Britain is emerging, albeit grumpily, from eight years of Conservative mayhem. In France, voters clubbed together yet again to stave off the ever-present threat of Marine Le Pen. In the US, the Democrats have a spring in their step after the anointment of Kamala Harris as their presidential candidate. But this tentative resurgence of sensible politics is, sadly, eluding Germany.
On Sunday, two former regions of East Germany are expected to support in droves two parties of the far right. The three centrist parties running the country nationally – the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) – are struggling to get over the 5% threshold that was designed to keep extremists out of legislatures. Meanwhile, the conservative CDU – Angela Merkel’s old party – is struggling to counter the populists.
In the small state of Thuringia, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), is still streets ahead, with a projected 30% of the vote, although its support has fallen slightly since January. The CDU trails with 22%, followed closely by an insurgent group called BSW, named after its founder, Sahra Wagenknecht.
Wagenknecht has learned from the playbook of Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni and others. Dominate television, look respectable, masquerade as the “people’s champion”, play on voters’ fears, while pretending to belong to the mainstream. From nowhere, she has become a force to be reckoned with.
Her journey is fascinating. A former leader of Die Linke (the Left) party that was born out of the former East German Communist party, the SED, which ran the country until 1989, Wagenknecht fuses leftwing economics with anti-immigration national conservatism – the classic horseshoe where two extremes meet.
Most dangerously for Germany and Europe, a woman who saw good in Stalinism has made an end to military support of Ukraine a precondition for cooperation with other parties. On chatshows she produces lines that please the Kremlin, calling for an end to sanctions, a resumption in energy imports from Russia and denouncing Nato “warmongering”.
In the larger nearby state of Saxony, the picture is only marginally less worrying. The CDU is slightly ahead of the AfD, but the margin is wafer-thin. Its longtime premier, Michael Kretschmer, is desperately seeking undecided voters by calling for a cut in assistance to Kyiv.
All this comes a year before a general election that will end four years of indecision and bickering among the three-party “traffic light” coalition of Olaf Scholz’s SPD, the Greens and the FDP. The CDU will almost certainly lead a new coalition, but what kind of coalition and what kind of CDU – because the party of Merkel is unrecognisable from a few years ago.
After the regional elections on 1 September, talks will take place designed to cobble together coalitions to govern in Thuringia and Saxony – and to keep out the AfD.
The brandmauer or “firewall” still exists for that party. The irony – and the hypocrisy – is that the remaining parties will be forced to do a deal with Wagenknecht, an equally dangerous but smarter representative of the new far right. The CDU and SPD (if it gets over the threshold) will hold their noses, but they may have no option but to cut a deal with her.
Some Germans in the west may reassure themselves that this is the post-communist east, and what do you expect? The contamination, however, goes far beyond geographical boundaries. All four mainstream parties are in a mess. The Greens are suffering a backlash, as resistance to climate measures gains momentum across much of Europe. The party’s Robert Habeck, the vice-chancellor and economics minister, is regularly outmanoeuvred and briefed against by his so-called coalition partners. At a time when the country is crying out for inspiration, Scholz sees leadership as little more than dour survival.
The real villain of the piece is Christian Lindner, head of the FDP and finance minister. Throughout postwar Germany, the FDP has usually, but not always, scraped over the 5% hurdle to get into parliament, several times becoming junior partner to governments of the centre-right and centre-left. Some of the statesmen of yesteryear, such as longtime foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, were Free Democrats.
Now, in an attempt at “definition” ahead of next autumn’s general election, Lindner has turned the party into a car-hugging, anti-woke, ultra-libertarian outfit. This has led to an exodus of a cluster of longtime supporters. Lindner should have factored that in, identifying just enough supporters to get him over the line. If his calculation proves incorrect, the FDP, one of the original postwar parties, could be finished.
Linder is also the chief proponent of the “black zero”, Germany’s fetishistic stricture to balance annual budgets. The coalition has just emerged with a deal, but a grubby one, which involves a cut in military aid for Ukraine in 2025 from €7.5bn this year to €4bn (albeit still a high figure compared with other countries), and a significantly lower increase in the overall defence allocation than had been planned. The defence minister, Boris Pistorius, did not hide his fury.
As for the CDU, its leader, Friedrich Merz, has shunted it back from the centre ground to a more traditional form of conservatism. His personal popularity ratings remain as low as Scholz’s. Nerves are frayed as it looks over its shoulder at Wagenknecht. “She is working to destroy the CDU. She has a devilish ability to identify weak spots and to destroy them,” notes Mariam Lau, of Die Zeit, who recently interviewed her.
This is an unhappy political moment for Germany, but the dangers should not be exaggerated. Next year’s elections will probably produce another mainstream coalition of the CDU and SPD. Germany’s constitution has admirable safeguards for stability and democratic norms. The show will stay on the road.
The AfD and BSW thrive on novelty and drama, and it is possible that their appeal will dissipate as the economy edges upwards. The next few weeks will require cool heads and hard hats. Longer term, something else is required. Germany needs better than this, leaders who restore faith in the deliberative and consensus-driven politics that has served it so well and has been a beacon for others to follow.
John Kampfner is the author of In Search of Berlin, Blair’s Wars and Why the Germans Do It Better
