German politics will be dealt a major blow in Sunday’s election. It will be the first time in the country’s post-war history that an openly nationalist, xenophobic, revisionist and anti-European political force will sit in the national assembly.
Projected to land in the low double digits, the Alternative for Germany’s share of the vote may appear modest compared to the reach of like-minded parties elsewhere in Europe. The fact that the party stands no chance of joining a governing coalition may reassure Germany’s neighbors. But for a majority of Germans who reject extremism, none of this is much consolation.
They sense that the AfD’s surge is more serious than the occasional radical right-wing flare-ups the country has witnessed in the past. They intuit that the result will irreversibly alter the political landscape as they know it. And their anxiety is all too justified.
This isn’t the first time the far right has seen a spike in support since World War II, but it will be the first time it establishes itself as a national presence in the Bundestag — with the funding, influence and visibility that comes with it.
The AfD is clearly set to become a fixture of German politics. And there are reasons to believe it will only get stronger.
The AfD benefited from a shift in German politics. Once dominated by two catch-all parties to the left and right of center, the landscape was transformed by the rise of smaller parties. The arrival of the Greens and the far-left Die Linke party fragmented the territory once held by the Social Democrats (SPD). Meanwhile, the Christian Democrats, under Chancellor Angela Merkel in particular, consolidated their base by moving to the middle. The shift opened a gap to the conservatives’ hard right.
But the AfD also draws on a pre-existing far-right movement, whose reach it has already far surpassed. Former Nazi party members attempted to reenter the political arena in the founding days of the Federal Republic and established the Socialist Reich Party in 1949. But the group was short-lived and soon outlawed, its Nazi ideology at odds with an overwhelming desire to leave the past behind and to focus on economic recovery.
It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that the far right reared its head again. Formerly splintered groups of extremists formed the National Democratic Party (NPD), which sought broader acceptance among voters by posing as the moderate, democratic voice of national conservatism.
This veneer, combined with an economic crisis and a grand coalition of Christian and Social Democrats, catapulted the NPD into the parliaments of seven West German states. When it narrowly failed to enter the Bundestag in 1969, the party descended into infighting and lost its political appeal.
Delegates hold on their voting cards during the party congress of Germany’s right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) | Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images
The 1980s saw the two subsequent incarnations of the German far right: the German People’s Union (DVU), which started as a nationalist reading club and morphed into a political party, and Die Republikaner (REP), which modeled itself after France’s right-wing National Front. Both, along with the earlier NPD, found their core audience by fomenting fears over immigration.
Successive waves of guest workers and refugees brought unprecedented cultural diversity to Germany, and the country struggled to acknowledge its new status as a country of immigrants. The far right successfully exploited those anxieties and, thanks in part to coordination between the small parties, entered several state assemblies.
German reunification in 1990 gave the far right’s expanding political presence another boost. East Germans had not been exposed to much diversity — they lived in a mono-cultural environment. The communist system discouraged all social debate, and instead imposed a rigid ideological framework that claimed to answer all questions. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, this seeming certainty vanished, diversity and differences of opinion came to the fore. This, along with a complete lack of historical reflection about the country’s role in the first half of the 20th century and the costs of transition, rendered many East Germans vulnerable to the rhetoric of right-wing extremists, who addressed the community’s difficulties in a way that mainstream parties didn’t.
As their political fortunes began to ebb in the West, the far right established a permanent presence in the East, securing seats in at least one state parliament every year since 1998. The movement became more radical in its positions and better-organized thanks to the merging of the DVU and NPD parties. It also adopted concrete social and foreign policy agendas.
The AfD’s entry into the Bundestag marks an epochal step forward for the far right. It’s one that few could have anticipated four years ago, when a group of economists established the party to demand an end to the eurozone — a promise that nearly led the AfD to success in the 2013 federal election.
Emboldened, the party formulated a fuller national conservative program that catapulted it into the European Parliament and landed it double-digit votes in three East German states. When large-scale anti-immigration protests erupted there in late 2014, AfD leaders seized the opportunity to pose as the natural allies of voters disenchanted with the political center. Within months, the party effectively transformed itself into a nationalist and populist force.
During the refugee crisis in 2015, which inflamed anxieties over national identity, the party saw another opening and staked its ground with increasingly radical rhetoric. With seats in 13 of 16 state assemblies and a number of municipal ones, the AfD has become the most successful far-right party in post-war Germany.
These are levels of funding, influence and visibility of which earlier far-right radicals could only dream.
Now that it is poised to enter the capital, the AfD is clearly set to become a fixture of German politics. And there are reasons to believe it will only get stronger.
In contrast to previous far-right projects, the AfD’s constituency sees itself as part of a greater nativist movement that is driving an epochal turn against the evils of globalization, migration and liberalism. Comparative latecomers among the illiberals, the AfD’s self-perception is nevertheless buoyed by cooperation with like-minded forces from Washington to Vienna to Moscow.
The party’s successes have also provided the AfD with unprecedented public resources. At the state level, taxpayer euros already cover much of the party’s expanding organizational infrastructure and activities. Once it reaches national representation, its campaign expenses will be partly refunded, and the party will be entitled to dozens of offices and hundreds of staffers.
AfD parliamentarians will join the boards of public institutions, from broadcasting councils to state banks to educational institutes. Analytical resources and government data will be at their disposal, and support will be provided for their media outreach. These are levels of funding, influence and visibility of which earlier far-right radicals could only dream.
Chances are the AfD is here to stay. And if its vicious campaigning ahead of Sunday’s election is anything to go by, German democracy is about to face its biggest stress test ever.
Joerg Forbrig is senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Berlin.