Germany is Moving to the Right—Why Won’t the Christian Democrats?

Recent elections in two German states, Saxony and Thuringia, last Sunday have delivered a body blow to the unpopular left-wing coalition Chancellor Olaf Scholz heads. And they yielded the strongest-ever results for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), much to the alarm of the mainstream media and political establishment. Almost a third of voters opted for the AfD despite all the hysterical warnings not to fall for “proven right-wing extremists.” The people have grown tired of and immune to this kind of scaremongering and absurd parallels with the Nazis and the Second World War (as were drawn by the head of the German public broadcaster ZDF in her commentary on the elections).

In Thuringia, the right-wing populist AfD came in first; in Saxony a close second behind the Christian Democrats (CDU). One of the main concerns of their voters is the loss of control of mass immigration, the decline in public safety (highlighted by the recent stabbing in the town of Solingen, perpetrated by a ‘refugee’ from Syria who turned out to be an Islamic State activist, leaving three people dead), mixed with discontent about economic insecurity and recession, the demise of traditional industries due to high energy costs, taxes and absurd bureaucratic red tape, and a general allergic reaction to arrogant ‘woke’ elites by many citizens.

The triumph of the Right was partially mirrored by a surge in votes for the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), the new party of Sahra Wagenknecht, a former communist who now embraces an ideological mix of statist economic ideas and some moderate conservative features like a restrictive stance on immigration, albeit much softer than the hardline AfD position. Wagenknecht’s BSW got 12% and 16% of the votes, respectively, and might become kingmaker in the two states. She emerges from the ashes of her former party The Left—once the Socialist Unity Party of the East German communist regime—which is on a fatal downward trajectory towards its well-deserved political demise.

Scholz’s Social Democrats were decimated to single-digit results in the two eastern German regional elections and struggled to connect with voters. It says a lot that they were relieved when they managed to clear the 5% threshold necessary for gaining seats in the parliaments. The Greens of Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock failed to gain representation in Thuringia. The liberal FDP, also part of the federal government, imploded to a splinter party level. Scholz’s fractious coalition now looks even more devastated than before.

The “traffic light coalition”—so called after the colors of the three parties involved—is widely considered one of the worst governments in German post-war history. They are unable and unwilling to find an answer to the public’s anger about uncontrolled mass immigration, with a six-figure number of failed asylum seekers not being deported. Asylum seekers and refugees cost the taxpayer far more than €30 billion every year.

Meanwhile, Germany, once admired as the industrial powerhouse of Europe, is struggling with deep-rooted structural economic problems and is probably again in a recession this year. Germany has had the worst growth performance among the G7 countries for quite a few years. The Green agenda has increased energy prices to the highest level in Europe; energy-intensive industries like chemical and steel plants are closing down or relocating to other countries. A slowdown in exports to China is adding to the economic woes.

German voters are increasingly alarmed by the incompetence of the government—and they are shifting rightward. Almost 70% of voters in Saxony and Thuringia backed the AfD and the CDU and rebuffed the left-wing/green agenda. The seasoned satirist Harald Schmidt put it in a nutshell in a show on election night in Dessau, eastern Germany: “People are longing for a Grand Coalition,” and he added: “For a coalition between the AfD and CDU.” A joke? No. It would be the obvious answer now.

However, despite the surge of the Right, AfD is still far away from a chance to gain access to government power on the regional level, let alone on the national level. This is due to the strategy of a ‘firewall’ (Brandmauer)—the German equivalent of the cordon sanitaire—that the establishment parties have created to deny the right-wing challenger any participation in governments. Critics of mass immigration have been labeled as racists or extremists and are frequently ostracized.

Even though it appears increasingly undemocratic to put a third of the population behind a ‘firewall’ and exclude the clear election winners from the formation of a new government, the establishment and mainstream media are determined to continue the practice.

Despite Wagenknecht’s BSW in many ways being ideologically opposed to them, the CDU looks more than willing to start coalition talks with Wagenknecht’s political start-up, a cadre party that is an ideological grab bag—among their MPs are ex-communists, Kremlin apologists, and radical NATO opponents, people who only recently advocated for open borders but now give the impression that they care about the downside of mass migration, etc. While the BSW is welcomed with open arms, the political isolation of the AfD (which also has a fair share of ideological mavericks) should continue, according to the playbook of the mainstream parties. However, as the AfD gets stronger, it becomes increasingly untenable to exclude the party from participation in legislative and parliamentary processes.

The CDU has been maneuvering itself into a dilemma. Under Friedrich Merz, the party leader, it has been trying to regain conservative ground in opposition to the Scholz government. The conservative wing of the party was for over 16 years willfully abandoned under Angela Merkel, whose fatal policy of open borders for more than 1.5 million migrants in 2015-16 proved a catastrophic legacy.

But how will Merz ever deliver? The party still has a strong unreconstructed left wing of former Merkel followers (with the regional minister-presidents Daniel Günther in Schleswig-Holstein, Kai Wegner in Berlin, and Hendrik Wüst in Northrhine-Westfalia). Secondly, even if Merz becomes the party’s candidate to run for chancellor in the next national elections in September 2025, he lacks an option for a real course correction in the main policy areas: to end mass migration, reverse costly green energy measures, and stop the economic decline.

This is because the CDU has solemnly vowed never to work with the AfD and thus tied itself to coalitions with either the SPD or the Greens (and now even with ex-communists from the BSW). In the future, Germany will be ruled by either Black-Green or, most likely, Black-Red coalitions. Again, these alliances will continue to soften the CDU’s already lukewarm positions on migration. With the “firewall,” the CDU has effectively castrated itself.

The result is a permanent “popular front of the good guys,” as one commentator of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it with cautiously critical undertones. “The AfD will then even more so act as the voice of the people.” Unfortunately, it was the mainstream soft-conservative media that for years helped build this “popular front of the good guys” with their appeasement towards left-wing and green parties and their demonization of the Right. What we need is the free play of democratic forces from Left to Right without asymmetric demonization. More and more citizens are fed up with this kind of pseudo-democracy.