Within a fortnight in September, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won a 43.8 percent relative majority in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt; Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) dropped out of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern parliament after failing the reach the 5 percent threshold; and the far-left party Die Linke came first in Berlin with 25.7 percent.
Four pieces in the October issue of Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik try to make sense of this turning point in German politics.
On the brink of hegemony
Blätter editor Albrecht von Lucke begins in 2020, when AfD votes in the Thuringian parliament led to the election of an FDP Minister President and indirectly to the resignation of the CDU chairwoman in Berlin. Now the AfD's candidate in Saxony Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, has almost done the same to Merz – and a far-right party could take power in a German state for the first time since 1945.
Germany, von Lucke suggests, is catching up with a European story: the collapse of postwar Christian Democracy and the rise of a radical right built around personalities, from Berlusconi and Haider, to Wilders and Weidel. Marine Le Pen could complete the pattern in France next April.
By scandalously insisting that arms manufacturing is needed not for national defence but for future ‘remigration and deportation offensives', Ulrich Siegmund seems intent on scuppering a coalition with the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), the only party willing to enter talks. Siegmund's aim is thus to force fresh elections and to win an absolute majority. The AfD's idea of democracy, von Lucke writes, is ‘voting until it fits, governing without any willingness to compromise'.
Nor, von Lucke notes, does the party have a plan. Its programmes offer no answer to the question every government faces: how to secure peace, shared prosperity and social security in an increasingly harsh world. Until now, nostalgia for what the party refers to as ‘safe old Germany' has sufficed; but victory forces it to define what that means.
Staying put in Saxony-Anhalt
On Magdeburg's cathedral square, the exit poll was met with silence, writes David Begrich. Protesters were exhausted after months of campaigning. Begrich, who monitors the far right for the Magdeburg association, Miteinander, fears normalization. Commentators quickly asked whom the AfD might govern with, rather than addressing what its manifesto promises: ‘remigration', Holocaust remembrance struck from textbooks, funding cuts for civil society and the arts.
Saxony-Anhalt, Begrich warns, is becoming the AfD's laboratory. The party sold a feeling rather than solutions: a return to a world that seems clear and controllable. In villages that have lost their pub, shop and pharmacy, it turned up with beer, bouncy castles and convoys of East German Simson mopeds – an ‘eventization of politics' that made the AfD look more like a movement than a party.
Democrats, Begrich urges, must defend what remains of democratic culture outside the big cities: a thin network of associations and cultural venues that depends on grants the AfD has vowed to cut. Democracy, he writes, is ‘staying put when things get difficult', recalling the old GDR civil rights slogan: Wir bleiben hier (‘We are staying here').
Culture policy back to the '30s
What would the AfD do with power? Ruth Hoffmann looks at culture and schools, where state governments can act fast. The party's culture spokesman, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, told the Magdeburg parliament that ‘culture in Saxony-Anhalt is German culture, and cultural policy must reflect that'. He has since been elected one of the parliament's vice presidents.
Hoffmann's parallel is Thuringia in 1930, when the Nazis, on 11.3 percent, agreed to enter a conservative coalition on the condition they controlled the interior and education ministries. As NS minister, Wilhelm Frick purged museums of art he deemed un-German, banned the teaching of Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front, and closed the Bauhaus in Weimar.
While parallels need care, the AfD's manifesto is unsettling, Hoffmann writes: raising children to love the homeland; limiting arts funding to that serving ‘German identity'; dismissing the Bauhaus in Dessau as ‘a mistake of modernity'; dropping the Nazi era from the history curriculum; ending antiracism programmes and inclusive education for children with disabilities.
Siegmund himself described his method at a secret Potsdam meeting in 2023: win sympathy as an ordinary guy and slip the radical content in last. The party shamelessly reinterprets history and appropriates the legacy of the Scholl siblings, the 1848 revolutionaries and even Willy Brandt. But other parties' preoccupation with migration has made far-right ideas respectable. The political firewall may not hold, Hoffmann concludes; civil society must close ranks.
Merz's leadership fetish
In 2018, Friedrich Merz promised to halve support for the AfD and lift the CDU back to 40 percent nationally. But in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD's vote more than doubled while the CDU's, at 17.2 percent, more than halved.
For political scientist Markus Linden, the chancellor himself is part of the problem. Linden blames a leadership style he calls ‘plebiscitary Caesarism': top-down command – the word ‘leadership' appearing ten times in one 2022 speech – instead of the grassroots citizens' party (Volkspartei) Merz had promised.
Helmut Kohl was ‘exactly what Friedrich Merz would like to be, a power machine'. Yet Kohl stayed in personal touch with the party down to local level and kept rivals inside the tent. After Kohl's general secretary Norbert Blüm, figurehead of the party's social wing, plotted against him in 1989, he kept him on as labour minister for sixteen years.
Merz has no comparable social voice in his cabinet. He pushed out his transport minister, Patrick Schnieder, without explanation, though earlier this year Schnieder's brother Gordon won Rhineland-Palatinate for the CDU after thirty-five years of SPD rule – by campaigning on education, as Kohl once did.
Linden's remedy: hold the line against any cooperation with the far right, even at the price of defections, and anchor the CDU in enlightened, integrative Christian conservatism.
Review by Cadenza Academic Translations
