on schools, hospitals, housing and the welfare system. Last week, the governing parties began to slowly – and painfully – change course. But the Greens are still blocking any significant change, and the Home Secretary is flip-flopping on border controls. Within the EU, Germany has become the main obstacle for tougher measures on irregular migration.
The CDU, formerly led by Angela Merkel, is still struggling with its opposition role. It is clearly spooked by the rise of a right-wing party and is now in favour of shutting down Germany’s borders and curbing individual rights for asylum seekers. But many within the CDU disagree with Friedrich Merz, the party chairman on this policy change. And for most Germans the CDU is still the party that under Merkel opened the borders eight years ago. It is the same on climate change. As of now the AfD is the only force passionately opposing Germany’s tough new climate change policies. The CDU is critical of these policies too but it can’t oppose them too strongly in case it needs to join a coalition with the Greens.
Soon the German party system could become even messier. There is a rumour that the former figure-head of Die Linke, Sarah Wagenknecht, will split from her party and found her own. According to polls more than 20 per cent of the electorate would at least consider voting for the kind of party she will form. Although it is on the far-left her programme is expected to be surprisingly similar to the AfD’s.
Germany is not returning to the 1930s. The German public is still overwhelmingly moderate and many AfD voters are no more right-wing than your typical British conservative. But the AfD’s rise is going to generate plenty of hysteria and upheaval in the next few years. Europe most stable country will have to belatedly find a way to ride the populist wave.
Comments