An alarming Alternative for Germany

It’s overblown that Sunday’s victory in Thuringia of “brownshirts in suits” leading the AfD spells the imminent return of Nazis to power but the country’s democratic forces need to find swift answers

Thuringia, one of the five eastern German Länder, has just broken a post-1949 taboo - and smashed a civil society firewall and political cordon sanitaire - by making a Far Right party, AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), the winner of its state election on September 1.

The result, giving it almost a third of the vote (32.8%) there and over 30% (30.6%) in neighbouring Saxony, was in line with opinion polls but has shocked Germans - and their fellow Europeans even more so. Coming on top of a surge in support for France’s Rassemblement National (RN) in July, it has aroused fears of a lurch backwards into the arms of (neo-)Nazis.

These fears are overblown. In France the "New Popular Front" of the Left and Centre-left saw off the RN (though President Macron is determined to ignore this by rejecting NPF nominees for Premier) and, in the European elections of June, the democratic, liberal, centrist forces emerged as still the strongest.

In the two eastern German states there was a distinct swing, however, away from those forces, notably the Greens and Liberals; the social democrats (SPD) have never really established themselves in eastern Germany post-1989/90 - apart from in  Brandenburg, around Berlin, which votes later this month - and remain stuck in  single digits. The centre-right of the Christian Democrats (CDU) - they retained a presence under communism/the SED - held their own with around a third of the vote.

The most striking aspect of these two elections is the rise of populists of both left and right, notably of Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), the eponymous party built around the policies and personality of a former Communist (she joined the SED in 1989!) She was a leading presence in Die Linke (the Left) led by her husband Oskar Lafontaine, ex-premier of the Saarland, SPD leader and briefly federal Finance Minister, until she left in 2023 to form the BSW - a German version of La France Insoumise - early this year.

Authoritarian, utterly nationalistic and, certainly in the AfD case, racist, they bear the hallmarks of eastern Germany's distinct pre- and post-war history under, first, Nazism and, then, 40 years of Stalinism. Significant elements of both share contempt for liberal democracy and admiration for Russian-style "democracy" under Putin.

Two Germanies after all?

On the Domplatz (Cathedral Square) of Erfurt, Thuringia, almost 35 years ago (22 February 1990), I was among a crowd of some 150,000 cheering then Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) in the run-up to East Germany's first democratic elections of March that year. It was here that he promised them "blossoming landscapes" aka prosperity in the event of unification.

It was a promise many east Germans considered and some still view as broken multiple times. Unification saw the east German labour force shrink by 3.5m in a year amid widespread emigration to the west and wholesale industry closures. Since then the (west) German taxpayer has pumped over €2 trillion in the eastern economy, transforming its crumbling infrastructure but not what one essayist memorably called "die Mauer in den Köpfen" (the Wall in their heads) that commentators still find erect today. They apparently still talk of "Besserwessis" - a play on the German word for know-alls (from the west) - and of western Germans crossing the "border" to take all the top jobs. Meanwhile, the Economist points to a growing demographic decline, with the state's population, already down 25% since 1990, set to decline by a further 20% in the next 25 years or so.

Per capita GDP is below but getting closer to the EU average while unemployment, around 3.4% in Germany, is stuck above 5% but was 17% 20 years ago. Meanwhile, national output in Germany as a whole is virtually stagnant - down 0.1% in Q2 - and talk has revived of Europe's biggest economy as "the sick man of Europe." And, of course, the national soccer team is in decline...as is the car industry.

There is renewed talk, too, of "Ossifikation" or reasserting a specific east German identity rather than adopting a pan-German One after 34 years of unification. All of these factors but, most notably, xenophobia - the Ausländerfeindlichkeit I reported on from east Germany in the early 1990s and the emergence of a small but ultra-violent neo-Nazi movement today as then - hasten this sense of separatism. Immigration is very small compared with parts of the west but fear of the Other very strong - even with large-scale anti-racist demos.

Responses

Olaf Scholz, German Chancellor, has called the elections' outcome as "worrying" and "bitter", suggesting the AfD is "weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining the country's reputation." But he, like other opponents of the Far Right, have failed to voice convincing answers to its ascent - and could be forced to resign and allow early elections ahead of the 25 September 2025 schedule. Either way, Germany’s political landscape is being destabilised even further with these results.

The CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, insists his party won't enter any coalition with the AfD at state or federal level although, intriguingly, some analysts are speculating he might in the end join forces with Wagenknecht in Saxony on a combined vote of 43.7%  (just 39.4% in Thuringia). That would certainly be a first...but then desperate times and all that. European politics is entering new terrain.