Historic win for anti-immigration party AfD
Posted by admin978 on June 28, 2023 · Leave a Comment
The anti-immigration German civic nationalist party ‘Alternative for Germany’ (Alternative für Deutschland – AfD) took control of a town council for the first time on Sunday when AfD candidate Robert Sesselmann was elected ‘district administrator’ of Sonneberg, a town of just over 20,000 inhabitants in Thuringia.
Sonneberg is in the east of today’s Federal Republic, though in the centre of traditional Germany.
AfD was founded as a right-wing Conservative party espousing what British voters would call ‘Thatcherite’ economic policies, but has steadily moved to the right and is now mainly identified with a strong anti-immigration stance. The Thuringian region of AfD is seen as especially right-wing and controlled by the party’s so-called Flügel or ‘wing’ led by Björn Höcke, who has made controversial remarks on racial and historical topics.
The party was greatly boosted by Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than a million extra immigrants and ‘asylum seekers’ in 2016 – a policy which alienated many traditional conservative voters who had once backed Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party CSU.
After losing its focus and slipping in the polls during the pandemic, AfD has greatly revived during the past 18 months due to economic problems that are felt especially keenly in regions such as Thuringia that were part of the old East Germany.
Voters in such areas are often nostalgic for aspects of communist rule, without being ‘left-wing’ in the usual sense of that term.
And partly for reasons discussed in a broader context by Ian Freeman in the forthcoming issue 115 of H&D, hard-pressed voters in such areas believe that environmentalist policies pushed by the German Green Party (who are coalition partners with liberals and socialists in the present federal government) are an ill-considered luxury that the country can ill-afford right now.
Foreign and defence policy has little relevance to a local election in a small town, so the controversial pro-Moscow stance taken by some AfD leaders is unlikely to have had a decisive influence on Sonneberg’s voters.
This latter AfD policy is utterly rejected both by the right-wing of CDU and CSU (who sympathised with AfD on immigration) and by the racial nationalist party III Weg (which regards Putinism as a betrayal of Germany’s and Europe’s fundamental interests, and strongly supports Ukraine’s defiance of the Kremlin).
Nevertheless, AfD’s latest electoral success has alarmed the liberal-left establishment and might be a sign that increasing numbers of German voters are no longer afraid to assert their national identity and turn back the immigration tide.
