SCHORFHEIDE, Germany—At the Schorfheide Breakfast, an annual event north of Berlin, a husband-and-wife acoustic duo regals strollers with upbeat renditions of ’60s tunes along with a snippet of Marlene Dietrich. Dozens of NGOs and other volunteer associations—including the fire department, a beekeepers’ club, the soccer team, a sister-city project with the African country of Burkina Faso, and more—line the cobbled main street, offering fellow locals homemade baked goods, fruit slices, coffee, and the opportunity to chat about their group’s activities.
SCHORFHEIDE, Germany—At the Schorfheide Breakfast, an annual event north of Berlin, a husband-and-wife acoustic duo regals strollers with upbeat renditions of ’60s tunes along with a snippet of Marlene Dietrich. Dozens of NGOs and other volunteer associations—including the fire department, a beekeepers’ club, the soccer team, a sister-city project with the African country of Burkina Faso, and more—line the cobbled main street, offering fellow locals homemade baked goods, fruit slices, coffee, and the opportunity to chat about their group’s activities.
Schorfheide is a rural municipality in Brandenburg, an eastern Germany state where elections on Sept. 22 are likely to lend the extreme right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) record gains, as they did earlier this month in Saxony and Thuringia. The jolt of those results—the AfD is a radical-right party that trucks with neo-Nazis—has mainstream Germans scrambling for answers to counter the rightest tendencies that jeopardize postwar democracy.
One of those solutions is the democratizing practices of civil society: the way that participatory grassroots engagement brings communities together and instills social cohesion into localities. According to its proponents, from the billionaire philanthropist George Soros to the European Union, the more grassroots engagement, the thicker the social fabric—and thus the less atomization and gloom there is for right-wing populists to exploit. Civil society nurtures the values of democratic life: tolerance, moderation, compromise, and respect for opposing points of view.
And where civil society is thin and or non-existent, official or private benefactors can help it blossom with money and know-how. This is a cornerstone of the Soros-founded Open Society Foundations that are active in democracy promotion around the world. It’s now also a tenet of German policy in the eastern states.
“At the Schorfheide Breakfasts we show [the hard right] that these are our streets and spaces,” explains Peggy Sydow of the Schorfheide municipality, which has won numerous awards for its civic initiatives. The breakfast is just one of the events in Schorfheide where the NGOs network and engage newcomers. Every stand offers parties a leaflet with information basics, meeting times, and an email address. “The far right barely has a presence here,” says Sydow, who notes that until this year, the 18-person Schorfheide municipal council never had a single extreme right member.
This tranquility, however, wasn’t always the case and Schorfheide is a vivid example of how civil society and democracy promotion can work—as well as its limitations. In 2008, a family moved to Schorfheide’s Finowfurt, a village of 5,000, and bought property that it turned into an outdoor venue for neo-Nazi concerts that attracted up to 500 like-minded young men from the region—and beckoned to Schorfheide’s younger generation. The property owner wasn’t just anyone in the sprawling hard-right scene but the Brandenburg boss of a neo-Nazi party. Sydow tells how the thugs paraded through the locality for days at a time during all-weekend festivals.
The municipality’s citizens puts their heads together and were joined by the Brandenburg section of the Mobile Counseling Teams Against Right-Wing Extremism (MBR), a nationwide, state-financed initiative that combats extremism by mobilizing citizens, labor unions, and local governments to defend themselves against its tactics and violence. The 55 MBRs in Germany promote democratic culture by assisting local communities in reclaiming public spaces—from town squares to Twitter—encroached upon by the far right. Each MBR is staffed with a diverse team of experts, from social workers and social scientists to legal experts and anti-racism activists.
The municipality, aided by the MBR, called the Schorfheide Breakfast to life in 2011 as a means to beef out and stiffen the back of its civic groups. The idea, central to the MBRs, was to “crowd out” the far right from public space by occupying it. The tactic that ultimately knocked the neo-Nazis out of Schorfheide, however, was calling it on legalities. The organizer was fined for excessive noise, for the absence of proper sanitary facilities, and for the public display of Nazi symbols like the swastika and imperial flag. Eventually, the fines piled up, outreach in the municipality withered, and the family moved away.
Schorfheide’s method to keep these kinds of political influences at bay is to enrich its civil society further—and the community’s health is evidenced by its over 50 civic, volunteer-run groups, as well as a rich schedule of cultural events. “The far right never managed to get a toehold here after the neo-Nazis left,” Sydow says.
Sydow’s claim, however, is overstatement. As refreshing as Schorfheide’s story may be, it is not without an underside. In the European Parliament election in June, 31 percent of Schorfheide’s voters picked the AfD—an above average share compared to all of Brandenburg (28 percent) and eastern Germany (29 percent). The same day, Schorfheidians voted for the 18 spots on the municipal council. The AfD garnered less than in the EU vote—22 percent (it won 27 percent in Brandenburg)—but still more than enough to wrinkle brows in Schorfheide’s municipal offices. At the breakfast event, everyone I spoke with expressed a version of the same explanation: The high AfD vote can be chalked up to the poor performance of the unpopular three-party government in Berlin. While the AfD’s tally entitled it to four seats in the municipal council, the party only ran one candidate, thus its three other seats are empty. Strange as it may sound, Schorfheide remains a bastion of democratic verve, despite the votes of a fifth to a third of its citizens.
Schorfheide’s AfD vote illustrates that neither high civic engagement—nor better economic circumstances, nor an absence of immigrant populations, nor high voter turnout—constitutes a sliver bullet against rightist parties, even though civil society stymies their presence in and impact on localities, as a decade of MBR and other democracy promotion work illustrates. Thus far, there are no studies measuring the relationship between civil-society density and voting patterns in the 2024 votes. A 2019 study on the state election in Thuringia shows that the far right thrived in communities that are more rural, have low voter turnout (electoral participation), where economic wellbeing is precarious, and that have weak structures, including lack of commercial enterprises, infrastructure, trade unions, and the like of quality medical services or schools.
Markus Klein of the MBR Brandenburg finds the lower number of votes garnered by the AfD in the Schorfheide council election telling. “In the EU election,” he says, “the AfD vote was a symbolic protest. But in the latter, they stuck with the local politicians who they knew could get things done. “Beyond local politics, there’s still an ‘us down here’ against ‘them up there,’ mentality,” says Klein.
Despite the disconnect between Schorfheide’s voting patterns and its buoyant civic life, there is a broad consensus in Germany and beyond that the so-called third sector presents a viable point of intervention from outside and that it can, as it has in Schorfheide, make communities more resilient to on-the-ground incursions from the far right. This is why Brandenburg receives a total of 6 million euros of state funding for the likes of anti-racism and queer initiatives, civic education, the MBRs, and many other such hands-on ventures. Klein says he is certain that these monies neutralize the hard right, and that more funding would go further—to a certain extent. “More funding is required,” he says, “but money can’t buy civil society. There have to be people there, on location, who want to make it happen..”
Since 2015, the federal government’s flagship program is Demokratie Leben! (Live Democracy!), which—with a budget of 182 million euros in 2023—helps “municipalities and districts all over Germany develop strategies for action in order to strengthen democracy and diversity and to counter group-focused enmity.” The program’s vast array of grassroots initiatives and political education projects across the country is immensely impressive but obviously falls short of deterring the rise of illiberal parties such as the AfD, which began its steep ascent into the political mainstream the same year that Demokratie Leben! began: in 2015.
Close observers, like sociologist Steffen Mau, author of a bestseller on the issue, conclude that the lion’s share of eastern Germans want to live in a democratic state—and practice democracy in everyday life—but simply do not relate to the western German political parties. Indeed, they have been woefully unable to win members in the eastern states. The AfD poses as an authentically eastern German party—although it is not—and representative of its citizens’ interests, as does the newcomer party Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Interestingly, in the European Parliament election earlier this year, only 34 percent of Schorfheide’s voters cast a ballot for one of western Germany’s traditional parties (Christian conservative, social democrat, green, liberal). In the municipal election, this share was even less, with the most popular vote getter being Bündnis Schorfheide, a civic initiative that runs in local elections.
Gradually, it’s becoming ever clearer that neither western Germany’s parties nor their agendas speak to eastern voters. Their priorities are local—such as new streets, recreational facilities, public transportation, and schools—and they trust local faces. Rather than resist this, Germany’s politicos should roll with it. Programs like Demokratie Leben! boost civic democracy and should be expanded. Germany’s NGO world is waiting impatiently for the passage of the Democracy Promotion Act, a bill that’s been stalled in the Bundestag for months that would give them access to long-term funding, in contrast to the grants that they reapply for every year. They also need the police and the justice system on their side—as is the case in Schorfheide, but not everywhere in eastern Germany.
The strong AfD votes in the east send an unmistakable message to Germany’s political establishment: Think locally with us—or get out of the way.
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