How Did Germany Let the Far-Right Genie Out of the Bottle?
The Alternative for Germany is expected to make strong gains in the European parliamentary elections and can no longer be ignored
Since the end of World War II, Germans had by and large steadfastly resisted voting for far-right populists. That norm was shattered in the last decade by the success of the political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which seemed to gain more traction as it radicalized into a full-blown, hard right populist party.
A year into its existence, spurred by widespread discontent with German fiscal policy, the AfD won seven seats in European Parliament. In 2017, after undergoing a hard-right turn, it won 94 seats in the German federal elections, good for third place overall. For the past year, the AfD has consistently ranked second in Politico’s poll aggregator tracking the public’s voting intentions.
In this Sunday’s European Parliament elections, roughly 1 in 6 German voters is expected to cast a ballot for the AfD, whose members have trivialized the Holocaust, encouraged their followers to chant Nazi slogans, and participated in a secret conference where they fantasized about forced deportations of naturalized citizens they derisively call “Passport Germans.” Worse still, the AfD is predicted to be the strongest party, with up to a third of the vote share, in the three elections for state parliament in Saxony and Thuringia on Sept. 1 and in Brandenburg on Sept. 22. And in generic polls for a hypothetical federal election, the AfD fares even better than it did in any previous election. How did Germany get to this point?
The AfD’s Origin Story
The AfD was founded in early 2013 by a group of conservatives, led by the economics professor, Bernd Lucke, greatly disillusioned with then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fiscal policy. In their view, the European debt crisis had revealed deep instability within the eurozone project as smaller nations found themselves unable to cope with the economic demands of membership, and they believed Merkel’s focus on saving the euro was coming at the expense of German economic interests. This was, however, the opposite of a populist complaint—in fact, the AfD was initially referred to as a “Professorenpartei” (a professor’s party) because of the party’s early support from various economics professors who were more interested in fiscal policy than catering to popular will. In its earliest days, the AfD could best be characterized as a cranky but respectable party of fiscal hardliners. Its anti-establishment posture stemmed entirely from its belief in the necessity of austerity. Even its name could be construed less as nationalistic and more an answer to the dictum coined by Merkel—“alternativlose Politik” (policy for which there is no alternative)—to defend her bailouts during the eurozone crisis.
Although the AfD had launched an abstract economic critique of Merkel’s policies that could be hard to parse for non-experts, its contrarian stance resonated with a significant portion of Germans. Right out of the gate, the AfD obtained the highest vote share of any new party since 1953, nearly clearing the 5% threshold for inclusion in the Bundestag, Germany’s Parliament, in its first electoral go round. Its success was also measurable in terms of membership, passing the 10,000 mark almost immediately after its formation.
The rapid increase in membership, however, helped lay the groundwork for its turn toward right-wing populism. Perhaps due to pure negligence—or a combination of calculation and ambition—the party’s founders did little to stop right-wing populists from swelling its rolls. And as the German economy emerged through the European debt crisis in good financial shape, fiscal conservatism naturally faded from the public’s consciousness. However, a new European crisis having to do with migrants came to dominate the popular imagination. The AfD hardliners seized on the growing anti-migrant opinion, positioning the AfD as its champion, thereby cementing the party’s turn towards culture war issues like immigration and national identity.
Starting in late 2014, organized right-wing protesters took to the streets to loudly rail against Germany’s decision to admit Muslim migrants, many fleeing the Syrian civil war. The AfD right wing’s desire to become the political home of nativism led to a rift within the party that culminated in founder Bernd Lucke’s being ousted as leader in 2015, and his replacement with hardliner Frauke Petry. Lucke left the party entirely, citing its right-wing shift, following in the footsteps of what other party leaders had already done and more would do in the coming year.
Up until this point, the AfD unwittingly helped the cause of right-wing populism. If the reactionary far-right had tried to start a party from scratch, it would have likely failed. The AfD, after all, was created within a respectable mold, trading on the credentials of its earliest founders and leaders. But with saner voices now pushed out, right-wing populists had the party with public respectability and an established name all to themselves. And they deliberately turned it into a Trojan horse for reactionary leaders who wanted to “fight the system from within.”
The AfD Embarks on its Far-Right Era
The AfD consciously worked to inject far-right ideas in the public discourse to shift the Overton window in a populist policy direction. The intellectual thought leaders of the German “Neue Rechte” (New Right) called this strategy the “occupation of the pre-political space” and the AfD deployed it very effectively.
In February 2016, Beatrix von Storch, the AfD’s European MP, posted on Facebook that refugees entering Germany via Austria should be stopped by any means necessary. When asked to clarify if she advocated shooting at unarmed women and children, she answered with a simple “yes.” The reaction was outrage—a German police union leader denounced the comment, noting that police officers would never shoot at refugees. But by 2023, the Christian Democratic Union politician Jens Spahn, a former Federal Minister of Health under Chancellor Merkel, was espousing similar views, noting that “irregular migration” needed to be stopped, if necessary, with “physical violence.”
A similar normalization has occurred over Germany’s Nazi past. In 2018, when then-AfD leader Alexander Gauland called Hitler and the Nazis “mere bird droppings” in German history, the outcry was strong enough that he was forced into a non-apology apology. Now, such utterances barely even register: In May 2023, the AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla gave an interview to a radical right-wing magazine on the anniversary of the Nazi capitulation where he cautioned against “always linking remembrance with the question of guilt” and to rather “replace the question of guilt with the question of the achievements of a civilization.” No outcry followed.
The clearest exemplar of what the AfD stands for in 2024 is Björn Höcke, the party’s leader for the state of Thuringia, one of the most influential politicians within the movement. He has repeatedly used phrases such as “Alles für Deutschland” (“everything for Germany”), which was a slogan of Hitler’s “Sturmabteilung” (SA), the Nazi party’s paramilitary organization—and a shibboleth of neo-Nazis. In May, a regional court found Höcke guilty of “using the symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations.” Although Höcke was the leader of a now formally dissolved faction within the party that Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has labeled extremist and a danger to democracy—its very concept deemed by the German intelligence agency to be “aimed at exclusion, contempt and deprivation of rights of foreigners, migrants, especially Muslims, and politically dissenting people”—within the AfD he is no shunned outsider but, rather, its vanguard.
A New Normal in Germany
As right-wing populist positions have become part of the political discourse, Germany is now in the exact same position as some of its European neighbors with established hardline populist parties. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni ascended to the premiership in October 2022 as the head of her neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, which is poised to perform well in the upcoming European Parliament elections. In France, the Marine Le Pen-led far-right Rassemblement National (RN) is set to bag a third of votes in those elections, roughly double what President Macron’s governing coalition is expected to obtain.
What makes the situation in Germany especially worrisome is that, unlike in France and Italy, far-right parties had failed to garner any meaningful vote share in nationwide elections until just seven years ago; indeed, until the 2017 federal election, there had never been a right-wing populist party that had received more than six percent of the national vote in Germany. The nation’s special vigilance toward far right ethnonationalism in light of its history of Nazi atrocities was expected to spare Germany the resurgence of far-right populism. But it actually led to complacency among mainstream parties. By 2017, the AfD—already in its right-wing populist phase—received nearly 13% of the vote in the federal election to become the third-strongest parliamentary entity. And by then it had also made inroads in all state parliaments as well as the European Parliament. The norm against it was officially gone.
To be sure, the AfD is not on track to take over German politics. It currently has the fifth most seats among all German parties in the Bundestag, fourth most seats among German parties in the European Parliament, and is a distant eighth in party membership. Nor is it currently a threat to dominate European politics—late last month, the AfD was ousted from the Marine Le Pen-led Identity and Democracy (ID) party coalition, the most right-wing group in the European Parliament. Le Pen, herself a far-right radical, explained the AfD’s expulsion by describing the party as “clearly controlled by radical groups.” But none of the above offer good grounds for thinking the AfD will be relegated to the fringes of German or European politics.
After the election, the AfD could rejoin ID, or it could form a new, even more radical right-wing presence within the European Parliament. Some fear that the AfD could potentially join forces with Bulgaria’s ultranationalist Vazrazhdane. Its leader, Kostadin Kostadinov, said that AfD’s expulsion from ID could create an opening to form “a real conservative and sovereigntist group in the European Parliament.” Also, ID’s removal of the AfD wasn’t due to its stated policy platform being out of step with Europe’s right-wing populist project. Rather, it was because the AfD’s leading candidate, Maximillian Krah, was implicated in a corruption and spying scandal involving China and Russia, and because he said he would not automatically construe a member of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) to be a criminal. Absent these entirely preventable missteps, the AfD would be in good standing with right-wing populist partners in Europe.
But even if the AfD self destructs, it has changed the ideological climate sufficiently that another right-wing populist party would almost certainly emerge. Still, the fact is that a majority of Germans remain committed to liberal democracy and don’t want ideologies that they consistently repudiated after World War II to rear their ugly heads again. The hundreds of thousands of Germans who took to the streets earlier this year to protest such extremism offers hope that Germany understands what’s at stake.
© The UnPopulist 2024
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I think we need to understand and acknowledge a fundamental reality that is missing from most analysis of the AFD’s success.
Germany’s government has repeatedly and ruthlessly betrayed the people of Germany, at least in the opinion of many Germans, and it has done so while patting itself on the back and assuring itself that is on the right side of history. It is not exaggeration, unfortunately, to say the German commoners are paid a price for their leaders desire to make themselves look good and to make up for crimes committed before their birth, nor is it exaggeration to say that the current government has acted in a manner disturbingly akin to the Nazi party; it has threatened its opponents with being made illegal, it has committed vast crimes against free expression and free speech, and it has worked (at least prior to Ukraine War) with states that are genuine threats to Europe and the civilised world.
It should not surprise anyone that vast numbers of Germans are thoroughly sick of this development and are willing to take the risk of voting for a party they do not consider to be far-right (not least because the term far-right has been overused to the point of uselessness) and/or voting against a political elite that has proven – repeatedly - that it does not have the best interests of the German people at heart.
The elite get to look good when they invite migrants into Germany; the common Germans suffer, in ways direct (sexual assault, terrorism) - and indirect (competition for jobs and government benefits): the elite get to talk about green renewable power and green economy; the commoners see their electric bills ever-climbing and fear that, one day, they will freeze in their own homes: the elite grandstands about Ukraine and other global issues; the commoners are painfully aware that the German military is a shadow of its former self, crippled by political generals who are more interested in looking good than preparing for war, and that provoking a man like Putin is asking for trouble.
And while these matters may not be as bad as many suggest, the simple fact that the government has resorted to concealing figures or censoring any sort of disagreement makes it very hard to trust them, and extremely sensible to assume the worst.
In 1933, the Weimar Republic fell - it was very much a victim of events outside its control, economic storms that battered Germany without German politics being able to do much of anything about it. The politicians of that era were very much the victims of circumstances they could not control. By contrast, the current German government has brought its problems upon itself and bears a considerable portion of the blame for the rise of the AFD. If they want someone to blame, they can look in the mirror.
If I were offering advice to the German government after this, I would say “stop whining about the AFD voters, and slandering them as wannabe far-right fascists, and start thinking about ways you can appeal to them by putting foolish politics in the past and addressing the very legitimate concerns of your voters … or get ready to watch helplessly as the AFD is elected into power.”
Not that I think they will listen.
Some people simply do not learn from history