This year, as Germans slog through the dog days of summer—traditionally a downtime for politics in Germany—there’s a conspicuous undercurrent of trepidation in the air. The country has its uneasy gaze fixed on the Sept. 1 elections in the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia—and the Sept. 22 elections in Brandenburg state—where there’s every likelihood that long sacrosanct traditions of the federal republic will be gutted.
In both Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) could well emerge as the strongest party with about 30 percent of the vote. A triumph for AfD and its neo-Nazi leanings would mark a sea change for postwar Germany.
Earning a relative majority in these states doesn’t mean that the radical populists will necessarily land in a ruling coalition, since the establishment and leftist parties (for now at least) rule out cooperation with the extreme-right party, which is radical even by European standards. But already one party, the upstart left-populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), is openly wavering on that promise. For the BSW—and the Christian Democrat Union of Germany (CDU), too—a shotgun wedding with the extreme right could prove a less unattractive option than cobbling together an ungainly hail-Mary coalition that sidelines the AfD.
Some observers are confident that when push comes to shove the CDU, BSW, and other smaller parties—such as the Green Party, Social Democratic Party, Left Party, and the Free Democratic Party—will put aside ideological differences to form anti-AfD coalitions. This would leave the AfD in opposition, which in no way neutralizes it. As an opposition force in eastern Germany since 2014, it has obstructed democratic processes, encouraged extra-parliamentary neo-Nazis, and set an aggressive tone against minorities.
But the capture of a third of the legislature’s seats in Thuringia, for example, would supply the AfD with real clout in governance. Thuringia requires a two-thirds majority of all elected members of parliament to dissolve the state parliament and pave the way for new elections. Moreover, constitutional amendments and the election of justices of the Thuringian Constitutional Court and other posts also require a two-thirds majority. This function of “blocking minority,” say observers, would enable the AfD to sow chaos, which it perfectly understands would further deplete the credibility of the mainstream parties.
The vibe in Germany is so tense, however, because far-right participation in the ruling government itself is a distinct possibility—and it would have enormous implications not only for Saxony and Thuringia but also for Germany as a whole.
There is every reason to believe that the polls are accurate, as the AfD racked up similar numbers across the east in the European Parliament vote in June. The worst-case scenario is that the AfD comes to office as the strongest party in a coalition and claims the state’s premiership, a post equivalent to that of a U.S. governorship. “We realize it can happen,” Jasmin Gräwel of Christopher Street Day Leipzig, an LGBTQ+ rights group in Saxony, told Foreign Policy. “This is the reality that we face. The funding from Saxony that we and other groups like anti-racism initiatives and diversity-minded [nongovernmental organizations] receive would be cut or eliminated altogether.”
Maximilian Steinbeis, a journalist and author who has written on populism, expressed similar concerns. “We’ve witnessed in other European countries what happens to state institutions that have fallen into the hands of authoritarian populists,” he said. “They’ve exploited their offices to immunize their power against opposition politics and public critique. This is something that we in Germany are poorly prepared for.”
The latest cover of the popular weekly Der Spiegel displays a Soviet-style bust of Thuringia AfD’s radical spokesperson Björn Höcke with France’s rightist scourge Marine Le Pen and former U.S. President Donald Trump behind him. The Spiegel headline reads, “How Fascism Begins: The Clandestine Hitlers.” Twice this year, a German court has convicted and fined Höcke for using symbols of a former Nazi organization; Germany’s domestic intelligence service has designated the Thuringia AfD an extremist group. As Thuringia’s top politician, Höcke has said he will “remigrate” German citizens with foreign backgrounds, revamp education policy along traditionalist lines, and completely restructure or shut down the state-run media—and that’s just the beginning.
The AfD could attain power by one of several routes: by leading a state government, as coalition partner in a government led by another party, or alone as a minority government.
The first two options entail the crumbling of the much-discussed “firewall” against the far right, namely the until-now joint refusal of establishment and leftist parties to govern with the AfD. This week, the BSW denied explicit coalition intentions but expressed openness to the AfD and a desire for less confrontation with its voters. “If the AfD says the sky is blue, the BSW won’t claim it’s green,” BSW’s leader told German media. “To infer coalition intentions from this is childish. We need a different approach and, above all, we finally need a sensible policy at federal and state level that takes into account the wishes of citizens instead of leaving them angry.”
So strongly has the newcomer BSW shown in recent surveys (13.4 percent in Saxony, 18.7 percent in Thuringia, 17 percent in Brandenburg) that just the BSW cooperating with the AfD might be enough to earn a parliamentary majority. In Thuringia, this would mean Höcke would assume the premiership. And while the CDU continues to shun the far rightists in word (calling them neo-Nazis), the party aligns with the AfD on a number of issues, not least in the red-button field of immigration. In both states, the tallies of the CDU and AfD together could constitute a solid majority, perhaps with the CDU assuming the premiership.
A final scenario envisions the AfD governing alone, in a minority government, which might come to pass should the other parties not manage to paper over their differences and animosities and form a multiparty coalition.
What would it mean to have the AfD in power in Saxony or Thuringia? There’s barely a newspaper, television talk show, or podcast in which German experts, politicos, intellectuals, and civil society activists, among others, aren’t discussing exactly this question.
“If the AfD has a ministry in its hands,” journalist Arne Semsrott wrote in Power Grab: What Happens When the Extreme Right Governs, “its minister can determine the practical execution of laws without interference from parliament. It can issue ordinances and internal directives, and fill key government posts. The decisive factor for the AfD’s greatest impact is therefore which ministries it controls.” Whatever ministries the AfD holds, Semsrott argued, the first move would be to replace non-AfD department heads with loyalists. Höcke himself counted about 150 posts in Thuringia that would turn AfD at once, if he heads the state.
Since the AfD understands itself as the law-and-order party that Germany desperately needs to get “out-of-control crime” under wraps, its plum would be the Ministry of the Interior, which controls the police and the domestic intelligence services. AfD chief Alice Weidel’s rant at the AfD’s party congress in June leaves little doubt who the first targets would be: non-Germans. “We have an internal security crisis,” she inveighed. “Foreigner crime and foreigner violence are exploding.” In Germany, she claimed, there are ever “more knife attacks, more murders, more rapes”—and upstanding Germans are the victims.
Very quickly—without changing laws—an AfD-led interior ministry could give the police force an authoritarian, hard-right makeover. “The interior ministry sets priorities for its police force,” Tobias Singelnstein, professor of criminology and criminal law at Goethe University Frankfurt, explained in a podcast episode. “It could, for example, opt not to go after right-wing extremists but rather left extremism, and rather than crack down hard on economic crime pursue climate activists.” Also among the AfD’s most wanted: Muslim people, naturalized citizens with roots in Turkey and the developing world, Gypsies, asylum seekers, and refugees.
It is these groups that Höcke has in mind when he told Germany’s N-TV: “We will definitely make Thuringia as unattractive as possible for social migration. We will make it clear that the Thuringia department of the International Welfare Office Germany is closed.”
The justice ministries, too, would be atop an AfD wish list. As in Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Hungary and 2015-23 conservative-ruled Poland, the far right would undermine judicial independence by replacing as many state-level justices as possible with AfD cronies. As for the agenda, the AfD says it will begin by reversing the legal rulings against its own party members, such as Höcke. “When the AfD is in government, the political show trials will be dealt with,” Höcke said at the June party congress, referring to his and other trails. “Then there will be a neutral judiciary again.”
At the same event, AfD Bundestag member Stephan Brandner demanded a “depoliticization of the judiciary” and explained what this meant: the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of those “responsible for the subterranean state of this country.”
According to Gräwel of Christopher Street Day Leipzig, LGBTQ+ people and others who don’t fit the AfD’s narrow definition of normal will suffer, particularly those in smaller cities and towns. “Some of my friends are considering leaving,” she said, should worse come to worst. “In small towns where everyone knows everyone, being ‘out and proud’ isn’t easy,” she added, noting that violence against LGBTQ+ people is already standard in Saxony.
It’s only the police that keep militant, far-right protesters from disrupting the Pride parades in Saxony, even in the big cities of Leipzig and Dresden. “It’s scary,” Graewel said about the aggressive counterprotests. Were the security apparatus in the hands of the AfD, the LGBTQ+ community is only one segment of civil society that could no longer count on protection.
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