The state elections in east Germany on 1 September delivered a strange result: the far right won, but the far left holds the balance of power. As happened in France in July, nobody wanted to partner with the far right, and the result is a mess.
This is the first time the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has won a state election. It secured more than 30 per cent of the seats in two east German states. In Thuringia it came first. In Saxony, it took second place behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The AfD is now the dominant political force in eastern Germany.
The polls predicted the result fairly accurately, and yet Germany is in shock. The far right is on the march, and no one knows how to stop them.
Among far-right parties in Europe, the AfD is scarier than most. It is not a Nazi party, but some of its politicians have neo-Nazi contacts. In contrast to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni, who seek to cooperate in Europe, the AfD wants to transform the EU into a confederation of nation states and leave the euro. And it doesn’t just want to stop new immigrants; it wants to send the ones that have already arrived back home, too.
The fear in Germany is that what happened in Thuringia on Sunday could one day happen in Berlin, perhaps not at next year’s federal election, but maybe the one after that. For now, despite its victory, the AfD may not form a government. That would require an absolute majority of seats in parliament, which it would only get through a coalition. However, other parties have erected a “firewall” against the AfD – a do-or-die promise not to join it in government.
But if not the AfD, who else can form a government? Should former communists, pro-Vladimir Putin populists, Christian Democrats and Greens get together and govern in a rainbow coalition? This is not impossible, but the chances of such a thing succeeding are next to zero.
The CDU has built not one firewall, but three. The second is against the Left Party, the third against Sahra Wagenknecht, a maverick politician who broke away from the Left Party to form her own group, BSW. Wagenknecht is a politician of the left who uses themes of the right. Her biggest one in this campaign was an end to supplying arms to Ukraine. She boycotted the Bundestag when Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the chamber and is an unapologetic defender of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. Her party got 11.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony, and 15.8 per cent in Thuringia; nationwide, she is polling between 7 per cent and 9 per cent. For a party less than a year old, her results are spectacular. In Thuringia she is holding the balance of power and in Saxony, it will be possible but difficult for other parties to govern without her support. This may be the first firewall to collapse.
Then there is Olaf Scholz and his government, which seems to have become almost irrelevant. The three parties in the national coalition were the big losers on Sunday. Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) barely made it above the 5 per cent threshold needed for a party to be represented in parliament. The Greens surpassed the hurdle in Saxony, but not in Thuringia. The liberal Free Democratic Party failed both, with a vote share of around 1 per cent. The government parties have disappeared as a political force in eastern Germany.
The situation in Berlin falls into the hopeless-but-not-serious category. It looks as if the government will limp on for another year. The more interesting question is not whether there could be early elections but what will happen afterwards.
Together, the AfD and Wagenknecht’s party account for over 25 per cent in the national polls. This would give them around one third of the seats, leaving the centrist parties to form a coalition with the remaining seats. Of the five centrist political parties, it might require four to form a coalition, which is the political downside of the firewalls. They turn coalitions into musical-chair arrangements of the same parties. It is no wonder that the extreme parties flourish in such an environment. They are the only real opposition.
Beside the rise of the far right and the far left, the other big shift taking place is the lurch that Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader, is taking to the right. Merz has aggressively adopted the AfD’s anti-immigration theme, with the goal to win back voters that deserted the CDU for the AfD. A recent terror attack in the west German town of Solingen, allegedly committed by a Syrian refugee, prompted Merz to call for the reintroduction of border controls, a kind of mini-Brexit that would kill a central EU principle: the Schengen zone of passport-free travel. This kind of anti-immigration rhetoric is appalling. But it’s also difficult to see how this could work for Merz. To evoke the sentiment expressed by Le Pen when the French centre right copied her policy: why go for the imitation when you can have the real thing?
The CDU lacks credibility as an anti-immigration party. It was Angela Merkel, as CDU leader, who opened Germany’s borders to refugees in 2015, which caused the biggest flow of immigration in modern German history. Merz is cautious not to offend Merkel loyalists in his party, and among his voters. He is not credible as an immigration hardliner. In recent years, centre-right parties in the UK, France and Italy have found that immigration does not work well as a campaign theme.
The story of Germany’s economic decline is a theme I chronicle in a forthcoming book. That’s what Merz should focus on, not immigration. Germany bet on a few industries that deteriorated simultaneously, the most dramatic being the car industry. Successive governments failed to invest in digital technologies. Within a few decades, Germany transformed itself
from high-tech leader to digital Luddite.
The irony about the AfD and the BSW is that they both yearn for the days of smokestack industries, and yet they are creatures of the digital age. The AfD has the most followers on TikTok of any German political party. Among state MPs on TikTok, the SPD had 290,000 likes, the CDU 914,000 and the AfD 17.8 million. Among young voters, the AfD is the most popular party.
It is not outlandish to predict that some of the old parties will disappear one day. The firewalls cannot protect them from voters. The smartest strategy would be to expose the AfD by co-opting them as a junior coalition partner.
The reason why German parties refuse to cooperate with the far right is historical: German nationalists and conservatives misjudged Adolf Hitler when they formed a coalition with him in the 1930s, and later handed him emergency powers to rule without parliament. But what triggered the rise of Hitler was a political, economic and moral breakdown of an entire system. The situation in Germany today is not comparable to that of 1933.
Firewalls are the embodiment of fear. But as Germans kept building them, they ended with the biggest one of all: against progress and modernity.
[See more: How the far right mobilised the new Germany]
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire