A good and bad day for Germany's AfD party
There are striking parallels between what is currently unfolding in German and Austrian politics.
"It's completely clear that the AfD is the future," declared Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, today, who praised the policies of Germany’s hard-right party on immigration as he hosted its leader, Alice Elisabeth Weidel, in Budapest.
This ringing endorsement will be music to Weidel’s ears ahead of Germany’s national election on 23 February, in which the AfD - which entered the Bundestag for the first time in 2017 - is poised to come second, securing around 20 per cent of the vote and overtaking Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s own centre-left party.
Despite its rising popularity, the German electorate remains deeply divided on the AfD. While a significant minority believe it is the only party that will take their demands for tougher immigration control seriously, many others still view it as a pariah party tainted by its revisionism towards the Third Reich. Polls indicate that two thirds of Germans regard it as a danger to democracy while just over 40 per cent want the authorities to shut the party down.
Unless the AfD performs even better than expected and wins a shock outright majority on 23 February, it faces a tricky path to power, thanks to all of Germany’s mainstream parties’ refusal to form a coalition with it.
Last month, Friedrich Merz, leader of the mainstream conservative CDU, the party expected to perform best in the looming election, broke precedent by relying on support from the AfD to get a motion on tougher asylum policy through the Bundestag. In the backlash that followed, Scholz accused him of tearing down the “firewall” that had been erected to keep hard-right forces out of power after the fall of the Nazi regime.
It’s worth remembering that Germans are not the only ones refusing to work with the AfD. The party has also been shunned by a number of anti-immigration European parties with seemingly similar agendas.
Both Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen declared they needed a “clean break” from the AfD, expelling it from their right-wing bloc in the lead up to last summer’s European parliamentary elections, after the AfD’s lead candidate, Maximilian Krah, suggested that not all members of the SS were war criminals.
As the Times’s Berlin correspondent Oliver Moody writes, while national AfD figureheads such as Weidel usually take great care to come across as reasonable democrats, there is still considerable concern about “the party’s wilder elements or suspicions that it harbours a hidden agenda.”
Björn Höcke, the AfD’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, who has expressed a desire to deport a fifth of the population, has twice been fined for trotting out a banned Nazi-era slogan at rallies. Meanwhile, the national party executive is struggling to rid itself of its scandal-ridden youth wing, the Junge Alternative, which even senior AfD officials have labelled an “insane sect”.
Even so, the AfD is not entirely isolated. It has Orban on side, and it is buoyed by its endorsement from Trump’s new right-hand man, Elon Musk, who recently proclaimed: “Only the AfD can save Germany”.
Another party the AfD has been keen to build alliances with in Austria’s hard-right Freedom party.
In fact, there are striking parallels between what is currently unfolding in German and Austrian politics. Democracy is being tested by growing disillusionment with mainstream political parties, paired with the rise of the hard-right and the refusal of mainstream parties to work with them.
Early elections were called in Germany after the longstanding ideological differences in Scholz’s coalition - between his centre-left Social Democratic party, the liberal Free Democrats and the Greens - became too difficult to reconcile. And, if Merz comes out top in a couple of weeks, but the AfD deprives him of a majority, he likely faces two choices: break the taboo and agree to work with the hard-right or, much like Scholz three years ago, form an unnatural union with other mainstream parties that leads to further political deadlock.
The situation distinctly resembles the political rollercoaster Austria has been on since the shock victory of the anti-immigration, eurosceptic Freedom party in September’s elections.
Although the Freedom party came first, with 28.8% of the vote, it lacked a majority and its leader, Herbert Kickl, struggled to find other parties willing to work with one founded in the 1950s by former members of the Nazi paramilitary police.
Kickl’s untouchable status meant it fell on the mainstream conservative ÖVP party, the centre-left Social Democrats, and the liberal Neos to attempt to form an awkward coalition.
When these talks fell apart in early January, and the ÖVP reneged on its campaign promise to never work with Kickl, the Freedom party leader again had a chance to become Austria’s first hard-right chancellor since the Second World War.
This afternoon, however, Kickl confirmed that his coalition talks with the ÖVP have collapsed.
The AfD has been watching developments in Vienna keenly, with the party’s co-leader, Tino Chrupalla, insisting that the Freedom party’s success shows “our time on the government benches will come sooner rather than later”.
Caitlin Allen
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