GERMANY HAS SEEN a far-right political party win a state legislature election for the first time since the Second World War.
Alternative für Deutschland – or Alternative for Germany (AfD) - topped the poll in the eastern state of Thuringia on Sunday, securing 32.8% of the vote.
Preliminary results also showed the party finishing in second place in Saxony with 30.6%, finishing behind mainstream conservative party Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called the result “worrying” and urged the country’s mainstream parties to avoid collaborating with the party in the eastern states.
So who are AfD and how likely are they to govern in Germany? Here’s what we know about them.
In Germany, the parliament is made up of two legislative houses: the Bundesrat, the upper house, and the Bundestag, the lower house.
The Bundestag is elected by the population in a federal election every four years.
Officially, it has 598 seats. However, this number can fluctuate, as the more votes a party wins in the Bundestag elections, the more seats it gets. It currently has 733 members.
The Bundesrat represents the sixteen Länder – or states – of Germany at a federal level.
There are no direct elections to the Bundesrat. Instead, its composition is sometimes renewed from time to time as result of elections in the 16 state parliaments.
The party was founded in 2013 by Alexander Gauland, Bernd Lucke and Konrad Adam at the height of the eurozone crisis, when opposition to a German bailout of other countries using the common currency was strong.
Mit 33,5 % stärkste Kraft in Thüringen, 31,5 % in Sachsen: Laut erster Prognose ein riesiger Erfolg für unsere #AfD! Herzlichen Dank an alle Wähler & Wahlkämpfer! pic.twitter.com/51V5M4kaLK
— AfD (@AfD) September 1, 2024
The party narrowly failed to pass the 5% threshold to enter parliament on a Eurosceptic platform in the 2013 federal election, but made gains in subsequent state elections after adopting a more anti-immigration stance.
At its party congress in 2016, amid the refugee crisis in Europe, AfD declared in its manifesto that ”Islam is not a part of Germany” and called for a ban on the call to prayer and the wearing of a full-face veil in public.
After running a campaign focused heavily on then-chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy, AfD won 12.6% of the vote in the 2017 federal election and entered the Bundestag for the first time.
However, a day after the election, its leader Frauke Petry – who had previously called for members who expressed extremist views to be excluded – declared that she would sit in the Bundestag as an independent.
AfD is now led by co-leaders Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel. It has 77 seats in the Bundestag.
AfD’s base is in the formerly communist east of the country, where anxiety over immigration is particularly strong.
“East Germany is an economically weaker part of the country, part of the deindustrialised England or the Rust Belt in the US,” said Dr Johannes Kiess, a sociologist at the University of Leipzig who specialises in political attitudes, particularly far-right extremism.
There was a lot of unemployment there in the 1990s, he said, and the wages there are significantly lower today, with younger people – particularly women – leaving the countryside to move to the more metropolitan areas of the country.
Kiess said another reason for AfD’s popularity there is that the Democratic parties have never been able to build up the same party affiliation or followership in the east of the country as they have in the west.
“We have a social democratic milieu, a Christian Catholic milieu that is aligned to the Christian Democrats, and these kinds of milieu and social structures have not been established in the last 30 years,” he said.
This feeling of being forgotten is transformed into a resentment against the political system in general and democracy, and then turned, of course, against foreigners.
“Migration is the biggest topic right now in Germany, and it’s also pushed by the Conservatives, it’s even pushed by the Social Democrats, and that also constitutes or reinforces a political climate that only helps the AfD and nobody else.”
As well as being Eurosceptic, AfD is seen as sympathetic to Russia when it comes to Ukraine. The party has called for Germany to stop sending military aid to Ukraine, with one member of the party partially blaming Nato and the US for Russia’s invasion.
One AfD politician is also being investigated for alleged connections with a pro-Russian network, while the head of Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency said the party was responsible for spreading pro-Russia propaganda.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency, has considered the AfD to be a suspected right-wing extremist organisation since 2021.
In May of this year, a German court ruled that the BfV could continue to treat the party as potentially extremist, meaning they retain the right to keep it under surveillance.
“We can see now that the party is basically infiltrated by a neo-Nazi network. It’s not only that it’s nationalistic Conservative party, ” Kiess said.
“The AfD is a new party, so it doesn’t have a real fascist tradition in that sense, but it now is influenced by the far right, neo-fascist, broader spectrum that we have in Germany.”
Both leaders and members of AfD have been embroiled in controversy since its formation.
Weeks before the 2017 election in Germany, the party’s co-leader Alexander Gauland prompted controversy by saying that “we have the right to be proud of the achievements of Germans soldiers in two world wars”.
Ahead of the European elections this year, AfD candidate Maximilian Krah told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he would “never say that anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal”, citing the writer Günter Grass as an example.
Björn Höcke, AfD’s party leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, has been behind some of its biggest controversies.
According to Kiess, he is one member “that really pushes the radicalisation of the party”.
“I would say, because of the success now in Thuringia and for the last couple of years, that he’s one of the strongest people in the party,” he said.
In 2020, Thomas Haldenwang, the head of BfV, said he judged Höcke to be a “right-wing extremist”.
The history teacher-turned-politician has advocated breaking with Germany’s culture of repentance for Nazi crimes and has echoed language associated with the Third Reich.
This includes calling for Germany to have “a thousand-year future” at a demonstration in the city of Magdeburg in 2015.
He once called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame” and called for Germany to perform a “180-degree turn” in how it remembers its past.
Höcke was the co-leader of the AfD’s radical Der Flügel, or ‘The Wing’ faction. In 2020, the party said it would dissolve Der Flugel after Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified it as extremist.
Höcke was fined twice this year after being convicted of using a slogan associated with the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing in a speech at a campaign event in May 2021.
The slogan, ‘Alles fuer Deutschland’ (Everything for Germany), was a motto of the Sturmabteilung (SA), which played a key role in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. It is illegal in Germany, along with the Nazi salute and other slogans and symbols from that era.
While AfD may have topped the poll in one of Germany’s state elections, it is unlikely that they will be able to govern there.
In Germany, a single party or parliamentary group rarely wins an absolute majority of seats at state or federal level, so elections tend to result in coalition governments.
In a post on social media today, Chancellor Scholz said the AfD is “damaging Germany”.
“It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation,” he said.
“All democratic parties are now called upon to form stable governments without right-wing extremists.”
But AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said she believes the “undemocratic firewall” was untenable given the party’s electoral success, while fellow leader Tino Chrupalla said there would be “no politics without the AfD”.
Mainstream parties have always ruled out collaboration with the far right. According to Kiess, the chances of AfD forming a coalition are “pretty low”.
“The pressure not to enter a coalition with AfD is too high, particularly with Hocke as the symbol now,” he said.
The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the only centrist party to perform strongly on Sunday, has been quick to dismiss the idea of teaming up with the AfD.
“Voters know that we do not form coalitions with the AfD,” said Carsten Linnemann, the general secretary of the conservative CDU.
The CDU only narrowly edged out the AfD with 32% of the vote in Saxony, and came second in Thuringia.
The conservatives still hold hopes of leading the next government in Thuringia, with their lead candidate Mario Voigt appealing for a “reasonable government” in a coalition led by the CDU.
Sahra Wagenknecht, who heads the far-left BSW, said her party “cannot work together” with Höcke and has long ruled out a coalition with the AfD.
BSW, formed in January year as a breakaway from the ex-communist Linke party, secured vote shares in the teens in both regional polls and is seen as a key building block in any coalition.
Kiess said it will be difficult to form any sort of coalition due to the outcome of both elections.
“At some point, AfD will try to put the coalition under pressure and put on specific legislation that might be appealing to one part of the coalition, but not the other.”
He also said having gained a third of the seats in Thuringia, the party now has the opportunity to block the nomination of two judges to Germany’s Supreme Court, with appointments expected in the next five years.
“Either these seats will be left vacant, or they will have to negotiate with the AfD.”
Germany are due to hold a general election in September next year, and AfD’s gains in two of the country’s states will cause concern for the mainstream parties.
Given that other parties have ruled out forming a coalition with them, it is unlikely at this point that AfD could form part of a federal German government.
Kiess said that how the other parties now react will impact how the elections go next year, but said that Thuringia and Saxony are traditionally “not very representative” of the wider population.
“Both states are traditionally not very social democratic, not very progressive, so it remains to be seen what happens on that,” he said.
“AfD can reach up to 20% in the national elections, I would say, but that’s significantly lower than the 30% they have now in Thuringia and Saxony.”
With reporting from © AFP 2024
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