The great divide

The rise of the hard-right AfD in recent state elections has caused panic in Germany, but is it premature? James Hawes argues that deep historical and cultural divisions between east and west will serve to protect the country from the spread of populism

THE MEDIA ARE ALIVE with crumbling firewalls (Brandmauer) in Germany. State elections in Thuringia have delivered the first win for the extreme right since 1945 in the region where the Nazis first entered regional power in 1929, and on the date Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.

"The east will do it!" The Alternative für Deutschland's (AfD) campaign mixed the usual right-populist themes with the suggestion that the east is where the real Germany resists the liberal horrors of multiculturalism and windpower.

A panic-stricken commentator announces that "there's only one way to keep Germany's far-right AfD at bay. Address the concerns it exploits" with "constructive debate on sensitive issues".

Other writers are horrified that Germany's centreright Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is suddenly concentrating its firepower on, of all people, the Greens. Are Germany's Tories copying all those former centrist conservatives of recent years (take a bow, Boris Johnson) and adopting the attack tactics of rightwing populists? That's the firewall that really matters, and if that goes...

Some facts. At the last Thuringian election in 2019, the AfD won 23.4% of the vote. This year, it won 32.8%. Consider those five years: Covid, the Ukraine war and the energy crisis caused by Germany's blind dependence on Vladimir Putin's gas. A country led by a fractious coalition under a chancellor whose party got less than 26%, and who seems to do whatever he does (if anything) late and unwillingly. Five years of an ideal breeding ground for anti-"system" populism and conspiracy theories - at the end of which the AfD has managed to convince less than 10% more voters in its strongest state.

And in Germany, of course, being the biggest single party doesn't mean you've "won", because your seats are in proportion to your vote. Without an absolute majority, all you win is first dibs at a coalition.