In Germany, as three eastern states await elections later this month, the establishment braces to enter a critical battle in its war against the far-right.
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is Germany’s insurgent far-right party. Founded by Eurosceptics in 2013, the party’s first decade of existence has been a story of burgeoning ascent and rapid intensification of their xenophobic, revisionist nationalism. The AfD describe their fight as one against an “invasion of foreigners”, oppose same-sex marriage, and reject climate change.
This year has been fraught with scandal for the party. The January investigation of senior AfD attendance at a prominent neo-Nazi meeting was followed by subsequent revelations of the party’s creation of a ‘remigration’ master plan. Later, there were two trials of a regional leader for campaigns using Nazi slogans, and then the April reports of Russian and Chinese espionage by party aides. Voters have been granted every reason possible to cut ties with the AfD and return their votes to the establishment parties. And yet most still haven’t.
Lurching through these scandals, the AfD lost momentum but avoided the mortal downturn that would’ve stunted its election chances. The party polls second behind the conservative CDU in national polls and ahead of the Chancellor’s coalition-leading Social Democrats. They top polls in Thuringia, Brandenburg, and Saxony, the three states that they seek to call their own after elections this month.
The story is similar across east Germany where the AfD leads the polls in all five eastern states. Support is strongest in Thuringia, where Björn Höcke heads the party in the state parliament. Höcke was the politician twice convicted for the use of banned Nazi slogans at campaign events. He formerly led Der Flügel, an extreme faction of the national AfD, before its categorization as an extremist organisation. While other AfD politicians only murmur conspiratorially about the ‘remigration’ masterplan, he openly flaunts the policy in a recent Instagram campaign video. Höcke represents the uniquely radical, and the uniquely popular character of the eastern German far right. This brand of radical politics did not surface in Germany’s east by chance. Reunification may have razed the hard border between the old West and East German nations, but an enduring division remains.
Decades of global applause for the supposed success of eastern regeneration, and for the triumph of liberal parliamentary order in bringing about the united Germany’s huge growth, has long drowned out the swelling protests of Germans in the east. Even in the UK, our think tanks cry eureka, clambering to announce grand “German-style regeneration” projects to address our North-South divide. A compelling hyperbole: placing cartoonish memories of dour GDR apartment blocks and ersatz two-stroke engine cars against the sparkling trains of capitalistic German unification. In modern Germany, disposable income in the east sits at 85% of the west, a gap more modest than the 75% gap between North-East and South-East England. But hurtling through pie charts and projections, the think tank reports are empty of human reality.
Three-quarters of eastern Germans still agree that their region lags behind the West. In Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia, close to two-thirds of citizens feel that people in eastern Germany, their friends and neighbours, are “second-class citizens”. Discontent is strong, unremitting, and eminently personal; creating fertile ground for radical politics. In the east, many voters concur with the AfD’s diagnosis that something has gone critically wrong in modern German politics – that they have been left behind.
As with any battle, the AfD’s offensive is only half the story. The German system is, by design, well-placed to defend against radicalism. Its constitution creates a Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), tasked with protecting liberal democratic order by investigating cases of extremism. In the election states alone, the BfV led prosecutions against Höcke, placed AfD Brandenburg under observation for suspected right-wing extremism, and branded AfD Saxony an “anti-constitutional right-wing group”. These actions come at the end of a long decade of hesitancy to act against the AfD.
The BfV once said of Die Heimat, a now-waning far-right party that the BfV formerly investigated, that they were “too small” to warrant banning. Political threats must be credible, the BfV insists. Perhaps only now that the AfD poses a serious electoral threat can their intervention be justified. Now, though, not only does the party enjoy a publicity reach far beyond possible BfV regulation (being a DW-described “social media superpower”), but their projected 8 million voters, already cynical, would not warmly accept being denied their chosen party by an SPD-headed administration. If Die Heimat were too small for banning, the AfD are seemingly now too big.
This need for a Goldilocks size of party prominence is perhaps not the only fault in the machinery of the German constitution. In a strange quirk of the German system, the BfV is not an independent institution (comparable to the independent Electoral Commission in the UK) but is instead led by a political appointee of the incumbent government. Investigations into a party are undertaken by a government minister belonging to another, or worse, the same, party. Until 2021, CDU minister Hans Georg Maaßen presided over efforts to curtail far-right extremism, tasked with monitoring the AfD during their formative years. He was in post for 6 years, before his dismissal from office for downplaying the extent of far-right xenophobia. After leaving the role, he abandoned the CDU and founded the Values Union, a new right-wing political party likened to the AfD. His former colleagues suggest his party is culpable of “brutalising the political discourse”. It is now understood that Maaßen himself, formerly the coordinator of all BfV activity, is under observation by the BfV for right-wing extremism. One must question whether an agency under Maaßen’s direction did all that it could to regulate the AfD and ready German democratic institutions for the scourge of extremist debate they were to play host to.
In populist politics, ‘the Establishment’ is often a vague, unbound sum of all political opponents. But the German establishment has made its face very clear, defined in their mutual rejection of the AfD’s extremism, and arranged in a last-gasp alliance to hold the centre. The SDP, Free Democrats, and Greens coordinate under a coalition resistance supported by the CDU, who boycott AfD collaboration. Their efforts are underwhelming. Having rifled through constitutional powers to observe and classify AfD activity, they are now engaged in the childish political exclusion of the AfD in the Bundestag. In increasing order of triviality: the AfD are excluded from parliamentary committees, they were disinvited from the Berlin Film Festival opening ceremony, and they are not allowed to start for the all-Bundestag football team.
But who else is to blame for the AfD being in play at all, except the other parties? Scholz’s coalition, distracted by internal strife, has failed to convince a nation of his plans for transformation. The CSU’s own islamophobia vindicated the AfD from scrutiny for remarks that “Islam does not belong to Germany”. The CDU’s most conservative members have warmed to the far right, normalising stances on migration and gender that the AfD had previously hoarded at the political extreme.
Perhaps, too, it was Merkel’s naivete. In 2015 she insisted “Wir schaffen das”, “We will manage”. Here, she confirmed that Germany was to accept thousands of refugees during the Syrian crisis. Her migration plans appear to have paid off: 75% of men who entered Germany in 2015 are now employed and pay taxes in Germany; 80% of young refugees describe a strong sense of belonging in German schools and feel liked by their peers and refugee naturalizations have never been higher. But the collective language – that we will manage – echoes grimly in the ears of many Germans who sense that establishment elites do not share their ordinary grievances. We will manage, she said. You will manage, they heard. For the AfD in particular, Merkel’s words were not an invitation for unity, but national conscription into an unrecognisable new Germany.
This approach excludes the discontented eastern voice from the political mainstream. Marco Wanderwitz, the former CDU Federal Commissioner for the Eastern States, sneered that many easterners have been “socialised in a dictatorship” and still “not arrived in our democracy even after 30 years”. He imagines an eastern citizenry stunted, straying, troubled by credulous demands, and out of pace with slick German modernity. As Katja Hoyer puts it, Wanderwitz imagines a centre ground “beyond criticism” that easterners just fail to understand. He sees no flaw in the social contract, no fault in the mainstream offer, but rather blames the dissenters for their slowness, and sought to pull the plug on their representation by banning the AfD.
The centre parties, ever tangled in these smug accounts of the eastern psyche, watch with panic as the AfD awaits unprecedented electoral success. Legal intervention becomes increasingly unlikely with every new AfD victory, opening ground for the party to test the vague limits of regulations on political activity, confident that consequences are either distant or implausible.
Successes in Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg will prelude the fortunes of the far-right entering a final year of campaigns before the 2025 Federal Election. In the seemingly inevitable case that the AfD wins a significant share of seats in the proportional parliament, the largest party will be faced with the prospect of forming a coalition with their established enemy. If the centre doesn’t hold, the biggest economy in Europe will fall into dangerous hands, and the freedom of millions of Germans will be at risk.