Germany will elect a new parliament on Sunday, at a precarious moment for the West.
The vote is almost certain to deliver a change in Berlin, with center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz set to be ejected from office and replaced by the conservative Friedrich Merz, whose CDU/CSU is on around 30 percent in polls, once coalition talks are done.
But one key question will be how much support the second-placed Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) attracts, with its far-right policy mix including the mass deportation of migrants. The party has won the backing of Donald Trump’s most influential adviser, Elon Musk, while U.S. Vice President JD Vance has demanded mainstream politicians ditch their convention of uniting to keep the far right out of power.
The rise of the AfD over the past decade — to around 20 percent in polls now — has triggered deep soul-searching in the political establishment in a country still wracked with guilt over its Nazi past. Could German history repeat itself?
POLITICO spoke to three leading historians to hear their analysis of what the election means, and what sort of threat the AfD poses to stability in the European Union’s most dependable and economically significant member.
These conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
Is Germany heading back to the 1930s?
Timothy Garton Ash, author and Professor of European studies, Oxford University: What we see in the opinion polls is already shocking. One in five voters according to the current opinion polls favor a party which really is hard right, calling for “remigration” — kicking out people of migrant background who may already be citizens; is calling not only to finish with the euro and restore the deutschmark but for Germany to leave the EU. That’s extraordinary. I don’t think it should be underestimated at all.
Katja Hoyer, German-British historian and author of “Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990”: In terms of comparisons to the far right in the 1920s and ’30s, people overestimate the danger to democracy. Germany is acutely aware of its own history and looks back immediately to the ultimate catastrophe of the 1930s as the reference point. But the difference is that the Nazis operated in a climate of mass political violence that came out of the First World War and that just doesn’t exist today. There is no SA, no SS. The other political parties haven’t got their own military wings. Even the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had a military wing in the 1930s.
In terms of the AfD’s capacity or even willingness to dismantle democracy, they are not outright setting out to do that in the way that the Nazis did. The same applies to voters. There’s not a resentment of democracy itself that’s behind the AfD vote, whilst that was definitely the case back in the past.
Can the AfD win power?
Timothy Garton Ash: I do think there’s a real danger for 2029 if you have a so-called grand coalition, Christian and Social Democrats once again, i.e. pretty much the mainstream center and they don’t deliver significant change. There is a really major crisis of the German political economy, of the German political model and the discontents are incredibly widespread.
Katja Hoyer: With Germany’s coalition system as it stands, they [the AfD] would always have to work with somebody to get majorities in parliament to get anything passed. So even in the medium and long term, their extremism would always be tempered in some shape or form.
The CDU [conservative Christian Democrats] have also shown they are quite happy to accept AfD votes on an ad hoc basis. That gives them quite a strong negotiating platform to say to the SPD, as the most likely coalition partner, if they want to do something the SPD is unhappy with they can potentially still go ahead and do it with the AfD.
James Hawes, bestselling author of “The Shortest History of Germany”: That phrase “second-biggest party” sets alarm bells off to an Anglo-Saxon who knows a two-party or three-party system. Of course, it’s nothing of the sort in Germany.
In a sense it doesn’t really matter which of the big three or four parties one votes for because they share an overarching commitment to what we would call, in this age of Trump, really important core values. And they can all work together and do work together at every level to protect those or work within them. Although there are different offers, really German politics has an enormous great center.
Why is the AfD so popular?
Katja Hoyer: If you look at the Cold War era in West Germany, there were basically two options on the table: You could either vote for the conservative program under the CDU which was really very conservative on a lot of issues, or you could vote for reform and modernization under the SPD. They would each only work with one small party as an add-on, usually the liberals.
So you had a clear choice at every election: Do you want things to stay the same or do you want them to get modernized? What’s happening now is even under Angela Merkel you had those two main parties working together, that choice wasn’t there anymore, and people think whatever you did on the ballot paper was the same center-left going forward.
That’s why the AfD is called the “alternative” for Germany — because they’re presenting themselves as the only opposition. When people aren’t happy with the status quo and they’ve got nowhere to go, you’ll see the AfD grow.
James Hawes: The AfD draws its support distinctly from one particular part of the country, the East. It really isn’t spectacularly spreading in the West. I don’t think there’s any more danger of it doing so than there is of New York adopting Utah gun laws, because there’s this cultural difference between East and West Germany.
Any democracy that can’t cope with a kind of splinter group of around 20 percent can’t really call itself democracy. We have to be able to cope with that. Really, West Germany doesn’t have to worry too much about the AfD. Even if every East German state government went to the AfD, so what?
Timothy Garton Ash: I have absolutely no doubt that the AfD is at 20-21 percent partly because they have this articulate professional woman [Alice Weidel] as the lead candidate, who can have a chat with Elon Musk on X.
The fact that she presents well like that and she is genuinely articulate and speaks a rather sophisticated, university-educated German, and is in command of the economic figures, together with the support of the world’s richest man; plus the fact that the sister party, the Freedom Party in Austria, is now being asked to form a government; plus the fact that hard-right parties are doing well all over Europe — all of that makes people feel it’s OK to vote for them.
How important is AfD leader Alice Weidel?
Katja Hoyer: This is what makes her dangerous I think: She’s able to project the more moderate side of the AfD well beyond Germany’s borders because she speaks English quite well, so she’s able to talk to Elon Musk or do her own thing on the international stage.
But she’s also in a minority within her own party despite being a leader. She tried to take the “remigration” term out of her manifesto because she considered it to be too extreme and it makes it basically impossible for them to have a coalition with the conservatives, and she was outnumbered and outvoted at the party conference and they put it back in.
And the same is true for other things like the definition of family as mother, father and child, which was in the manifesto. She took it out and they put it back in, despite her own situation not meeting that definition [she is in a same-sex relationship]. So it’s an odd thing in that you have a comparatively moderate leader leading a party that’s far more radical than she is but she’s willing to go along with it as well.
She knows what she has to say and do in order to stay in power and that I think is quite dangerous. If you look in history there’s plenty of examples like it where ideological flexibility makes some of the most extreme leaders in the end.
Timothy Garton Ash: If we say she’s untypical, untypical perhaps in her personal story but not in her political views. She has now in her campaign speech endorsed the idea of remigration, that is a position that until now has really been identified with the often Islamophobic hard right. It’s a really radical position.
What happens next?
Katja Hoyer: I don’t think most voters, even AfD voters, are as radical as the AfD is. They don’t really want a pure AfD program implemented because that is too extreme for most people. So if there is a way forward, the mainstream parties can do some of the things on immigration and also the economy that people want and there’s a sense that things are really moving forward, I also think that would take the wind out of the AfD’s sails.
The problem is if we have quite an unstable situation where nothing much gets done because the new coalition parties can’t agree on anything. If that’s the case, then voters will get more frustrated. And if the AfD doesn’t get so divided that they become dysfunctional, really they just need to hold out and wait for more people to come their way. So I can see a kind of Austrian scenario coming up if nothing changes.
James Hawes: I think the AfD is very close to the limit of where it’s going to get any more votes from. I just don’t see where they’re going to come from, especially given the CDU’s and CSU’s current noises on the big topic of migration. I do not see sufficient Germans wanting to take that sort of risk at all.
Timothy Garton Ash: Between now and [the next expected election in 2029], a whole bunch of external factors could change the situation. But thinking about Europe, thinking about what mainstream parties have to do to get our economies going again, to give people a sense that irregular migration is under control, make people feel secure in terms of doing our own defense if Donald Trump isn’t going to do it for us, I think centrist parties should say to themselves, “Hey guys, we’re drinking in the last chance saloon.”
I can’t think of any time in the last 50 years when the forces of integration and disintegration in Europe have been so finely balanced. It really is unclear which is going to prevail in the next four or five years.
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