© REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

Are today’s right-wing populists in Germany using the same language as Adolf Hitler? An interesting journalistic experiment with Björn Höcke, leader of the most radical faction within the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), certainly suggests so.

Höcke, 47, was a history teacher before entering politics and turning into the AfD’s far-right star. He is an intelligent, well-educated man who knows what he is doing when he speaks about the “thousand-year Germany” and calls the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a “memorial of shame.”

More moderate AfD leaders—who have since left the party—have tried in vain to get Höcke expelled from the AfD for his revisionist, racist views and his closeness to neo-Nazi groupings. Instead, it is the party that has become more radical, particularly in eastern Germany, where it is most successful.

In regional elections on September 1, the AfD received 27.5 percent of the vote in Saxony and 23.5 percent in Brandenburg. Another strong showing is expected when Thuringia goes to the polls on October 27. Under Höcke’s leadership, the state’s AfD can expect up to 25 percent of the vote—a result that would certainly accelerate the radicalization of the party as a whole.

An Unusual Interview

Against this backdrop, Germany’s ZDF television received a lot of attention with an unusual interview with Höcke. To prepare for it, the reporter took two quotes from Höcke’s book Nie zweimal in denselben Fluss (“Never twice in the same river”) and showed them to AfD deputies in the Bundestag. These were then asked on camera to judge whether the quote originated with Höcke or with Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

“A few corrections and small reforms won’t be enough, but the German absoluteness will guarantee that we will tackle the matter thoroughly and fundamentally,” the first quote said. “Once the turning point has come, we Germans will not stop half-way, and then the mounds of debris of modernity will be eliminated.”

Most of Höcke’s fellow AfD members started laughing when asked about the origins of the quote. Not one of them could answer. “No, I am not going to commit myself,” said Jens Maier, a leading far-right figure from Dresden. “But if I did, I would rather say from Mein Kampf but not from Mr. Höcke.”

Höcke’s second quote did not fare any better. “The longing of the Germans for a historical figure, who will once again heal the wounds of the people, overcome the strife, and put things in order is deeply rooted in our soul.”

So was it Hitler or Höcke? “I don’t know,” answered one AfD deputy. “I can’t answer that,” a second one said. The third interviewee took a bit longer. “I won’t be able to answer that question, because I did not read Mein Kampf, and whether it’s from Höcke, I don’t know.”

Interestingly, not one of the AfD politicians took offense at being asked to compare a 20^th century dictator responsible for murdering millions of Jews and starting World War II with their fellow party member. Nor did any of them think to warn Höcke about the ZDF journalist’s line of enquiry.

“Too Poetic Sometimes”?

When confronted with these answers, Höcke was clearly surprised. As the reporter showed him his fellow party members on a tablet, he gave a cautious smile. A pity that they didn’t read his book, he said. “I think it’s good that we have politicians again, who have the courage to express themselves in an original way and use a language that sometimes is too poetic,” Höcke added. “This must be possible.”

The interview with Höcke continues for several minutes more. The reporter points to occasions when Höcke has used Nazi terminology like “Lebensraum” or “degenerate,” while Höcke denies there is even such a thing as Nazi speak.

Finally, Höcke’s press spokesman intervenes. He explains that Höcke was not expecting any such questions and has answered in an “overemotional” way. He then asks the reporter to repeat the interview. The ZDF journalist refuses, however, and publishes the original version despite Höcke’s threats of “massive consequences.”

A Political Paradox

So what are the lessons from this interview? The first one is an insight into how far the AfD, a party founded as a conservative, euroskeptic movement, has moved toward the far-right. Höcke’s Facebook account shows his supporters firmly behind him (“Great guy, did everything right”). Not a murmur, either, from the national leadership of the party in Berlin.

Yet—and here’s the second lesson—what plays well in eastern Germany may not work for the western part of the country. Here, polls show the AfD stagnating at around 12 percent, only half of what it scores in the east. And even among those 12 percent, the share of Höcke supporters is far smaller.

The result is a political paradox: with its astonishing success in the east, the AfD may be risking its ambitions at the national level. Easterners may be more radical, but western Germans have the numbers.

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© REUTERS/Matthias Rietschel

Michael Kretschmer is the day’s hero. Deeply exhausted, Saxony’s state premier blinks under the harsh light of the television cameras. “The most important message of this day is: friendly Saxony has won,” he says among huge applause from his fellow Christian Democrats.

The first exit polls of Saxony’s state elections on September 1 had just been published. And while the xenophobic, revisionist, and populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was able to nearly triple its results to 27.5 percent (from 9.7 percent in 2014), it didn’t come in first.

Kretschmer’s CDU won 32.1 percent, by far the worst result in 30 years of governing Saxony. Even so, Angela Merkel’s party continues to be the strongest party, and Kretschmer will continue as state premier if he can put together a workable coalition with the Greens. This time at least, the AfD will not make it into power.

A Personal Victory

This is Kretschmer’s personal victory. Nobody here has ever campaigned as hard as this 44-year-old engineer from the Eastern city of Görlitz, who spent the last two months crisscrossing his state, shaking hands, grilling sausages, and talking to absolutely everybody. Not for the last 20 years, a pollster said on Sunday night, did any of the Saxony premiers achieve as high a personal recognition score as Kretschmer.

In neighboring Brandenburg, which also held state elections on September 1, the picture is similar. Here, the race was even tighter, but in the end, the incumbent prime minister Dietmar Woidke managed to squeeze into first—26.2 percent for his Social Democrats versus 23.5 percent for the AfD. Coalition talks will likely be even more difficult than in Saxony, but the AfD was kept at bay.

Three conclusions stand out from these crucial state elections:

The first one is paradoxical: Kretschmer’s and Woidke’s narrow victories will strengthen their respective parties in Berlin and help to stabilize Merkel’s coalition government. At the federal level, both Christian and Social Democrats are profoundly relieved; they have gained a bit of time to turn things around in Berlin. Yet neither of them did much to help Kretschmer or Woidke win their elections.

On the contrary: Chancellor Angela Merkel is so intensely disliked by many voters in the East for her refugee policy in 2015 that local Christian Democrats didn’t even want her to show up for the election campaign. Merkel’s successor at the helm of the CDU, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is struggling with her leadership role. And the SPD, which has been hit by ever more catastrophic election results, currently doesn’t even have a leader.

The second lesson is a pessimistic one: thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AfD is deepening the split between East and West. The pollsters infratest dimap found that in Saxony, 66 percent believe that East Germans are being treated as second-class citizens. Among AfD voters, that share goes up to 78 percent.

During the election campaign, the AfD not only played on the resentment in the former East Germany, they stirred and stoked it. Its message has played particularly well in regions which have seen a massive exodus of higher-skilled people toward the West. The result is a deep mistrust of the country’s mostly West German elites and democratic institutions which will poison German society for a long time to come.

Yet the AfD’s success as the Easterners’ party—and this is the third conclusion—could prove a mixed blessing for the party. In Saxony and in Brandenburg, the party’s leading candidates belong to the far-right wing of the party, which is radically anti-foreigner and anti-establishment and unafraid of links with neo-Nazi groups.

Their strong showing in Sunday’s elections will give them sway over the party’s future direction. But what worked well in Saxony and Brandenburg may turn out to be a liability for elections in western Germany, where the party’s base is ultra-conservative rather than far-right. Also, most West Germans find the anti-Western sentiment that the AfD fueled in the East hard to stomach.

Shooting Itself in the Foot

Keep in mind, finally, that the numbers are firmly on western Germany’s side—North Rhine-Westphalia alone has far more inhabitants than all the East German Länder together—and it becomes clear that with its turn toward the east, the AfD may be shooting itself in the foot.

Autumn has only just started, and Germany still has one more regional election scheduled in the east. Thuringia will go to the polls on October 27. But it’s a slightly smaller state and, according to the latest polls, unlikely to give the AfD the big victory it was hoping for.

So what Germany has now, is a reprieve: for Merkel’s government in Berlin, for the political mainstream, and for the business community which feared that investors would pull out after an AfD victory. Right-wing populism is dangerously high and still rising—but time is not necessarily on its side. “We now have five years,” Kretschmer said—the next state elections are scheduled for 2024. “Time to also speak to those whom we have not yet been able to reach.”

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© REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

Ahead of last month’s European Parliament elections, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini announced he would be forming a pan-European alliance with France’s failed second-round presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in order to create a new far-right European group to disrupt the European Union from the inside.

There was just one problem. Le Pen and Salvini were already in such a European Parliament alliance: the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group.

On Thursday, Le Pen held a press conference in the European Parliament to announce that her project with Salvini had been a success. They had met the threshold to form a group in the Parliament—a total of at least 25 MEPs from at least seven different member states—and had decided to call their group “Identity and Democracy” (ID).

“We have changed the political chessboard of the EU,” Le Pen declared.

But as she described the group’s composition and goals, it became clear that it was virtually indiscernible from the ENF. The far-right euroskeptic parties in the group are mostly the same, with the addition of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has left the British Conservatives’ European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group to join the far-right.

The addition of the German AfD, combined with the huge increase of Salvini’s Lega seats (up from five to 29) nearly doubles the far-right group’s size. While ENF had 37 seats, the ID group will have 73. This gives them 10 percent of seats in this term, compared to 5 percent in the previous term.

But even though more seats means more resources and greater influence in parliamentary committees, ID will likely remain the smallest group in the European Parliament, coming two seats behind the Greens. And given the lack of difference from the ENF, it’s hard to see how its influence in the parliament is going to be any different. Moreover, its failure to woo members of the center-right European Peoples Party, notably Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, will deny it the numerical heft that Salvini craves.

Political Pygmy

Both Le Pen and Salvini are themselves former MEPs, and they have had long experience with the parliament’s various far-right blocs over the years. Though much of the media has breathlessly portrayed their latest project as a new development that could destabilize the EU, the reality is that the presence of far-right groups goes back to 2007.

That group was called “Identity, Tradition, and Sovereignty”, but it didn’t last long. By the end of 2007 it had disbanded after Italian MEP Alessandra Mussolini (yes, the dictator’s granddaughter) made insulting remarks about Romanians on the parliament floor. MEPs from the irredentist Greater Romania party quit the group in protest, causing it to fall below the threshold needed to be an official group.

Such has been the history of the attempts to form a “nationalist international” in the European Parliament over the past decade. Through the years the far-right bloc continued to exist, though it was not officially recognized because it did not have enough MEPs. In these years Le Pen was teamed with Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, who is now in the political wilderness after having suffered a humiliating defeat in the Dutch European election.

The new ID MEPs, who will be led by Salvini’s foreign policy advisor Marco Zanni, were at pains at Thursday’s press conference to say that ID is not just a renamed ENF. No wonder, given ENF’s paltry record of achievements. Its members, especially Lega and Front National (which Le Pen has also renamed) MEPs, barely showed up to Brussels or Strasbourg, preferring to focus on national issues. Their record of cooperation is virtually non-existent, and they were so invisible in the last parliament term that many journalists forgot they existed.

Farage in the Wilderness

The stated aim of the group is to return power to EU national capitals, curb immigration, and prevent the spread of Islam in Europe. With such a platform it might seem a natural home for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, the successor to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Brussels.

But Farage has not had a good relationship with Le Pen in the past. After the 2014 election, she and Wilders tried to cajole Farage into taking his UKIP MEPs into a common Euroskeptic group with them, but they were rebuffed. The most important thing for UKIP has been to have a group in which Farage is the leader, so he can be given long speaking time at the top of the Parliament’s major debates and create clips for British news and his online fan base. Farage has also been wary of being associated with Le Pen, who is seen as an extremist by most people in the UK.

Farage has had his own group in the parliament since 2009, Europe of Freedom and Democracy. After the last European election in 2014, he and Le Pen were in a race to attract euroskeptic parties, and Farage won. Le Pen was unable to form a group until one year later in 2015, barely reaching the threshold.

This time around, it appears Le Pen has won. Though the ID group was briefly in talks with Farage to bring his Brexit Party MEPs into the fold, those talks went nowhere. Now, with time running out and Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) wary of continuing its unsuccessful alliance with Farage, it looks as if the EFD will cease to exist.

Zanni, who held the talks with Farage, said that the door remains open to the Brexit Party. “We were unable to create a united group for a number of reasons with the Brexit party,” he said. “It’s not a defeat; it’s a very open relationship; we are open to them if they want to cooperate.” He said they are also in talks with Spain’s new far-right party Vox, which has not yet chosen a group.

But it now seems even more unlikely than before that these far-right parties can cooperate with Farage. That’s because the UK’s Brexit chaos has scared Europe’s far-right parties away from the idea of their countries leaving the EU. Le Pen performed an about-face in 2017, changing her party’s position from wanting to leave the EU and the eurozone to wanting to stay in both. Lega and M5S also no longer advocate for Italexit, making the latter’s continued membership in Farage’s group rather untenable.

At their press conference, the ID MEPs were keen to stress that they are not a group that is against the EU’s existence. “Some people say that we want to destroy the EU, I want to contradict that,” said AfD MEP Jörg Meuthen. “The EU needs to be limited and reformed”.

New Names, Same Faces

The new names for these groups and parties will not change the reality that nationalist parties have difficulty working together. It is difficult to demonize foreigners and cooperate with them at the same time, as Alessandra Mussolini learned in 2007.

Indeed, it is a lesson her grandfather learned as well, always having to strike a balance between glorifying Italy and placating Hitler, who often spoke of Mediterranean peoples’ inferiority. This was one of the reasons that Franco never took Spain into the Axis—he distrusted international cooperation.

As the dust settles on the group formation process ahead of the first plenary sitting on July 1, what we are likely to see emerge is an enlarged far-right group that has benefitted from Brexit, picking up new members from two groups, Farage’s EFD and the British Conservatives’ ECR, which will likely no longer exist after the departure of UK MEPs.

But the ID group will probably still be the smallest, unable to block legislation. ID MEPs will probably still not show up. And the “far-right disruptor” that the media has been so preoccupied with over the next months will not materialize. At least, not in the context of the European Parliament.

The post The EU’s Overhyped Far-Right Alliance appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Political journalists in Berlin often do a thing called a Hintergrundgespräch. This “background conversation,” as the English translation would be, involves gathering in an airless room of a ministry or a party HQ with a group of favored colleagues and some alpha politician, who then tells you what’s what. Or what’s really what. The mood is relaxed and pally, and the etiquette is: recording devices and photos are not allowed, and though notes may be taken, direct quotes can’t be used. Free drinks are provided. The first time I went to a Hintergrundgespräch, not very long ago, a heavy realization dawned on me: This is why people hate us. This is why people vote AfD. I’m not the only journalist who feels that the political class and the press in the capital have gotten used to their cozy arrangement. This exacerbates the impression that political journalists are being spoon-fed their stories by politicians.

For a country that guards stability so carefully, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is an electoral phenomenon. In its five-year life, this unashamedly populist and often ill-disciplined party has become the third biggest group in the German parliament, the Bundestag, and has put representatives into all state parliaments—the last one on October 28 in Hesse. And it’s not certain that they’ve plateaued. The AfD’s popularity has only ballooned since the national election breakthrough in 2017: more than 15 percent of German voters currently declare for the AfD, up from 12.6 percent in September 2017. The party’s stronghold is in eastern Germany, where it attracts nearly one in four voters.

The AfD is still fundamentally repugnant to all the other mainstream parties, who have ruled out joining coalitions with them (though the resolve of the Christian Democrats in Saxony, a bastion of right-wing politics, is beginning to crumble). This is mainly because it harbors open racists and flirts with revisionism about Germany’s remembrance for the Holocaust (a shrill dog-whistle to Germany’s big neo-Nazi scene).

A couple of obvious factors have helped the AfD get itself established in the German party system in the past year: weariness with Chancellor Angela Merkel after she formed yet another centrist government between her conservatives and the Social Democrats, coupled with exasperation that this new Merkel administration has done little more than lurch from one crisis to the next, tearing itself apart over the perennial problem of refugee policy. In fact, migration is almost never out of the news, even though the “refugee crisis” is now more than three years old, and Merkel has done all she can within legal limits to close Germany’s borders.

Florian Hartleb, political scientist and author of a book on European populism, thinks this last point is crucial. Ever since Merkel’s fateful decision in 2015, the media made things too easy for the AfD, first by relentlessly demonizing them, and then by keeping their most important issue on the front pages.

The media has done some soul-searching recently: a 2017 study by the Hamburg Media School and Leipzig University found that the majority of news outlets had taken on the government’s “slogans” on migration too uncritically. Merkel’s famous line “Wir schaffen das” (“We’ll manage that”) had simply been adopted, rather than scrutinized. “It was easy for the AfD to play the counterpart,” said Hartleb. “And the more we talk about migration, the more the chances are for the AfD.”

A Party of Pessimists

But the origins of the AfD pre-date 2015, and, if you believe the party’s strategists, the refugee crisis was simply the moment when 15 years of frustration with complacent German centrism finally crystallized around it.

“The refugee crisis broke the trust in established politics,” says Rainer Erkens, an AfD member who lives in Berlin. “For years politicians were doing things that they did not have a mandate for, which were not even remotely an issue in elections.” He goes on to list all the decisions made by successive German governments “over the people’s heads”: creating the euro, the Hartz IV social welfare reforms, abandoning nuclear power, abolishing military service, and bailing out Greece in the aftermath of the eurozone debt crisis.

This is what, Erkens believes, made Merkel’s decision to open borders in 2015 the last straw for many voters. “People realized that politicians were pursuing policies that had nothing to do with election campaigns. They were getting majorities in elections for policies they’re not even pursuing.”

But there’s another feeling that AfD voters share, according to Erkens: an all-pervading pessimism. “If you really want to understand why people like the AfD, then you have to see that people who vote for the AfD have a specific image of Germany. And this image is: Germany is going down the drain,” he says. Then comes another list: the images of Germany’s deterioration; the state of the Bundeswehr; the “energy transition” to renewable sources running out of steam; the debts of other EU countries; the alleged “Islamization” of German society; and, as Erkens puts it, “what does climate protection even mean, and how much will that cost us?” All these are the weeds creeping underfoot, destabilizing Germany’s economic power.

That’s why, as Erkens tells it, AfD voters are unaffected by the scandals that outrage everyone else. One of the more recent ones came in June, when party leader Alexander Gauland triggered a tsunami of outrage because of a speech describing the Third Reich as “a bird-shit in a thousand years of successful German history.”

The AfD voters’ pessimism supersedes all such scruples. “If you have the feeling that Germany is going down the drain, and if there is one party, the AfD, which is saying exactly that, then you couldn’t care less that Gauland uses the term ‘bird-shit’ when he talks about the Nazi chapter in German history,” says Erkens. “The AfD is much more important than one politician possibly talking nonsense. It’s in this context quite irrelevant.”

The Media Effect

More than this, the media’s fixation on such outbursts, and on dubious figures like Björn Höcke, who was almost thrown out of the AfD in 2017 for describing Berlin’s Holocaust monument as a “memorial of shame,” only pushes AfD voters into protecting their leaders.

That is at least what Ronald Gläser, AfD spokesman in Berlin, believes. “I think a lot of people in the AfD weren’t particularly crazy about that, but it’s not important enough—it’s forgotten about three days later,” he says. “Those outrage issues do accompany us, but they don’t harm us that much. And of course, when the media reports about us so hysterically, that is useful for us.”

And anyway, as Gläser acknowledges, the AfD needs Höcke to keep the party’s extremist elements on its side: “We can’t just throw a leading figure of our party out—or at least if we did, it would have a huge effect. Björn Höcke is an important figure for the AfD.”

Hartleb, the political analyst, says deliberately baiting the media is a calculated strategy. “There is this taboo-breaking logic: you make a bald provocation, then you say it was just a misunderstanding, then you go one step further,” he said. “It doesn’t help anymore to just blame the voters of the AfD. It doesn’t help to say that these are neo-Nazis. And it also doesn’t help to bring them into coalition—Germany can’t do this because of its past.”

So if you can’t beat them or join them, what strategies are left? October’s election in Bavaria showed that only the parties that are not divided over migration are winning—the AfD and the Greens. Either you’re for a diverse society or you’re against it. This, as Erkens says, is where the political debate in Germany is headed: “In the future there will be two big parties: the Greens and the AfD. Those will be the poles, and between them there will be three other parties crawling around, at 10 or 15 percent: the SPD, FDP, and the CDU … They will have a little more of one or the other side. It’s perfectly feasible that that will be our party system.” 

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© REUTERS/Matthias Rietschel

Back in 2000, Kurt Biedenkopf, then prime minister of the federal state of Saxony, made a peculiar statement. Saxonians, said this experienced West German politician who had moved east after the fall of the Berlin wall, had “shown themselves to be completely immune against extreme rightist temptations.” Biedenkopf was wrong. And by banking on denial, he contributed to making things worse.

This week’s right-wing riots that shook Chemnitz, Saxony’s third largest city, have roots reaching well back into the 1990s. That period was one of huge disruption for East Germans, calling into doubt much of what they had lived and worked for. It was also the time when neo-Nazi and right-wing extremists started to spread out their networks and make inroads into mainstream society.

So, what happened in Chemnitz? On August 26, a 35-year old German was knifed to death in this city of 240,000, a bleak place dominated by socialist-era high-rises and a gigantic statue of the head of Karl Marx. Police quickly arrested two refugees, a 22-year old Iraqi and a 23-year old Syrian, as the main suspects. That same evening, neo-Nazi groups took to the streets, hunting and attacking any foreigners they could find. Undermanned and under-equipped, the police mostly looked on.

Worse, the police were still badly understaffed the next day when right-wing extremists organized another march through Chemnitz. 6000 people joined in, some of them hard-core Nazis who were emboldened enough to give the Hitler salute (a crime in Germany) in front of cameras and police units. 20 people were injured in clashes between neo-Nazis and left-wing counter-demonstrators.

A Bungled Operation

Clearly, the police operation was bungled; just as clearly, Saxony has a growing problem with right-wing sympathizers within the police and justice system. Shockingly, a justice official in the state capital Dresden took a picture of the arrest warrant for the two men from Iraq and Syria, listing their full names, the names of witnesses and the judges involved. The document was then illegally spread through right-wing social networks. The official was later suspended from his duties.

In a more harmless, yet equally revealing incident in mid-August in Dresden, policemen had detained a television crew for 45 minutes during a rally of the anti-foreigner movement Pegida after one of the demonstrators had protested against being filmed. The demonstrator later turned out to be an employee of the state office of criminal investigation–he has since been suspended, too. Yet it took the Dresden police several days to officially apologized to the TV crew.

For years, Saxony has led the statistics in Germany for hate crimes against foreigners. It was also home to the NSU, a right-wing terrorist group that between 2000 and 2007 murdered nine immigrants and one policewoman. In Saxony, neo-Nazis have established powerful informal networks. Soccer fan clubs play a particular role, as do right-wing rock bands.

Successful in Saxony

There are social, economic, and psychological reasons why the German far-right is so spectacularly successful in Saxony. This once heavily industrialized region was hit particularly hard by the economic disruption which accompanied reunification. High unemployment and low wages have contributed to a widespread feeling among Saxonians of being second-class citizens in the new Germany. And when Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed nearly a million refugees to Germany in 2015, many East Germans felt even more abandoned, believing that the benefits they should have received were now being given to refugees.

Such resentment is not limited to Saxony or to eastern Germany. In many of West German cities, competition between low-income indigenous groups and refugees for apartments or childcare is much more acute. But Saxony has a long political tradition of underplaying right-wing tendencies. “Saxony does not have a significant problem with right-wing radicalism,” said then Prime Minister Stanislaw Tillich as late as 2011, echoing Biedenkopf. As a consequence, the police and justice system failed to combat neo-Nazism effectively.

Saxony’s current Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer, a member of Merkel’s CDU, follows the line of his predecessors: naturally, he does not encourage xenophobia or neo-Nazism, but neither does he clearly point out what is right and wrong. And after the riots in Chemnitz, Kretschmer said that the police had done “a super job.”

Spreading into Politics

From fringe groups, right-wing ideology has spread not only into state institutions like the police, but also into politics. It was in Saxony that the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) used to register its best results; it’s here that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) now scores highest. At the federal elections in 2017, the AfD received 27 percent of votes and emerged (by a tiny margin) as the strongest party in Saxony. Also, the AfD members of the Bundestag elected in Saxony are among the most radical in the party. The most prominent of them is Jens Maier, a judge (!) from the Dresden district court.

The enormous success of the party in eastern Germany has also accelerated the radicalization of the party as a whole. Today’s xenophobic and revisionist AfD has little in common with the conservative, anti-Euro party founded in 2013 by West German conservative economists. And as the party has become more extremist, many of its members throughout Germany have become more radical as well.

As a consequence, Germany now has a sizeable far-right party that in spite of its leadership squabbles is stable and well established. With 15 to 17 percent in the polls, it appears that the AfD is here to stay. In a European context, that would not be unusual. But for Germany with its Nazi past and the Holocaust, it’s a disturbing first.

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© REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

Berlin’s Bundestag was bristling with expectation on Wednesday when Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived for her first question-and-answer session with members of parliament.

With a nod to Prime Minister’s Questions in the United Kingdom’s House of Commons, the Bundestag session was pushed through by Merkel’s junior partner, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Other parties supported the move to reclaim some spontaneity to the German chamber as well. The German federal parliament doesn’t have the same rhetorical tradition as the UK, and it is often a place of dry, scripted speeches, zero debate, and empty press benches. For years, political talk shows have eclipsed parliament as the true place for debate.

Yet hope springs eternal, and all eyes turned to the Bundestag at 12:30 pm. In the end, we shouldn’t have gotten our hopes up. MPs were too busy being impressed by Merkel—or grandstanding—to actually ask a tough question.

Chancellor Merkel stood in her place with no podium to hide behind, clutching papers before her nervously like a shield until she realized the questions were going to be as tough as candy floss.

The first item on the agenda was the upcoming G7 meeting in Canada. Merkel conceded that Trump’s tweeting habits, penchant for U-turns, and protectionist tariffs meant “we have a serious problem with multilateral agreements.” The deterioration in Europe’s relationship with the United States could no longer be “papered over,” the German leader admitted.

Echoing comments from last year, she said this meant Europeans “have to take care of ourselves to an extent and learn to be consistent in defense and security policy.” The German leader said she would meet Italy’s new leader Giuseppe Conte on the sidelines of the G7 meeting; Conte is heading a populist coalition, but Merkel said she didn’t see “as dramatic a problem” with European partners as the US.

Given what the EU views as US breaches of trade and environmental agreements, the Green Party wanted to know when Merkel was going to stand up to President Trump. “I don’t think linking everything together is the right approach in the German interest,” she said.

Landing No Blows

The Bundestag format allowed one minute for a question and the same time for Merkel’s answers. Observers had anticipated this would work to the advantage of the opposition, in particular the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. In the end the AfD failed to land a blow on the German leader, even when accusing her of triggering “floods of migrants” resulting in “serious damage” of attacks and rapes. AfD MP Gottfried Curio culminated what was more an extended statement than question with: “When are you going to resign?”

The chancellor brushed off the questions, insisting she had acted responsibly in a “humanitarian emergency” and noted that the European Court of Justice (CJEU) had confirmed she had acted legally as well. “The basic political decision was correct,” she said.

She dismissed a series of questions about a growing scandal over asylum applications, where at least 1,200 refugees were granted asylum status incorrectly. Merkel insisted she only knew of these specific problems “recently.”

She conceded she had appointed a new chief to the federal asylum board in September 2015 to deal with “grave structural problems” in an authority that, faced with a surge in asylum applications, had to quadruple its staff numbers. The chancellor spoke to asylum agency chief Frank-Jürgen Weise “countless times and always encouraged him to tell us of all deficits.”

In a rare moment of spontaneity, a far-right AfD parliamentarian complained that Merkel had spoken longer than the allotted one minute. Bundestag president Wolfgang Schäuble replied that the first AfD question had been too long, too. “Mind your own business,” added Schäuble, “before you give me advice.”

After mastering television debates with loud opponents, town-hall meetings with weeping teenagers, and intimidated YouTuber interviews, a confident Angela Merkel strolled out of the Bundestag chamber with the latest political novelty format behind her.

“Much of a shame as it is, it’s over,” she said with a triumphant smile, adding: “But I’ll be back.”

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© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

September 24 marked a watershed moment in German politics: a right-wing populist party entered the Bundestag for the first time in post-war history. There was much soul searching and hand wringing in the lead-up to the first joint parliamentary session, but the AfD’s 92 newly minted lawmakers (not including its leader, Frauke Petry, who abandoned ship because the party had moved too far to the right) managed to build a parliamentary group, appear in the Bundestag chambers, and deliver a speech without sparking controversy. That, by AfD standards, is news in itself.

It was the AfD, after all, that continuously employed highly controversial and divisive rhetoric on the campaign trail, denigrating Germany’s justice minister by claiming he was the result of “inbreeding” in his home state of Saarland, and branding Chancellor Angela Merkel an “old shrew.” The party also hired an American creative agency to design an aggressive online campaign strategy, including an ad that depicted a bloody set of tire tracks, referring to the series of Islamist terror attacks carried out with vehicles. The slogan: “The global chancellor’s tracks across Europe.”

That crude, populist behavior was noticeably absent in the Bundestag’s first session on October 24. Most of the AfD’s lawmakers appeared to blend seamlessly into the parliament’s tapestry, difficult to distinguish from their counterparts from the mainstream parties. Only their pride in being MPs set them apart from veteran politicians: AfD lawmakers posed for pictures and exalted their success on Twitter and Facebook. But they were not disruptive – certainly not in the way the other groups had feared.

What was striking, however, was the AfD’s reticence in moments where the rest of the Bundestag applauded – when Holocaust survivor Inge Deutschkron was welcomed from the podium, for example, or when MPs congratulated the newly elected president of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Schäuble.

It highlighted how the AfD perceives itself as the true underdog – a systematically oppressed group that successfully fought for a spot at the table against a powerful establishment. While the majority of German society is outraged over the populist party’s treatment of minorities, the AfD is in turn outraged by that very reaction. When Hermann Otto Solms, an MP from the liberal Free Democrats, warned in a speech against rules that “stigmatize and exclude,” AfD lawmakers applauded vociferously because they see themselves as the victims of such exclusion. Solms’ appeal to take a stand against hate speech and propaganda, however, did not garner a reaction: the AfD does not identify itself as a propagator of either.

Provocations and Half-Truths

In its first motion in the new Bundestag, the party demanded that the Alterspräsident, or chairman by seniority, be elected by age. The oldest member of parliament traditionally makes the first speech in a new session. But Germany’s mainstream parties had hastily changed the election process after realizing the oldest MP would be an AfD lawmaker who has publically trivialized the Holocaust.

That prompted AfD parliamentary group leader Bernd Baumann to hold a speech that once again revealed the AfD’s character as not a party of reason, but one of provocation and half-truths. Baumann claimed that the mainstream parties’ barring of an AfD parliamentarian from the seniority post could be compared to the time when Nazi leader Hermann Göring banished Marxist Clara Zetkin from the Bundestag and prevented her from speaking. It was an erroneous comparison as many German media pointed out: Göring had indeed gotten rid of the chairman by seniority position, but he did not prevent Zetkin from speaking. By then, she was not even a member of parliament anymore. Instead, Göring actually blocked a member of his own group from taking the post.

The incident is an important reminder that parliamentarians will have to remain vigilant and alert during AfD speeches to check facts and react quickly. They did not do so during Baumann’s speech, allowing his half-truth to stand. He will certainly not be alone in pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. According to the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel, 15 AfD parliamentarians created a closed Facebook group that has already become a platform for vicious racism and vile hate speech. One member posted a picture of a pizza box with the image of Anne Frank on the cover; the caption, reportedly, read “Oven-fresh, light, and crispy.” Some 50 AfD lawmakers from state and federal levels are part of the closed group, yet when news of its existence came to light, there was no outcry. The lack of outrage has become commonplace.

The AfD’s eerie silence in the Bundestag does not mean other parties can let down their guard. In the coming months, the government will be formed; the committees will take up their work; debates on content will begin – and AfD lawmakers will undoubtedly reveal their true colors. In his speech, Bernd Baumann claimed his party would usher in a “new era in the Bundestag” where mainstream political groups would no longer “decide everything among themselves.” The same holds true for the AfD as well. The public will be watching their words and actions closely.

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© REUTERS/Stefanie Loos

Late on September 24, when nearly all the votes in the federal election had been counted, Germany’s far-right populists celebrated an astonishing success. Not only were they going to have the third largest group in the new Bundestag – in Saxony, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) received a staggering 27 percent of the vote, making it the strongest political force in this East German state.

During the campaign, the AfD played very skillfully on fears of immigration and the spread of Islamic fundamentalism that run particularly strongly in eastern Germany. But it also tapped a huge reservoir of resentment against the country’s political elites, vilifying them as “cartel parties” and “pseudo elites.”

As a result, the AfD’s share of the vote was twice as high in eastern Germany – with an average of 21.5 percent – compared to the old West German states. “We are going to kick the old parties in the butt,” one AfD supporter crowed on television during the election night.

There is a reason the anti-establishment message plays so well in the former German Democratic Republic: East Germans simply aren’t part of the establishment in Germany. A study published by the Deutsche Gesellschaft, a non-profit association dedicated to overcoming the gap between East and West, shows that despite 27 years of reunification and Angela Merkel in the chancellery, East Germans are still totally under-represented among German elites.

The study, “East German Elites: Dreams, Realities, and Perspectives,” makes for an astonishing read.

Here are some key figures from the study:

Top positions across Germany generally go to West Germans. While East Germans make up 17 percent of the total population, they only hold four to five percent of senior jobs in administration. Even in eastern Germany, only 13.3 percent of judges and 5.9 percent of court presidents are East Germans.

Every single one of the country’s 500 richest families is from West Germany. The 30 biggest publicly traded companies are managed by a total of 190 board members, and all but three of them are West Germans. Even in the hundred largest East German companies (not that they are very large), two thirds of the top management jobs are held by West Germans.

And so it continues: Out of 200 generals or admirals in the German army, two are East Germans. Out of 22 university directors in East Germany, three are East Germans. East Germany has 13 regional newspapers, yet West Germans manage all but two of them.

“When I started my job in Bonn in 2000, I doubled the number of East Germans,” Thomas Krüger, a former GDR dissident and now president of the Federal Agency for Civic Education in Bonn, said in a recent newspaper interview. “Where before there had been one East German, there now were two – out of a total of 200 employees.”

“Cultural Colonialism”

Politics is where the balance works best, because elected officials need to be confirmed by their bases. Even then, 30 percent of ministerial postings in the Eastern state governments are taken up by West Germans. In contrast, in nearly three decades, only one East German has managed to serve in a West German state cabinet.

“With Angela Merkel as chancellor and former Federal President Joachim Gauck, at first glance things may look different,” Krüger said in the interview. “But across the (East German), the dominance of West Germany among the elites continues to be experienced as a cultural colonialism.”

The East German revolution of 1989, like all revolutions, consisted of replacing the elites – the people working for the communist party and state institutions, including the secret police, the Stasi. But in contrast to what happened in Eastern Europe, the old East German elite was not replaced by new local leaders, but by West Germans who brought their political system to the former GDR and occupied nearly all key positions to manage the change.

This was initially welcomed by many East Germans, who wished for better government and untarnished leaders. They did not expect the transformation of their society and economy to bring such pain in terms of jobs, security, and social structures. Soon, East Germans came to see the West Germans (“Wessis”) as brash, arrogant, and shallow; West Germans saw East Germans (“Ossis”) as self-effacing, passive, and sometimes lazy. Raj Kollmorgen, one of the authors of the study, says that to this day East Germans are stuck with an inferior image. West Germans build their careers through networks of power, recruiting people of a similar background and therefore perpetuating the discrepancy in the careers between Ossis and Wessis.

As a result, many East Germans feel alienated from the political, economic, and social institutions of unified Germany. “There is a de facto gap in the representation of East German interests, perspectives, and experiences,” said Iris Gleicke, a Social Democrat from Thuringia who serves as the federal government’s Commissioner for Eastern (German) Affairs.

Gleicke quoted a 2014 poll by sociologists from Halle that found that almost three out of four West Germans feel “politically at home” in the Federal Republic, while not even half of East Germans do. “If you leave out the East, you will to have to pay for that at some point in time,” she said.

Part of that payment is the East’s high support for the AfD, though the populist surge has other causes as well – after all, right-wing populism is also flourishing in central and eastern European countries that came out of communist rule without an imported elite.

Yet if East Germans remain left out, Germany as a whole will suffer – not only in terms of democratic representation, but also because it is depriving itself of a great pool of talent and experience.

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© REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

As the mist lifts, the road on from Germany’s federal election is slowly becoming clear. The worst result for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) since 1949 will not prevent her securing a fourth term to pull even with her four-term mentor Helmut Kohl.

Her new alliance is likely to be an untested so-called Jamaica coalition, based on the party colors of Merkel’s CDU (black), the liberal Free Democrats (FDP, yellow) and Greens. And while the journey to Jamaica will require considerable effort and creativity, with no new administration likely before December, Merkel loyalists insist Kingston is a worthwhile destination even if the lack of direct flights means a strenuous row-boat journey looms.

But the arrival of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the next Bundestag, with 12.6 percent of the poll and 93 seats, changes the atmosphere in German politics. It’s obvious that Germany shifted right on election day, with the center-right pulling in 56 percent of the total vote. This marks the end of the consensual years of what I call “the Claudia Roth Republik.”

For those outside the Berlin bubble, Claudia Roth is a well-meaning ex-Green Party leader. Beloved and mocked in equal measure, the left-wing politician’s default reaction to opposing views is cartoon-like emotional outrage. In that she has always reminded me of Helen Lovejoy, the over-excited pastor’s wife in “The Simpsons” whose answer in every difficult situation is: “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

In the Claudia Roth Republik, the consensual political center was the place to be, in tune with the Zeitgeist of Germany’s World Cup generation: open and cosmopolitan, a people increasingly at-ease with their German identity. Anyone who visited this republic headed home again convinced the Germans had undergone a collective personality transplant, with ease replacing angst.

After the Earthquake

But nothing lasts forever, particularly not after the refugee crisis earthquake. Germany’s initial welcome to asylum seekers in 2015 surprised everyone, including the locals, but things began to cool somewhere between the 2015 New Year’s Eve attacks on women in Cologne and the 2016 Christmas market truck attack in Berlin that left twelve dead. Even though the perpetrators in both cases were not Syrian refugees, the cool, liberal consensus began to crumble.

Behind this new facade: an old, deep-seated German fear about loss of control, quickly pounced on by the AfD. Since then, despite steady growth and record employment, a new Zukunftsangst is palpable as Germany returns to the real world and departs the Claudia Roth for “the Roland Koch Republik.”

Roland Koch was once the politician German lefties loved to hate. A take-no-prisoners hard-right CDU governor in the western state of Hesse, he played the conservative keyboard with ease until 2010 when he dramatically quit politics for a – so far not terribly distinguished – private sector career.

A year ago, as the mood began to darken, I sought him out to ask why he left and whether he felt needed again. He left politics, he told me, because Merkel had blocked his path with a consensual, low drama style of politics that had made his approach redundant.

Why, I wanted to know, had Merkel’s centrist CDU neglected his old right-wing conservative clientele? He was as puzzled as I was and concerned this left it easy for the AfD to pick off older right-wing CDU voters alarmed over the refugee crisis.

But having felt surplus to requirement, Koch told me he sensed the wind changing again. For his traditional voters, he said, Merkel’s “we can manage this” mantra in the refugee crisis missed the forest for the trees. “The real question now is, ‘Do we want this?’” he told me. “And large sections of the European and German population don’t want this, a fact that many politicians underestimated.”

This was blindingly obvious in recent weeks on the election trail with Merkel. She was greeted with furious protest wherever she went, culminating in a final, vicious stand-off on Munich’s Marienplatz. Two days later the AfD celebrated its historic result. Bulking up its far-right populist voter base were a million reactivated non-voters and another million disappointed former CDU and Bavarian CSU voters. Minutes after polls closed, CSU leaders said the AfD success was the logical conclusion of their failure to defend their right-wing flank.

Rhetorical Mind-Lock

This exposed flank was a consequence of the Claudia Roth Republik, conservatives argue, where any person or party with positions right of the center risked being labelled a far-right extremist. Conservatives who expressed law-and-order views, once mainstream in the Kohl-era CDU, were shouted down in this Germany as potential racists or proto-fascists.

In the Claudia Roth Republik, the golden rule was “das darf nicht sein,” a kind of rhetorical mind-lock which roughly translates as “that must not be.” The AfD lured people into their camp by shattering this logic with the rhetorical hammer of “das wird man wohl doch mal sagen dürfen” – “you have to be able to say this.”

As the dust settles, the challenge for Merkel and Germany’s political establishment is to prevent further drift to the right-wing fringes. The chances are good, given post-election polls suggested some 60 percent of AfD support was a protest vote.

But winning these voters back can only happen when their conservative, liberal, or moderate right views are no longer demonized and silenced. Germany has to rediscover its capacity for controversial debates on the big issues of concern – security, migration, and globalization – that respects competing opinions within the limits of the democratic mainstream. That is the alternative to Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland.

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© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch – The poster reads “Burqa? We like bikinis.”

The storm began brewing long before members of Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) arrived at the Maritim Hotel in Cologne in late April. For two days, delegates from across the country gathered to settle on a platform for the election campaign and choose their lead candidate for the race. This was meant to be the party’s moment of strength and unity. But an undercurrent of discord spoiled the show. Two factions emerged – one more populist and conservative, the other more nationalist and far-right – and they were both vying for power.

Frauke Petry, the chairwoman and internationally known face of the party, wanted delegates to vote on a motion that would have shifted the AfD into the mainstream. It’s not that Petry was softening her right-wing views; she wanted to make her party a real, viable opposition force in the next Bundestag – and perhaps even a possible coalition partner for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU.

The delegates chose to go in another direction. Petry’s motion was neither accepted nor denied, but rather completely ignored. Meanwhile, national spokesman Jörg Meuthen delivered a stinging rebuke to the moderates, rejecting any discussion of factions or the possibility of working with the likes of Merkel. “We won’t join any coalition with those people!,” he shouted to jubilant applause.

Petry, blinking and visibly uncomfortable, was sidelined. The delegates chose Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland to represent them in the election campaign, the latter a clear nod to the nationalist wing. This was more than the tempestuous confusion of a young party finding its identity – it revealed the struggle the party is facing to forge a common vision.

The AfD shocked the establishment in 2016 with a series of successes in regional votes, winning 14 percent in Berlin’s election last September. Since then, however, it has seen its poll numbers fall steadily to around eight percent in recent surveys. Now, some analysts believe the AfD has reached an impasse; its future as a unified movement may be at stake.

“I think that in the long run the divide between the civically-minded, conservative branch and the ethnically-minded, nationalist branch is too deep, I don’t think it’s sustainable,” says Melanie Amann, a journalist for Der Spiegel magazine and author of the book AfD: Angst für Deutschland (or “Fear for Germany”). “I think the party is heading for a split.”

Anti-immigration, Anti-Islam

To see where the AfD is going, it is important to understand where it began. The party was founded in 2013 on a starkly euroskeptic, populist platform. As debt-laden Greece teetered toward bankruptcy, the European Union organized a large-scale bailout. The AfD cried foul over profligate Greeks squandering hard-earned German taxpayer money. The eurozone debt crisis began to stabilize in 2014, and public indignation subsided.

Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open Germany’s borders  to Syrian refugees came as a stroke of luck for the AfD. With nearly a million asylum-seekers and migrants entering Germany that year, the party seized on a rising tide of anger and fear to shift to an anti-immigration, anti-Islam platform. At the same time, the anti-Islam Pegida movement (“Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West”) was drawing tens of thousands to the streets.

“The discussion back then was so polarized, it was very emotional – it drove a wedge through entire families, where you had supporters and opponents of the government’s policy,” says Oskar Niedermayer, political scientist and professor at Berlin’s Free University. “The AfD received more protest voters than any other party then. These were people who were not necessarily supporters of the AfD, they just wanted to send the mainstream parties a message.”

Part of the problem is that to some voters, Germany’s mainstream parties share more or less the same view on immigration, says Niedermayer. Even Merkel’s opponents, the Greens and the SPD, have stood behind the chancellor’s original decision in 2015 to open Germany’s doors. The only substantial criticism of that policy has come from the AfD.

“The belief is that the CDU left too much space on the right, and the AfD just slid in. But that is not the core of what truly happened,” said Marc Jongen, the AfD’s spokesperson for the southwestern state of Baden-Württemburg. “Over the last few years and decades, all of our main parties, with the exception of the Left Party, have moved closer and closer together, and they’ve become a cartel. It’s simply one big party.”

Throughout 2016, it seemed a rising number of German voters agreed. But a series of key factors has begun to erode the AfD’s popularity.

Too Right, Too Soon?

First, the refugee crisis faded. Merkel, watching her popularity plummet, rapidly began working to ensure there would be no repeat. She signed key agreements with governments in transit or origin countries like Egypt and Morocco to stem the flow of migrants; she pushed a landmark (and highly controversial) deal with Ankara to stop illegal migration through Turkey into Europe; and the government passed legislation to increase deportations and make family reunification more difficult. Together, Berlin’s package of measures has slowed the flow of migration considerably. According to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, the agency received 13,685 new asylum applications in June of this year, an 81 percent drop year-on-year.

Second, and more significantly, the party’s rising far-right nationalist faction bubbled to the surface. The AfD’s leader in the state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke, delivered an inflammatory speech to young party members in Dresden in January, demanding a break with what he called Germany’s culture of guilt. Germans, he added in a reference to Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of its capital.”

Höcke was blasted by politicians from across the spectrum, and some members of his party launched a petition to revoke his membership. It appeared he had crossed a line in disparaging Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture. Yet now, months later, he is still a leading member of the party. He was reprimanded with regulatory measures, but not more.

“That really was a turning point for the AfD,” says Amann. “It was a moment where Höcke’s thoughts were revealed, unfiltered and crude, and it was clear that if the party tolerated it – which it did – it would become too much for the moderate conservative wing.”

Marc Jongen, often referred to as the party’s intellectual leader, insists the AfD has taken a clear stance on Germany’s past. “Within the scene of the intellectual right there have always be quarrels over how to deal with radicalism – where to draw a line, or if a line should even be drawn. But everyone we have involved is very clear that we categorically reject anti-Semitism, or dreams of another German Reich and similar ‘old right’-stuff. That is all gone,” he says.

Anti-foreigner sentiment is not, however. Alexander Gauland, one of the party’s two main candidates, came under fire in May 2016 for targeting football star Jerome Boateng, a German of Ghanaian descent: “People like him as a footballer. But they don’t want Boateng as a neighbor.” Now Gauland has once again drawn ire after lashing out at Turkish-German SPD politician and state minister Aydan Özoguz, who said in a speech that there is no specific German culture aside from the language. At a campaign rally in Thuringia, Gauland taunted Özoguz, saying they would be able to “dispose of her in Anatolia, thank God.”

In the east of the country, the AfD’s regional and state chapters are visibly far-right. There, the lines between the AfD and the Identitarian Movement (a right-wing populist youth movement), the intellectual Neue Rechte (New Right), and even radical extremist elements are blurred, say analysts. In early May, the AfD held its first joint rally with Pegida as well.

“They have stuck to their strategy of trying to reach as many voters as possible, from the moderate conservative to the right-wing extreme,” said Niedermayer. “I think the moderate conservative voters see a red line has been crossed – they say ‘I can’t vote for a party that has these people in its ranks.’”

“The tone will become rougher”

Despite declining numbers and internal turmoil, the AfD is a remarkable success story. In just four years, it has won seats in 13 of Germany’s 16 state parliaments, the most ever for such a young party. Barring an upset, the AfD will win seats in the Bundestag at the end of September. Melanie Amann believes the current poll numbers, placing the AfD around 8 percent, are likely too conservative, especially as many voters are still undecided.

The question remains just how the party plans to wield its new power in the federal parliament – as opposition or a force of disruption. The AfD’s record in state parliaments so far have been mixed. But analysts point to the party’s list of candidates to fill seats in the Bundestag. There, the far-right nationalist wing is in the majority.

“I think we are going to have to brace ourselves for a much sharper tone, a more aggressive opposition position,” said Amann. “If you want to give it a positive spin, we will see sharper debates, but if you want to look at the negative outcome, the tone will become rougher, more uncivilized.”

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