Right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) is riding high in the polls on a wave of voter discontent with the ruling “traffic light’ coalition—a reference to the colors of the three coalition parties: the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Greens—high levels of immigration, and the costly green agenda. Three recent polls showing that AfD ranks second at 18 or 19% support, the same as or ahead of the ruling Social Democrats (SPD). This has unsettled the political and media establishment. Some politicians have become almost frantic: “This … is a disaster and should be understood as an alarm signal for all parties of the centre,” said Norbert Röttgen, a senior lawmaker for the main opposition, Christian Democrats (CDU). Sawsan Chebli, a Berlin SPD figure, urged her followers to “wake the hell up!”
The strong showing in eastern Germany is even more noteworthy. A recent Forsa poll puts them in first place with 32% support at present. Given this large backing by disgruntled voters, the party seems on track to win three regional votes in eastern Länder (regional states) next year, making it very difficult for the establishment parties from the Left to the centre-Right to form a government without AfD. In Thuringia, the CDU has even been forced to support a coalition headed by the far-Left Linke. Ironically, they now prop-up a government of the successors of the GDR’s communist ruling party in order to keep AfD out.
Stigmatization
Yet, the CDU insists on continuing the politics of exclusion, a kind of cordon sanitaire against the Right. In Germany, the buzzword is Brandmauer (firewall). The CDU leader Friedrich Merz has solemnly promised to uphold this firewall against AfD. The right-wing party is led by Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel and was founded only ten years ago as a Euro-skeptic party by economists around a Hamburg professor Bernd Lucke. It later transformed into a popular and populist movement against mass immigration. It has undeniably attracted unpleasant extremist elements. However, despite internal tensions and external pressures, the party has not disintegrated.
From the beginning, mainstream parties underestimated the challenge, especially the CDU during the Merkel years, under whose leadership the party veered further Left. Chancellor Merkel’s decision in 2015 to allow more than a million immigrants from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa to enter unchecked into Germany boosted support for AfD. The party entered the Bundestag for the first time in 2017, securing 12% of the votes. In 2021, they were re-elected with a little more than 10%. Since then, the economic crisis, heavy inflation, and newly rising immigration pressures catapulted them to record-high support.
International media are raising the spectre of a rebirth of the Nazi movement. The Verfassungsschutz (an internal spy agency that ‘guards’ the constitution and is controlled by the interior minister,an SPD politician) has branded the AfD a ‘suspected case’ of extremism and a threat to the basic law of human rights. This is because the AfD recognizes that there exists a German ethnic people and culture that is distinguished from immigrants. Yet, even this kind of public stigmatization by an official agency has not stopped the party from gaining more and more support among citizens. The AfD rejects the verdict of the Verfassungsschutz, calling it an attempt by the establishment parties to suppress a democratic rival party. Stigmatization has become a blunt weapon.
In early June, The Institute for Human Rights, which is funded by the Bundestag and is politically aligned with the Greens, published a research brief calling for a ban of AfD as an extremist force. However, this idea was received rather coolly by most mainstream politicians for fear that it is legally impossible. Even if it were legal, there is also concern that it would be politically unwise, particularly when the party has strong support in some regions. A commentator in the liberal conservative newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, called it a “fatal idea.” Left-wing magazine Der Spiegel lamented that “no one has a strategy against the AfD,” only to advocate the old idea of a total quarantine even at the local level. The leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU), Bavarian prime minister, Markus Söder, once even proposed punishing any of his party colleagues if they drank a coffee with an AFD member.
AfD’s base
Yet despite all this, AfD continues to rise in the polls. There are several reasons for this. First, the popularity of the three-party coalition government (Social Democratic SPD, Greens, and Free Democratic Party FDP) has fallen to an all-time low. 79% of Germans are now dissatisfied with the government, according to the most recent Deutschlandtrend survey for public broadcaster ARD. Voters are particularly unhappy with the radical proposals for a ban on new gas boilers and costly replacements with heat pumps beginning in 2024, which Robert Habeck, the Green minister of economy and climate and vice chancellor, is pushing for. A nepotism scandal in Habeck’s ministry seems to have derailed the popularity of the former Green star and he’s gone from hero to zero in record time.
Two thirds of AfD supporters state that their main motivation for choosing the right-wing party is to protest; only one third say they support them out of conviction for their policies and their program. According to Deutschlandtrend, AfD’s supporters are dissatisfied with the government’s immigration policies (65%), energy and climate policies (47%), followed by economic policy (45%). Only a quarter of AfD voters care about foreign policy, which is only slightly less important than social policy. Chancellor Olaf Scholz is widely perceived as a weak political leader who has had very very little political success to speak of. It is no wonder that SPD has declined and is even overtaken by AfD, the headline of a leading article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung exclaimed.
The war in Ukraine has boosted the AfD’s fortunes, despite putting the party under internal strain. While formally acknowledging that the Russian invasion “violates international law,” many of the party’s leading figures have expressed sympathy for Moscow’s concerns with NATO expansion. A few even sound like parrots of Kremlin propaganda. AfD’s co-founder and now honorary president Alexander Gauland, a former CDU state secretary who moved to the Right, harbors some nostalgic ideas and memories about Prussian alliances with the Russian tzars two hundred years ago. However, when Gauland and party leader Chrupalla attended an event in the Russian embassy on May 9th to commemorate the victory of the Red Army over Nazi Germany, this generated a backlash in the party.
However frustrating this pro-Russian stance is for conservatives, especially in West Germany, it doesn’t seem to hurt the party in the east. On the contrary, in the former GDR, which was occupied by Russian troops for decades and received a long-term indoctrination through Soviet ‘friendship,’ there is a pro-Russian mood in some conservatives. This is also motivated by a rejection of the West’s morally degrading ‘woke’ values.
Going to the polls
In Germany, the main focus of attention will be the three regional votes next fall, in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia. The rise of AfD puts the CDU under enormous pressure. Mainstream media urge the Christian Democrats to back-up the firewall. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, in conservative weekly Junge Freiheit, editor-in-chief Dieter Stein has called for the CDU to embrace cooperation with AfD. “How long will it be possible to maintain the course of quarantine that established parties have imposed on the AfD? Or is demonization actually making the AfD stronger and stronger because citizens perceive it as deeply unfair?” he asked. At present, the CDU sees only one coalition perspective to regain power after the next federal elections, and this is with the Greens. The Greens could “pull the CDU with a nose ring through the political circus,” Stein wrote.
Indeed, all polemics aside, the CDU leadership is aligning themselves with many of the policies of the Green-liberal establishment, from their focus on climate change to the stance on diversity and the ‘modern’ family. If they dared to form a coalition with AfD in one of the three eastern states, this would cause a political earthquake. Stein thinks it could trigger a productive debate about a political realignment. Others, like conservative political scientist Werner Patzelt, are probably right to think that no CDU politician would survive the media thunderstorm that would follow a CDU-AfD pact.
However, the future is open and further developments could bring about a situation where it is almost impossible to form a regional government in eastern states without the AfD. This week, the Greens in Thuringia even proposed the idea of a four-party pact to keep them at bay. It is likely that many voters will not approve a left-wing national front to keep out a popular rival who challenges the consensus.
