Earlier this month, the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) threw an Election Night victory celebration at a restaurant in Erfurt, the capital of the state of Thuringia. It was a distinctly private affair. The Party had pre\u00ebmptively barred some news organizations from attending, which prompted a court challenge. Despite a ruling that the organizations must be allowed in, the AfD, citing space concerns, extended the ban to all media. So the TV crews were out in front, under the glower of security guards. A large police presence kept everyone else even further off\u2014hundreds of protesters were gathered near the state legislative building, more than half a kilometre away. \u201cHaven\u2019t we learned our history? Didn\u2019t we always say, \u2018Never again\u2019?\u201d a member of Omas gegen Rechts (Grannies Against the Right), a nationwide anti-AfD group, demanded. \u201cWell, \u2018Never again\u2019 is now.\u201d<\/p>\n
After a while, Stephan Brandner emerged from the restaurant. Brandner represents Thuringia in the Bundestag, the national parliament, and is one of the Party\u2019s three deputy federal spokespeople. He is suited to the role of unthreatening front man: with his rimless glasses, blue blazer, baggy jeans, and affable manner, he could have been at a 2004 fund-raiser for George W. Bush in Charlotte. Only his small lapel pin signalled where we were: \u201cDer Osten Machts!\u201d (\u201cThe East Does It!\u201d)<\/p>\n
On this day, the east had in fact done it. In one interview after another, Brandner crowed about the Party\u2019s showing. In Thuringia, it had received roughly a third of the vote\u2014the first time it had scored the highest tally in a state election. In the neighboring state of Saxony, it had done nearly as well, getting about thirty per cent for a close second to the center-right Christian Democratic Union. (The AfD has historically had a stronger base in the eastern regions of the country than in the west, but never before at this level.) These results, Brandner declared, represented a rebuke to the years-long effort to cast the Party as part of a radical fringe, to the fire wall maintained by other parties to keep it out of governing coalitions, to the determination by the state security agency that the Party\u2019s branches in Thuringia and Saxony were so extreme as to require surveillance. \u201cThis fable of \u2018right-wing extremist,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Brandner said, \u201cmany in Thuringia saw right through that.\u201d He went on, \u201cWe are the democratic party and the democratic force in Thuringia.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was not hard to imagine the headlines that were, by this point, already caroming across the world, charged with dark historical association: a far-right party triumphs, again, in Germany. The AfD, born in 2013 in opposition to the country\u2019s bailouts of fellow European Union members after the financial crisis, had quickly evolved to focus on resisting the migrant surge that began nearly a decade ago, with frequently nationalistic and racist overtones. The Party\u2019s victory arrived \u201con the 85th anniversary of Nazi Germany\u2019s invasion of Poland,\u201d a columnist wrote in the Financial Times.<\/p>\n
But I had spent enough days in Thuringia prior to the election, and enough time in Saxony several years earlier, that I knew the story was more complicated. What has been happening in Germany\u2014especially in the states of former East Germany, but also elsewhere\u2014is a wholesale institutional fracturing accelerated by the stresses of recent years: the COVID pandemic, the continued influx of migrants and refugees, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
When I was last reporting in Germany<\/a>, in late 2021, it seemed that the country might just be able to handle the first two of these stressors. A new government came to power that fall, with Olaf Scholz, of the center-left Social Democrats, installed as Chancellor in coalition with the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats. There were happy photos of the \u201ctraffic light\u201d triumvirate<\/a>, so named for their party colors, and talk of an economic miracle to blossom from ambitious plans for a renewable-energy transition.<\/p>\n Then came the war in Ukraine, and the resulting spike in energy prices and military spending, and today that coalition is stumbling badly toward next year\u2019s federal elections amid a prevailing sense of national brokenness. The trains are late<\/a>, manufacturers are shuttering plants<\/a>, the kids aren\u2019t learning<\/a>, doctors are leaving the profession<\/a>. There is talk of broader demoralization, a \u201cquiet quitting\u201d of sorts\u2014Germans, once so proud of their work ethic, now put in fewer hours<\/a> on average than their counterparts in most other wealthy nations.<\/p>\n The recent elections laid bare just how dire things are now for the traffic-light coalition: in Thuringia, both the Free Democrats and the Greens failed to make the five-per-cent threshold needed to obtain any seats at all; the Social Democrats barely squeaked in. In other words, in a state of slightly more than two million people, in the geographic heart of the country, the three governing parties will barely exist.<\/p>\n The old order is crumbling, and the AfD is not the only beneficiary. As telling as its triumph was the bravura d\u00e9but of a party founded by Sahra Wagenknecht, a longtime leftist and former Communist who abandoned her comrades to offer a new, potent mix of policies from across the traditional political spectrum: demands for economic justice alongside anti-woke jibes and calls for migrant limits and peace negotiations with Russia.<\/p>\n The dynamic was reminiscent of what I had observed while reporting<\/a> on the rise of Donald Trump<\/a> in the American Midwest in 2016\u2014above all, the disconnect between voters in left-behind places and the highly educated winners of the metropolis. What sets the situation in Germany apart, in addition to the dark historical context, is the multiplicity and transparency of the rupture. In the U.S., the growing regional disconnect has been flattened under the weight of Trump\u2019s cult of personality, obscuring the realignment under way in both major parties. But, in a multiparty parliamentary system like Germany\u2019s, the rifts and tensions are easier to discern. They are out in the open, striations of a Western democracy under strain.<\/p>\n In Thuringia, Germany\u2019s contradictions are especially dense. It is the region where Martin Luther<\/a> translated the New Testament into German in his refuge at the castle of Wartburg; it was home to Goethe<\/a>, Schiller, and the astonishing Romantic cluster in Jena<\/a>\u2014Schlegel, Schelling, and Fichte, among others. On the hills above Goethe\u2019s Weimer sits the Buchenwald concentration camp; in Erfurt, Topf & Sons manufactured ovens and gas-chamber-ventilation systems for the death camps. Also in Erfurt, in December, 1989, some brave citizens were the first in East Germany to demand that the Stasi<\/a> stop destroying its files.<\/p>\n Today, Thuringia is also home to one of the most notorious figures in the AfD, Bj\u00f6rn H\u00f6cke, who leads the Party in the state legislature and has lately been in court to fight charges, which he denies, of having deliberately used a Nazi slogan, \u201cAlles f\u00fcr Deutschland.\u201d In a party in which some leaders come across as conventional and technocratic, H\u00f6cke, a history teacher by training, stands out for his willingness to flirt with the sort of nationalistic rhetoric and charismatic style that set off alarm bells in Germany.<\/p>\n Four days before the election, I arrived in Zella-Mehlis, a town of less than fifteen thousand people in the hills, an hour south of Erfurt, in hopes of catching Thomas Luhn, an AfD candidate who was campaigning there. I found him awkwardly posing for a photographer, who had Luhn, a balding, melancholy-looking fifty-six-year-old, standing in profile in front of an AfD backdrop. \u201cGive us something forward-looking!\u201d the photographer coaxed.<\/p>\n Luhn urged me to take a copy of the state party program, which was more than a hundred and forty pages long, and ranged far beyond migrant restrictions to include proposals on bringing down energy costs, balanced budgets, protection of the Thuringian landscape, and promotion of \u201cclose-to-home tourism.\u201d Luhn insisted, \u201cWe are a party of the right, not an extreme-right party.\u201d He wished that the state legislature could function like the town government in nearby Suhl, which he is part of, and where Christian Democrats and AfD members co\u00f6perate on local issues, such as social services and economic development. \u201cWorking together like that\u2014that should be a requirement,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n I asked him about the story that had been dominating the news, the arrest of a twenty-six-year-old Syrian man in the aftermath of a knife rampage that killed three and injured eight in the western city of Solingen, on August 23rd. He demurred, saying that he didn\u2019t want to be seen as capitalizing on a tragedy. (In contrast, the Party\u2019s national co-leader, Alice Weidel, had called for an immediate ban for at least five years on immigration and naturalization after the attack.) I came at the subject another way: What did he make of the argument that Germany, and especially the underpopulated east, should welcome new arrivals to make up for labor shortages? (Six million people migrated<\/a> to Germany between 2013 and 2022; nearly one in five inhabitants is now foreign-born, a higher share than in the U.S.)<\/p>\n This, he contested with alacrity. \u201cWe need people to come here, sure, but the government mixes asylum and skilled immigration in one pot,\u201d he said. \u201cThey let people in blindly, people who claim asylum to get across the border, and then they call this \u2018skilled labor.\u2019\u00a0\u201d He went on, \u201cI\u2019ve been in Arab countries often, and I had to follow the laws and protocols, and when people come here they must do the same. Everyone who breaks the law has lost his right to be here.\u201d Left unstated was that the eastern states where the AfD is strongest also have far lower rates of immigration than almost anywhere else in the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this month, the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) threw an Election Night victory celebration at a restaurant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331121,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[1816,33,2000,299,1105,1824,285,118935],"class_list":{"0":"post-331120","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-elections","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-far-right","13":"tag-germany","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-rallies"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115000073674788964","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}