What the Heck’s Going on in Germany?

Photograph Source: Metropolico.org – CC BY-SA 2.0

For the first time since the end of World War II, a far-right party has won a state election in Germany. This most recent success for the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—it won one-third of the votes in the eastern state of Thuringia—has generated a swirl of questions both inside and outside the country, such as:

+ Doesn’t Germany have laws that prevent such extremists from running in and winning elections?

+ Don’t Germans recoil instinctively from political parties that remind them of the Nazis?

+ What happened to the independent left, which was quite strong in Thuringia and other parts of the former East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

+ Will the far right take control of the entire country in Germany’s federal elections next September?

These questions have relevance beyond Germany. The far right is experiencing yet another wave of popularity across Europe. The anti-immigrant Party for Freedom came out on top in the last Dutch elections. Marine Le Pen’s National Assembly nearly won the most recent French elections after besting the competition in the European Parliament elections. And the equally far-right Freedom Party is poised to win the upcoming elections in Austria at the end of this month.

Taboos around extremism are being challenged the world over. Just as a substantial number of U.S. voters are willing to contemplate installing Donald Trump in the White House for a second term, an equally significant portion of the German electorate is willing to flirt once again with fascism. Are Germans, Americans, and others determined to repeat the history they’ve either forgotten or not bothered to learn in the first place?

The Platform of the Right

The Alternative for Germany started out in 2013, during the world-wide financial crisis, as a party opposed to the European Union bailouts of southern members like Greece. The AfD was a right-wing party but not a neo-Nazi one, which would have triggered a German law outlawing the political spawn of Hitler.

Particularly under leaders like Alice Weidel and Björn Höcke, however, the party moved inexorably closer to a crypto-Nazi position, much as white supremacists have become more prominent in the Republican Party thanks to Trump’s MAGA movement. According to investigations by the German magazine Der Spiegel, there has been considerable cross-pollination between the AfD and neo-Nazi movements, with representatives of the latter working as advisors for the former. Occasionally, when news breaks of AfD members attending neo-Nazi meetings, the party leadership publicly distances itself from that member, as it did by firing Roland Hartwig, an advisor to Alice Weidel, after he participated in a discussion on a “master plan” for mass deportations of immigrants. These scandals seem to have had little impact on the AfD’s popularity.

Björn Höcke, the politician most responsible for the AfD’s success in Thuringia, is also the most infamous with regard to his extremism. He participated in a neo-Nazi march in 2010. Articles that have appeared under a pseudonym in a neo-Nazi magazine were most likely written by Höcke, which prompted an attempt within the AfD to expel him (it failed). He has been convicted twice of using Nazi slogans. In 2019, a German court ruled that he can legally be described as a “fascist.” But voters in Thuringia had no problem backing this fascist and his party. In the election in nearby Saxony, without a local politician like Höcke, the AfD only came in second.

The popularity of the AfD, though initially built on anger at the EU, grew considerably when the party shifted its focus to immigrants, particularly those coming from the Middle East and North Africa. In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed a million new refugees to Germany and won praise from around the world. In Germany itself, however, the AfD was the chief beneficiary of the resentment and backlash to that decision.

Although the AfD has capitalized on Islamophobic sentiment by stigmatizing Muslim immigrants, it pivoted after 2022 to complain evenhandedly about the welcome Germany was extending to white Christians, namely those fleeing the war in Ukraine. The over one million Ukrainians living in Germany, the largest number of any European country, have access to quite generous state services—health care, rent, heating—as well as a monthly stipend. Unlike asylum-seekers, they can immediately apply for jobs. AfD supporters, particularly those in the poorer regions of former East Germany like Thuringia, are upset that those funds aren’t going to help native Germans.

As anti-immigrant sentiment became more widespread across the political spectrum in Germany, particularly among Christian Democrats, the AfD diversified. So, for instance, the party has gone big on climate change. It is now the only German party that has dug in its heels to prevent decarbonization. Over the last year, the far right has won over many German voters by painting heat pumps as overly expensive, thus sticking up for the “little guy” against allegedly expensive government efforts to abandon fossil fuels. The AfD’s support for coal mining strikes a chord in the areas of the old East Germany that were dependent on that industry.

And in Thuringia, the AfD forged political alliances to push through a measure to limit the expansion of wind power at the expense of forests and farmers. According to the AfD, “Wind turbines pose a fundamental threat to plants and animals as well as an impairment of people’s health and quality of life.” It has shown no comparable concern about the threats and impairments caused by coal, nuclear power, or oil. On environmental issues, the AfD stands apart even from the ultraconservative Christian Social Union, which backed renewable energy in its political base of Bavaria.

With its skepticism about climate change, and its critique of the neo-liberal, pro-globalization economic policies that most German parties have embraced, the far right has portrayed the political mainstream as out of touch. Ironically, when the German political scene was first disrupted in much the same way in the 1970s, it was the pro-environmental Green Party that challenged the then-consensus on fossil fuels and nuclear power. Today, the far right has stolen the mantle of anti-establishmentarianism from the left.

The good news, so far, is that the AfD is still far behind the Christian Democrats in the national polls. But especially after the results in Thuringia, the conservatives will be increasingly tempted to borrow from the AfD’s platform. The really sad news is that part of the left is doing the same thing.

The Convergence of Right and Left

It’s one thing for the AfD to win an election. It’s quite another for the party to govern. No other political party is willing to partner with the far right. Although the AfD got a lot more votes in Thuringia than the Christian Democrats or the left, it didn’t win the absolute majority necessary to form a government by itself.

As a result, the spotlight now shifts to the party that came in third in the state election, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), and its potential role as kingmaker. The BSW could break the electoral taboo and partner with the AfD. Or it could join with the conservatives and smuggle many of the AfD policies into the Thuringian government without the stigma attached to the far-right party.

That’s right: a party that considers itself “left” actually sounds more like a party situated as close to the neo-Nazis on the German political spectrum as the law allows.

Last year, Sahra Wagenknecht broke from the Left Party to create her own self-named alliance. Although she was a leader of the Left Party, she was developing political views quite at odds with her comrades. She adopted anti-immigrant positions. She was skeptical of the Left Party’s environmental agenda. And she did not support Ukraine in its war against Russia. On these issues and others (such as vaccination), Wagenknecht sounded a whole lot like the AfD. It must have been galling to her that the far right was doing so well in elections with what was essentially her platform. No surprise, then, that she jumped ship and formed her own party.

Her party received 15 percent of the vote in Thuringia, which was quite remarkable given that the BSW only debuted at the beginning of this year.

The principal position that marks the BSW as a progressive party is its focus on workers. But this should not fool Germans, who are well aware that many socialists concerned with the plight of workers joined the Nazi party (which, after all, was the party of “national socialism”). Wagenknecht’s odyssey from left to right resembles the opportunist drift of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a liberal who saw a chance to capture right-wing votes and seized it. Orbán, at least, had the good grace to stop pretending that he was a liberal. How long will it take for Wagenknecht to sever her ties to the progressive tradition?

Left Adrift

Many progressive planks, once thought daring even by some on the left, have become part of the mainstream. Respect for LGBTQ rights, environmental protection, and international law can now be found in the most mundane of places, like the statements of the World Bank and in public school textbooks. Racist and sexist comments were once routine in U.S. newspapers; now they lead to public shaming.

It’s no surprise that pushback against these victories of the left has come from the far right, which is even more upset that traditional conservatives have accepted “diversity” and “sustainability” than that these ideas have found a place in the liberal mainstream. The MAGA camp wants to drag the United States back to a time before these social movement successes. Outside the United States, figures like Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin treat these victories as examples of “Western” hegemony foisted upon their traditional, “pro-family,” religious countries.

The real surprise is how segments of the left have embraced this regressive agenda. Sahra Wagenknecht is only one particularly stark example. It can be found as well in elements of the U.S. left that have taken aim at “identity politics” as a dangerous distraction from meat-and-potatoes economic concerns. It’s also part of the strange cul-de-sac of the left that somehow believes that Russia is a progressive force in the world (along with China, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and other authoritarian regimes that have won some leftist hearts by standing up to the United States). It can even be found among progressives who criticize the necessary energy transition because they equate it solely with middle-class demands (for electric cars or heat pumps).

Is this the future of the left, either racing to the right like Sahra Wagenknecht or limping to the middle like Labor in the UK in order to win votes? The world is experiencing a dangerous uptick in authoritarianism, climate chaos, economic polarization, and expensive militarism. A progressive internationalism that is Green, democratic, and inclusive can offer a coherent response to these challenges.

Too many politicians are stuck in a status quo quagmire or are peddling some version of extremist populism. Voters eagerly await something different.

The post What the Heck’s Going on in Germany? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Feffer.

Print Share Comment Cite Upload Translate Updates

Leave a Reply Cancel reply