Germany’s firewall against the far right isn’t working

In three states, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has listed the AfD as an “extremist” organization, a reflection of concerns over its party members’ strident rhetoric on Islam and migration, their penchant for Holocaust denial, as well as links to far-right political violence. At various moments in recent months, protesters have taken to the streets of German cities in marches against the far right, denouncing the AfD while remind their countrymen of the horrors of Nazism.

The attempts at stigmatization may be impassioned and concerted, but they have not stuck. This past weekend, the AfD came first in elections in the central state of Thuringia and second in neighboring Saxony. It was the first time that far-right party won a state in the country’s postwar history.

The results were not a surprise: Both states sit in what was once Soviet-occupied East Germany — a less populated, less economically vibrant region where Germany’s far right has drawn disproportionate support in recent years — and the surging AfD was expected to do well in what are its de facto strongholds, especially against the parties that comprise the country’s increasingly unpopular ruling coalition.

In Thuringia, the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz scored just 6 percent of the vote, and their federal coalition partners in the Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats just about 2 and 1 percent, respectively. “The [ruling coalition] has lost its legitimacy,” posted Wolfgang Kubicki, deputy speaker of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, and a prominent Free Democrat politician, in the wake of the state elections. “People have the impression that the ruling coalition is harming the country. If such a significant proportion of the voters refuse to support it, this must have consequences.”

The AfD’s victory in Thuringia adds to the strain on the fraying “cordon sanitaire” set up by the German establishment to keep out the far right. In the aftermath of the vote, Scholz denounced the results and urged “all democratic parties” in the state to form a stable government “without right-wing extremists.” All other parties in the election have ruled out directly allying with the AfD, leaving the second-place center-right Christian Democrats, or CDU, who finished some ten points behind AfD in Thuringia, as the likely faction to try its hand at forging a state government.

“Our country cannot and must not get used to that,” Scholz told Reuters in an interview. “The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation.” Such rhetoric drew derision from the party in ascendance. “The voters have made a clear decision. They want the AfD to participate in the government,” AfD co-leader Alice Weidel told German broadcaster ZDF after the election, suggesting the “undemocratic firewall” erected against her party won’t last.

Tortured wrangling awaits. The AfD may not have a platform to govern, but, with a third of the votes in Thuringia (and a similar share in Saxony), they make any political arrangement complicated. Some analysts suggest they could provide external support to a feeble minority government. Or they may be content to sit in angry opposition, as unnatural coalitions involving the CDU and perhaps a new left-populist faction that also did well in Thuringia buckle under the weight of their contradictions.

Björn Höcke, the AfD’s outspoken leader in Thuringia, who has been fined twice for invoking banned Nazi slogans in his speeches this year, basked in the triumph, casting his party as the state’s “number one people’s party.” That term, “Volkspartei” in German, has long been reserved for mainstream parties like the CDU and Social Democrats. But the extremists have gone mainstream: “There is a large proportion of people who have no confidence in the ability of established politics to find solutions and have therefore deliberately opted for a negative model,” Kevin Kühnert, the Social Democrats’ secretary general, said earlier this week.

The votes for the AfD can no longer be seen purely as a reflection populist discontent. “‘Protest’ is if you vote for them once, but there are a lot of people who have voted for them the second or even the third time,” said Andrea Römmele, dean of executive education at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, to my colleagues. “Some of the reasons why people vote for the AfD is, indeed, because they are dissatisfied with the national coalition. But what the numbers also show is that for people in these states migration and security are the most important issues, and they see the AfD as the most competent party to solve these issues.”

The AfD’s anti-migrant rhetoric has struck a chord and is bending German politics in its direction. “The AfD is entrenching itself at local level, and post-election surveys found that a growing number of voters were persuaded by its populist anti-immigrant message, rather than plumping for it out of protest,” explained the Economist. “Meanwhile, many CDU foot-soldiers in the east long to cozy up to the AfD. At municipal level across much of east Germany the firewall has long expired.”

The developments show the limits of Germany’s statist efforts to stamp out far-right extremism and ultranationalism. “We’ve always known through surveys that … far-right thought never disappeared in Germany,” Miro Dittrich, co-managing director of the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, told my colleagues. “But in the recent past, they didn’t really have a party they could vote for. They didn’t have a political platform. That’s changed with the AfD.”

Höcke has mocked the “dumb firewall” thwarting his immediate prospects for power. In an interview with a public television journalist on the night of the election, he took umbrage with being saddled with the tag of an “extremist.”

“Please stop stigmatizing me,” Höcke said, as Politico reported. “We are the number one people’s party in Thuringia. You don’t want to classify one-third of Thuringian voters as right-wing extremists, do you?”