A massive political earthquake jolted Germany as the final results of its federal election on February 23 poured in.
The tremors are still being felt.
For the first time since the Nazi era, that 12-year interregnum during which Germany persecuted its Jewish minority and launched a genocidal murder campaign on a European scale, the unthinkable occurred.
An extreme right-wing party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), doubled its share of the vote from the last election four years ago and finished in second place, sending shock waves across the country.
This could be an inflection point in Germany, which is still coping with the atrocities perpetrated by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich between 1933 and 1945.
As one observer noted, Germany has been reborn three times since the demise of the Nazi regime.
The first chapter was written in 1949 with the formation of the democratic Federal Republic. The second was the reunification of Germany in 1990, when capitalistic West Germany absorbed communist East Germany into a single state. The most recent federal election may well be the third time Germany has been reborn.
The AfD’s comparative success is a sign of the times, with far-right European parties having exploited popular anxieties over migration, the economy and cultural identity to achieve stunning breakthroughs.
Due to a political “firewall” established by major German politicians, hard right parties like AfD are routinely shut out of coalition governments. The AfD, therefore, will not be in Germany’s next government, which will be headed by the Christian Democratic Union’s Friedrich Merz. Nonetheless, the AfD has morphed into Germany’s biggest opposition party, with all its attendant implications and consequences.
Alice Weidel, the AfD’s co-leader, denigrated Merz’s victory, saying it would be “pyrrhic” if he allied himself with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) or the Greens rather than her own party. Looking ahead, she predicted that Merz’s “unstable” government “will not last the next four years.”
Whatever happens in the future, no one can deny that the AfD is a force to be reckoned with today.
Prior to the election, public opinion surveys indicated that it was on a roll, and in last year’s European Union and German state elections, it performed relatively well.
Nevertheless, mainstream politicians who had demonized it as a closet neo-Nazi party were dismayed by the outcome of this election.
It was the first time since the foundation of postwar Germany in 1949 that a party outside the orbit of the right-of-center Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (its sister party), and the left-of-center SPD had ever placed second.
In winning the support of 20.8 percent of the electorate, the AfD, a party formed 12 years ago, cast Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD into third place (16.4 percent) and saddled him with the dubious distinction of being the first German leader in the past five decades not to have been reelected.
Scholz’s coalition, consisting of the SPD, the Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP), collapsed in November over a budget dispute, forcing last week’s election.
The CDU finished first, garnering the allegiance of 28.6 percent of voters. This will allow Merz to succeed Scholz once he has formed a coalition with the SPD. Scholz has excluded himself from this arrangement, having announced he does not seek a ministerial role in it.
Two parties, the liberal FDP and the leftist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), fell short of the five percent threshold required to make it into the Bundestag. This means that about a tenth of the electorate will be unrepresented in parliament.
Although the AfD is neither antisemitic nor anti-Israel, Jews in Germany are concerned by its rise to prominence.
Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told Die Welt newspaper: “It must concern us all that a fifth of German voters are giving their vote to a party that is at least partly right-wing extremist, that openly seeks linguistic and ideological links to right-wing radicalism and neo-Nazism, that plays on people’s fears.”
Objectively speaking, the AfD raises grave concerns.
Parts of it are under government surveillance. Björn Hocke, the AfD leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, was fined by a court for having used the banned Nazi expression Alles für Deutschland (“Everything for Germany”). Hocke, too, described the Holocaust memorial in central Berlin as a “wall of shame.”
One of his colleagues, in 2018, likened the Nazi period to bird droppings. As Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader, said, “Hitler and the Nazis are just bird poo in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”
His comment caused an uproar.
The general secretary of the CDU), Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer Karrenbauer, tweeted, “50 million war victims, the Holocaust and total war are just ‘bird poo’ for the AfD and Gauland! That’s what the party really looks like behind its mask of respectability.”
Germany’s president, Frank Walter Steinmeier, warned, “Whoever today denies that unique break with civilization or plays it down not only ridicules the millions of victims, but also consciously wants to rip open old wounds and sow new hatred.”
That controversy notwithstanding, the issue that the AfD has capitalized on, particularly in eastern Germany, is migration.
In 2015, Angela Merkel, the then chancellor, permitted more than one million Muslim migrants from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to enter the country. Their assimilation into German society has been difficult, say observers.
Much to the anger of many Germans, a few of these refugees have lately committed a succession of murders. In August, a Syrian stabbed three people to death in Solingen. In December, six were killed and hundreds injured when a Saudi-born doctor drove his car through a Christmas market in Magdeburg. In January, a two-year-old baby was fatally stabbed by an Afghan in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg. On the eve of this election, a Syrian stabbed a Spanish tourist in the neck at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, saying his intention was to kill Jews.
These events strengthened the AfD, which bluntly opposes Muslim immigration on a vast scale.
Shortly after the Aschaffenburg incident, Merz, in a bid to shore up support, advanced two resolutions and one piece of legislation to toughen migration laws. He carelessly said he did not care which parties endorsed his proposals, leading rivals to accuse him of implictly courting the AfD, an accusation he stoutly denied.
The AfD’s hardline position on migration struck a chord among voters in the east, with only 42 percent casting their ballots for traditional West German parties. The remainder voted for the AfD and Die Linke, a left-wing party which picked up 8.8 percent of the vote.
In last June’s European Union election, the AfD won 15.9 percent of the votes, becoming Germany’s biggest party after the CDU. And in elections in three eastern states last September, the AfD won 29.2 percent, 30.6 percent and 32.8 percent of the votes in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia, just behind the SPD and the CDU.
By all accounts, the AfD appealed, in particular, to 18-24-year-olds, possibly because it had tapped into social media platforms — TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and YouTube — favored by the young.
According to one observer, conservative and nationalistic eastern Germans are often recruited from among the children or grandchildren of easterners who were disillusioned by reunification in 1990. As he put it, “There was an increased sense of betrayal and economic abandonment, a rejection of politics and, for some youth, an embrace of neo-Nazi nihilism (expressed in the racist riots of Hoyerswerda and Rostock in 1991-92).”
Judging by official figures, 54 percent of East Germans still feel like second-class citizens, providing fertile ground for the AfD to grow still stronger. Yet youth radicalization has also affected western Germany, much to the AfD’s advantage.
It seems clear that the AfD has become a major vehicle for the expression of discontent in Germany.