In The News

AfD surge in German regional elections

The anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has created further panic within the German political establishment after historic regional election results in two eastern German states.

In Thuringia, AfD became the largest party with 32.8% and 32 seats (up from 23.4% and 22 seats five years ago). In Saxony, they finished only just behind the conservative CDU after advancing from 27.5% to 30.6% and from 38 to 40 seats.

Politics in eastern Germany is even more fragmented than previously, with many voters alienated from the Federal Republic’s mainstream parties. For many years, large numbers of Saxon and Thuringian voters backed the modern version of the old Communist Party, rebranded as the Left Party (Die Linke), and until about a decade ago the old German nationalist party NPD also polled well.

The NPD won seats in Saxony’s regional parliament in the 2004 and 2009 elections, but its decline was accelerated by the emergence of AfD. Last year the NPD renamed itself Heimat (Homeland) but has yet to revive, and had no candidates in either Saxony or Thuringia this year.

As we have previously reported, many radical nationalists abandoned NPD for the new party III. Weg (Third Way), which did not contest Saxony or Thuringia yesterday but after several years of growth will be contesting the Brandenburg regional elections later this month.

AfD began as a right-wing conservative party with quasi-Thatcherite policies, but began to take a stronger line against immigration after former Chancellor Angela Merkel shocked her countrymen by admitting a mass influx of refugees in 2015.

Paradoxically, Thuringia (which saw the greatest AfD success yesterday) hasn’t seen much immigration. Its population has declined markedly since German reunification, from 2.7 million to 2.1 million, and outside major cities its population is noticeably ageing.

This feeling of being abandoned and exploited by the federal political elite is a major factor in the success of both AfD and a new leftwing party founded by Sahra Wagenknecht, the half-Iranian former leader of the pro-Moscow faction who broke away from Die Linke to form her own party BSW.

In Thuringia BSW polled 15.8% and took 15 seats, while in Saxony they were similarly in third place with 11.8% and 15 seats.

In theory AfD and BSW combined would now have a majority in the Thuringian Parliament, but although they agree on some foreign and defence policies, the state government has no power in these areas, and in most domestic policy areas the two parties are enemies: no such coalition is on the cards.

From a racial nationalist perspective, yesterday’s results are in some ways welcome news. But we should have few illusions about AfD, which is essentially another civic nationalist system party, and some of whose leaders have corrupt links to Moscow.

The most positive aspect of all this is that Germany (like France) is moving towards irreconcilable political divisions. AfD are not the answer: but they are posing questions that can cripple Germany’s ‘democratic’ constitution, and lay the foundations for better movements in the future.

In the short term, the challenge for the establishment parties is to find some way of patching together minority governments that exclude both AfD and BSW, though it’s possible that the CDU will demonstrate their lack of principle by seeking some sort of arrangement with Wagenknecht.

(Germany’s federal constitution divides power between the central government in Berlin and various states or Länder, in a somewhat similar manner to the USA. Thuringia has a population of 2.1 million, similar to the US state of New Mexico, or slightly smaller than West Yorkshire. Saxony’s population is just over 4 million, similar to Oklahoma, or slightly less than half the size of Greater London. The Saxon capital is Dresden, the historic city devastated by Allied terror bombing in February 1945.)