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A demonstrator holds a sign reading "Hate makes you small" at a rally organized by the German Trade Union Confederation on "For Democracy and Solidarity" on Jan. 27, 2024.
A black eye for Germany’s far right
That’s one way to understand why the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, was narrowly defeated last weekend in a local election in a place it has scored wins in the past. A recent scandal involving contact between AfD leaders and officials considered neo-Nazis – conversations that reportedly centered on plans to deport immigrants, including some who have German citizenship – set off a firestorm.
Last weekend, anti-AfD protests filled the streets of some 30 German cities, and that sentiment appears to have pushed higher-than-expect turnout among anti-AfD voters for the election in the German state of Thuringia.
There will be larger elections in this region in September, and AfD may well perform much better. But last weekend’s protests and local election results, from a place considered an AfD stronghold, remind us that Europe’s anti-populist political forces are strong too.
Protesters march while carrying placards and chanting slogans in the "Feminists March Against Femicide" in Kenya.
Hard Numbers: Kenyans march against femicide, Corruption costs Ukrainian defense, Germans protest far right, Evergrande tries to avoid liquidation (again), Say more than ‘Oui’ to Paris!
14: So far this year, 14 women have been murdered as a result of gender-based violence in Kenya, and thousands took to the streets in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, on Saturday in response. Nearly a third of Kenyan women face physical violence at some point in their lives, while 13% are victims of sexual violence, according to a 2023 government report.
40 million: The country’s security service, SBU, says five employees from a Ukrainian arms company have been charged with conspiring with officials to embezzle nearly $40 million from defense coffers. The money, meant for buying mortar shells to aid the fight against Russia, has been seized and returned to the defense budget. But the incident signals how Ukraine’s battle against corruption continues.
100,000: Protests were held in 30 German cities on Saturday, with up to 100,000 people demonstrating against far-right extremism in Deutschland. The protests – coincidently held on International Holocaust Remembrance Day – were a rebuke of the anti-immigrant rhetoric peddled by the increasingly popular Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, just months ahead of three major regional elections in eastern Germany where the AfD tends to do well.
$300 billion: A court in Hong Kong ordered Chinese property development giant Evergrande to liquidate as it struggles to restructure debts to service over $300 billion in liabilities. It is unclear whether China will allow foreign investors to seize Evergrande assets, and there are fears of major ramifications for the Chinese economy as a whole.
A2-B1: If you dream of moving to Paris, you’ll need to dust off your Petit Larousse and embrace the subjunctive. While French competence was previously only required for those seeking French citizenship, a new law passed on Saturday requires anyone applying for multi-year residency to prove they understand French at the A2 level (advanced beginner). And a 10-year residency card now requires a B1 (intermediate) level of proficiency.FILE PHOTO: A placard reads, "deport AFD now", during nationwide protests against racism and plans of Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) party to deport foreigners, in Bonn, Germany, January 21, 2024.
Can Germany defund its own far-right?
Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled Tuesday that the small far-right Die Heimat party may not receive funding from the federal government because of its anti-democratic and ethno-nationalist goals. Die Heimat isn’t a big player in German politics, but the Alternative für Deutschland is. And as AfD is drawing the support of about 23% of Germans, according to recent polls, centrist parties are eyeing the same pathway to box them out financially.
The AfD has long taken anti-immigration stances, but some senior members may have put the party at risk by meeting with neo-Nazis last year to discuss plans for an extreme program to deport immigrants by the millions, including naturalized citizens. Hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets to protest, but calls to ban the party outright are likely to fail due to the high standards German courts impose on such a drastic move. Instead, the recent finding against Die Heimat is fueling calls for a similar motion against AfD, which stands to lose over $10 million in annual public funding.
It’s not all about morality, though. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government faces a bruising negotiation over the 2025 budget, with a sluggish economy necessitating major cuts. The AfD could use the cuts as a populist cudgel to hammer the incumbent coalition in elections in the states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg scheduled for September. Scholz’s government is struggling in the three eastern states — but if AfD finds itself light on funds, he might avoid the worst outcomes.Jörg Prophet, AfD candidate for mayor in Nordhausen, stands in the city center.
Hard Numbers: German far right comes up short, Ukraine dreams of drones, a space rock arrives on earth, world trade slows
54.9%: In an upset, Jörg Prophet, of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, lost a promising bid for mayor of Nordhausen the office on Sunday, as incumbent Kai Buchmann kept his job, winning 54.9% of the vote. The AfD has been polling at 21.5% nationwide, but has even more support in Thuringia, which is where Nordhausen is located.
$1 billion: Ukraine wants a drone army, and it’s looking to spend more than $1 billion to get one. Drones, Ukrainian leaders say, are great for reconnaissance, dropping bombs, and self-exploding on impact – all useful things in Kyiv’s war of defense against Russia. But what are drones not so good at? Holding territory.
6.21 billion: That’s how many kilometers (3.86 billion miles) a NASA capsule traveled to deliver the largest-ever asteroid sample to American soil. The capsule landed in a Utah desert on Sunday. Scientists hope the sample will help us better understand how the solar system formed and why life occurred on Earth.
3.2%: World trade volumes dropped 3.2% in July compared to the same month last year — the steepest decline in almost three years. High inflation is crushing demand for exports, while the resulting interest rate hikes are choking off credit, fueling fears of a global economic slowdown.
AfD holds "Future for Germany" rally in Erfurt.
Why is Germany’s far right surging?
For extremely obvious reasons, it’s always a little unsettling when the far-right is having a good moment in German politics.
That’s exactly what’s happening now as the avowedly anti-immigrant and Euroskeptic Alternative for Deutschland Party, known as AfD, is now neck-and-neck with the Social Democrats, the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The AfD, which is polling at 19% (to the SPD’s 20%), is closing in on becoming the country’s second most popular political faction. The Christian Democratic Union Party still holds the top spot at 27%.
What explains AfD’s recent upward trajectory, and what does it tell us about the state of German politics 18 months after former Chancellor Angela Merkel left the stage, ending 16 years at the helm?
AfD’s raison d'être. Founded in 2013, the group’s main shtick at the time was agitating against the European Union’s planned bailout of indebted countries after the eurozone crisis. The founders wanted to ditch the single market and bring back the German Deutschmark. (Spoiler: It didn’t happen.)
But when millions of refugees starting streaming into Germany in 2015 in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war, the AfD morphed into an anti-immigrant – and anti-Islam – party and has since called for the German constitution to gut the right to seek asylum.
Evoking outrage has been par for the course for AfD party stalwarts, and in some instances, it’s perhaps the entire point. Consider that the AfD leader of the central state of Thuringia has called for Holocaust memorials to be taken down, while former party leader Frauke Petry once said that refugees should be prevented from crossing into Germany … by using armed force.
It’s in former East Germany – where grievances about economic inequality and second-class citizenship have festered since the end of the Cold War – that AfD’s populist, ethnocentric messaging has gained the most traction.
Still, when Germans last went to the polls in Sept. 2021, AfD was polling at around 10% on average, and the far-right group is now reaping nearly double that at 19%, having seen a four-point bump over the past 12 weeks alone.
“This is not a blip, and not some sort of short-term thing,” says Jan Techau, Germany director at Eurasia Group and former speechwriter to German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. “We've seen buildup over some time, and now it seems like AfD is solidifying.”
So what explains this seismic shift?
Economic misery and the blame game. Anti-establishment parties almost always get a boost when the economy is hurting. Stubbornly high inflation over the past year – in large part due to the war in Ukraine – has provided an opening for the AfD’s populist message to resonate not only with the extremist right but also with disillusioned conservatives and those opposed to the status quo.
Indeed, although inflation has begun to ease, food prices are still up 15% year-on-year, an enormous strain for working-class Germans.
What’s more, that economic instability has coincided with a rise in asylum-seekers trying to reach the European Union this year by boat – from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa – has presented the perfect boogeyman for populists and nativists across the bloc, including in Germany.
Consider that in the first four months of this year, initial asylum applications in Germany increased by 78% compared to the same period in 2022. This is in addition to the more than 1 million Ukrainians who’ve crossed into Germany since the war began, though these migrants don’t engender the same national scorn.
While public support for arming Ukraine is at 57%, AfD’s recent rise in popularity suggests that its argument that sanctions against Russia hurt Germany’s economic interests is resonating with at least some voters.
Many AfD backers are “disenfranchised conservatives who see no other alternative because they feel the mainstream conservatives have become too liberal” and aren’t responsive to their bread-and-butter needs, Techau says.
The traffic light turns green. The German coalition government that came into office in 2021 is a varied one. The three-party coalition, the first in Germany’s modern history, includes Scholz’s SPD, the progressive, climate-conscious Greens, and the business-friendly fiscal hawks of the Free Democratic Party. The coalition is known as the “traffic light” owing to the colors of its three members.
With the Greens heading the economy portfolio, climate reform has been at the forefront of the government's domestic agenda, even more so since Russia invaded Ukraine and the EU made a collective pledge to kick its Russian natural gas habit.
Accordingly, the government has sought to slow the use of oil and gas heating systems by 2024, mandating that new heating systems are powered by at least 65% of renewable sources. The government's push to install heat pumps in homes and offices – a very expensive undertaking – has resulted in a massive pushback that the AfD has naturally used to its advantage. (AfD parliamentary leader Alice Weidel has called the government plan a “heating massacre.”)
Techau says that failure to sell this policy to voters has perhaps been the government’s biggest downfall. “When they started to legislate, they were quite ambitious and weren't able to explain it in a way that convinced people,” he says, adding that “people started to react quite negatively to this.”
Extremism abhors a power vacuum. The departure of Merkel after almost two decades at the top left a pair of sensible brogues that no successor has been able to fill. While her CDU/CSU remains the most popular, its support has certainly been slipping since 2020. As a result, some conservatives susceptible to economic populism have been lost to the AfD in recent months.
Tachau says the fact that current CDU leader Friedrich Merz is very unpopular has been a boon for AfD. “He’s not seen as a possible future chancellor, and that means that a good number of voters will go elsewhere,” he says.
This dynamic is exacerbated by the fact that Scholz’s SPD never had that much of an edge to begin with – winning just 10 more seats than the CDU in 2021. Perceptions of Scholz as unable to control infighting with his coalition over how to roll out domestic policies have only added fuel to the fire.
“The ideological leanings and the clumsy craftsmanship of Scholz's coalition, especially on migration and energy, have massively aggravated the situation,” Techau says, adding that while “they are not to be blamed alone, as much of the anger is structural and has built up over a long time, the coalition's performance over the last 18 months made the whole situation boil over.”
Could AfD really rule? All of Germany’s major political parties have committed to putting up a Brandmauer – a firewall – between them and the AfD, meaning that they have agreed not to sit with the formerly fringe group in any governing coalition. But if the far-right party gets more and more popular, could that change by the next election?
For now, Techau doesn’t think so. “In Germany, the ghosts of the past are always quite present,” he says.
However, even though the AfD could be kept out of a government by other major parties forming a broad (and unstable) coalition, that too would only feed into the AfD’s narrative of ostracization and otherness.
Indeed, such a move “would only turn into a shallow mechanism to keep them out,” Techau says. His takeaway? “No matter which way you do it, you're doing it wrong.”
What's going on with the far right in Germany?
A few days ago, despite an ongoing pandemic, nearly 40,000 people poured into the streets of Berlin to express outrage at the government's handling of the crisis. Some of them called on Putin and Trump to "liberate" the country.
Many observers have since interpreted the mass protests as a show of strength by Germany's far-right movement, particularly the populist Alternative for Germany party (AfD), the largest opposition party in the Bundestag that triumphed in the 2017 national elections. But is this really a sign of the growing prominence of the far right, or are there other dynamics at play?
Who's marching? While some AfD members have made a splash in attending the recent demonstrations, anecdotal evidence suggests that they are simply one faction of a motley crew made up of pandemic denialists, anti-vaxxers, far-right agitators, libertarians, nationalists, and affiliates of the Reichsbürger movement, which claims that the German government created after World War II is illegitimate.
While the focus of their ire includes mandatory mask-wearing and restrictions on movement, what really unites the group is mutual outrage at the political establishment that governs Germany.
Why is the AfD making noise like this right now? The AfD has been on its back foot lately, in part because of Angela Merkel's effective (and popular) leadership during the pandemic, and in part because of infighting within the AfD. Its national support fell to 9 percent this summer, down from 14 percent earlier this year.
Internal power struggles, combined with the German intelligence agency's symbolic decisions to classify part of the party as "extremist" — and place its leaders under surveillance — have caused a crisis of faith for the party, long deemed a potent political force within German politics. (Consider that nearly 50 percent of Germans polled in February said they think the AfD would form part of the government by 2030.)
Additionally, Germany has done an objectively decent job at mitigating the spread of infection compared to many other countries. As a result, most restrictions have alreadybeen lifted. Therefore, the far right's twin warning of an ongoing government crackdown on civil liberties and of a country in disarray, is failing to resonate across the political spectrum. Indeed, the AfD's overtures to populist fringe groups currently hogging the spotlight likely reflects the party's underlying anxiety about Germans' diminishing appetite for its extreme nationalist agenda.
Is any of it working? The answer is mixed. While the AfD has experienced only a marginal bump in the polls over the summer months (one percent), anti-government sentiment is having some effect on policy.
For instance, despite a rise in coronavirus cases in recent weeks that have sparked fear of a second wave of infection, Germany's health minister ruled out another nationwide lockdown, and said that the government would have done things "differently" this past spring, striking a better balance between health and safety, and personal freedoms.
But the biggest challenge is that Germans overwhelmingly support what Merkel (who is a trained scientist) is doing. Only one in 10 Germans say they oppose virus prevention measures like mask-wearing, and support for Chancellor Merkel, which waned in recent years as populist sentiment swept parts of the country, has skyrocketed to 86 percent.
What's next for Germany? Germany's federal elections are only a year away, and the race to replace Angela Merkel, the country's second-longest serving chancellor, will surely ramp up in the near term.
The German government has managed to keep COVID-19 deaths relatively low, thus allowing schools to reopen, while also pumping millions into financial aid programs. But if a second wave of coronavirus comes in the winter, and unemployment surges, the AfD may get a new opening to exploit that discontent to boost its prospects.