Families are making the most of the summer when I arrive in the German city of Erfurt, where wooden houses and shops line narrow streets that lead to open parks and squares. Friends are catching up to shop, drink and dine near a river that gurgles beneath an old stone bridge.
If Germany needs more tourists, it only has to issue a picture of Erfurt to sell more flights. The food is good, the beer even better. This town, halfway from Frankfurt to Berlin, has all the outward signs of happiness – especially when I visit at the height of summer and talk to locals over drinks. But I’m visiting to learn about the shadows beneath the sunshine.
The AfD under Alice Weidel (right) has transformed Germany’s political landscape. The protester’s sign reads “Hitler was also democratically elected”.Credit: Matthew Absalom-Wong
Like other parts of Germany, this community is turning further to the right.
Fed up with the dominant political parties, many voters are shifting their support to new leaders who have been labelled extreme – and even called Nazis. One party in particular, the Alternative fur Deutschland, or AfD, was once dismissed as a fringe group. Now it is on centre stage.
“It’s devastating,” says Klara Verdachtsfall, 27, a student. She admits the personal toll from the election results earlier this year that continued the rise of the AfD, a party she is desperate to stop. She joins thousands of others at protests as part of a group called Auf die Platz, a phrase that means “on your marks” when runners are about to start a race. In Germany, this political race is deadly serious.
“Whenever we get word of a right-wing demonstration that’s being planned, we’ve been protesting,” she says. “We set up a demonstration to counter it, to always show people that the city is not for right-wing extremists, it’s for all of us.”
Voters swung hard to the right in this district at the national election in February.
The AfD gained 26.9 per cent of the vote – up from 16.3 per cent four years ago. It did even better in the neighbouring districts: 40.4 per cent in Eisenach; 40.6 per cent in Gotha. The party, formed only a dozen years ago, is giving voice to real anger in the community.
“Wages have not been rising, and the cost of living has significantly increased,” says Verdachtsfall. “We are seeing tougher times. The AfD is very good at offering extremely easy solutions for situations that are very long-running, very complex and not as easy to be answered, which many people find appealing.”
This is not only happening in Germany. Others have growing parties that appeal to the right – think Nigel Farage and Reform in the UK, or Marine Le Pen and her National Rally in France. But nowhere experiences this like Germany, a country traumatised by two catastrophic wartime defeats, the echoes of Adolf Hitler and decades of communist rule that divided east and west.
Now the big question for Germany, and for Europe, is whether this shift to the right is only a passing reaction from a sullen electorate or a sign of things to come.
While its critics despise the AFD, it is winning hearts and minds with its platform. It opposes “woke” gender politics, wants to quit the Paris Agreement on climate change, vows to exit the euro currency, and is in favour of better relations with Russia despite the war in Ukraine.
Erfurt, Germany – on outward appearances a thriving, successful city.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Most importantly, it is adamantly against the 3.3 million asylum seekers who now call Germany home after waves of migration over the past decade – including Muslims who arrived after the collapse of Syria. The AfD’s federal leader, Alice Weidel, wants migrants deported. “I have to be honest with you: if it’s going to be called remigration, then that’s what it’s going to be: remigration,” she said in January.
Tesla founder Elon Musk is a fan. So is US Vice President JD Vance, who met Weidel in January and declared this week that Europe was at risk of “civilisational suicide” by failing to control its borders.
The power of the protest vote
The two parties that dominated German politics for generations, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on the left and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on the right, have been put on notice. While CDU leader Friedrich Merz became chancellor in February, he had to rely on the SPD. At state level in Erfurt, the CDU also governs in coalition with the SPD. But the single biggest party in the state parliament of Thuringia, the Landtag, is not one of the old ones. It is the AfD.
“For some, the AfD is a channel to voice their protest,” says Antonios Souris, the chair of German Politics at the Free University of Berlin.
“There are some voters who vote for the AfD despite its positions and candidates, and there are others who vote for them because of its positions and candidates.
‘All around the globe, the far-right vote is driven by nativism: the idea that ‘non-native’ people, ideas, and customs are a danger to the nation state, which needs to be homogeneous.’
Karl Arzheimer, University of Mainz
“However, protest voting is rather economically motivated – although cultural issues are pretty present in the media. East Germany became a stronghold of the AfD due to the economic deprivation of some of its regions and then, recently, the wide perception of becoming poorer following inflation.”
The German economy shrank by 0.1 per cent in the June quarter, the country’s statistics office reported on Wednesday. The minimum wage, at €12.82 per hour – about $23 – is one of the highest in Europe, and it is rising. But the unemployment rate is stubbornly high, at 6.3 per cent, and almost 3 million people are out of work.
Kai Arzheimer, the professor of politics at the University of Mainz, says Germany is going through a political earthquake – and that migration and cultural issues have more power than economics alone.
Björn Höcke, party and parliamentary group leader of the AfD in Thuringia, leaves the AfD election party.Credit: AP
“Resistance to immigration and multiculturalism and more specifically Islamophobia is really the driving force behind the AfD’s success,” he says. “The common theme is resistance to social, political, and cultural change. But immigration remains the most important issue for their voters.
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“All around the globe, the far-right vote is driven by nativism: the idea that ‘non-native’ people, ideas, and customs are a danger to the nation state, which needs to be homogeneous.
“Nativism is not confined to the far right, but what really sets them apart is their disdain for the liberal elements of democracy: minority protections, free media, and independent judiciary, checks and balances, rules and procedures. This authoritarian streak appeals to their voters, or at least does not put them off.”
‘Security in difficult times’
I came to Erfurt to talk to people about what happens next. The city shares a key factor with others that have turned to the right: the sense that it has been left behind. An old brick building here, a former Stasi headquarters that once held 5000 political prisoners, is a reminder that Erfurt was part of East Germany. It is wealthier than other cities of the former German Democratic Republic, but families still have lower incomes than those in the west.
“I’m a child of the GDR,” says Pascal Franz. Born in Erfurt in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, he can see the disappointment of people who feel betrayed by unification. He lists the problems he sees around him: greater inequality, global warming, environmental pollution and the impact of the war in Ukraine. He believes the pandemic eroded trust in politics, the result of unpopular decisions on quarantine and health.
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel speaks during an election event at the party’s Berlin headquarters.Credit: AP
“People look for security in difficult times, and the reflex for many is to pursue conservative values,” he says. “And the AfD is skilfully using social media to appeal to younger people in particular.”
Henryk Balkow, 44, was raised in a village near Erfurt with the promise that everyone would gain an equal share of the nation’s wealth – the GDR lie that crumbled with the Wall. Even now, he says, the anxiety about inequality is part of the unease that gives rise to the right: “People are very sensitive when they have that feeling that somebody is getting a little bit more than me.”
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Migrants have become the target, he says, because they have brought so much change. In one example, he says, a village near Erfurt with 500 residents learned at short notice that an old army barracks would be used to house 150 refugees. Neither group spoke English; each struggled to understand the other. He says the village was one of the first to shift to the AfD.
Balkow hopes the AfD implodes. “There is a core in the AfD which is not just conservative – they are Nazis, just extreme Nazis. But there are a lot of politicians in the AfD who are opportunists. A lot of them were in another party before, and the AfD ticket was just like a fast lane to success for only a little bit of work.”
Those inside the AfD – the very people called “extremist” – believe this trend is not about extremism at all. They say they are succeeding because the major parties have failed so badly.
A crowd in Erfurt listens to AfD Thuringia leader Björn Höcke speak at an election rally in February.Credit: Getty Images
“The AfD addresses problems that are burning on many people’s minds and we offer solutions for them,” says Wiebke Muhsal, who represents a state district east of Erfurt.
“Yes, citizens want a restriction on immigration, but this is also tied to their sense of justice. It is unjust that elderly people can no longer live off their pensions, parents have to work harder and harder to feed their children, while at the same time our country is being de-industrialised and tax money is being distributed abroad or to foreigners.”
Like other AfD politicians, Muhsal knows how to provoke. She wore a niqab in state parliament in 2016 to call for it to be banned, one year before One Nation leader Pauline Hanson did the same in the Australian Senate. There was an outcry, but it did not deter voters. The AfD gained 11 seats in the Landtag in 2014, the year Muhsal was elected, and it doubled to 22 seats in 2019. It rose again to 32 seats at the state election last year.
“By labelling us as right-wing extremists, the established parties and the media try to silence us or ensure that no one listens to us,” she tells me by email.
“After all, who would talk to an extremist!? This shows above all that the others have no arguments to counter us, only their propaganda.”
To fight at the ballot box, or in the courts?
Germany now faces an agonising question – is it repeating the 1930s? Journalists are usually loath to draw parallels with that decade, but my visit to Erfurt tells me there is no taboo in mentioning the rise of Hitler and the ruins of the Weimar Republic. The critics of the AfD are open about the way Hitler gained support through democratic means before replacing the republic with the Third Reich.
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The AfD leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has shown in the past that he is not held back by sensitivities about history.
He has criticised the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and deplored the way Germany remembers the crimes of the past. He was fined last year for using a key phrase that used to be heard at Nazi rallies: “Everything for Germany”.
Arzheimer, the professor of politics at the University of Mainz, says there are “Weimar vibes” in the way the dominant parties are now barely able to form a government. And he says it is wrong to regard the AfD as mainstream or conservative.
“They shifted from a softly Eurosceptic platform to a radical right platform around 10 years ago but did not stop there,” he says. “The party is dominated by a faction that openly embraces volkisch nationalism, a hyper-nationalist, racist ideology that predates Nazism. Their MPs employ members of right-wing extremist organisations in considerable numbers.”
He points to another development: a decision by the German domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, to label the party a “confirmed right-wing extremist” group. The AfD is appealing this decision, made in May, but the classification has not been withdrawn.
“This is not some fringe group,” says Arzheimer. “Given its substantial electoral support and the resources that come with it, the AfD is a danger for democracy in Germany.” His conclusion? The Federal Constitutional Court would probably ban the party if the government or parliament chose to trigger this formal process. For now, there is no sign they will do so.
None of this is apparent when I walk the streets of Erfurt during a glorious summer. Germany remains a powerful and prosperous country. It is not alone in Europe in feeling the shift of an unhappy electorate. Here, however, the past casts a longer shadow.
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