AfD on the rise – that’s why the party is getting stronger in East Germany The three biggest open questions after Prigozhin’s coup attempt

The Sonneberg district in the German state of Thuringia is one of the smallest in Germany, but Sunday’s second round result caused a stir across the Federal Republic: ten years after the party was founded, an AfD politician has captured a top municipality . office for the first time. Member of parliament and lawyer Robert Stuhlmann triumphed in the second round against incumbent district councilor Jürgen Köpper (CDU) – although he was also supported by the left, the Greens, the SPD and the FDP.

And the AfD in Thuringia isn’t exactly considered moderate: its head of state is Björn Höcke, who is considered the figurehead of the party’s far-right wing. Höcke and the Thuringian state association of the AfD are classified and observed by the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution as proven right-wing extremists.

The election of the AfD politician as district administrator is not really a surprise. The AfD has been flying high for months; the party has overtaken the Greens and even the SPD in polls. It has been the strongest political force in East Germany since autumn last year, also according to polls.

Why is that? For the CDU it is clear that the politics of the current government coalition in Berlin, the so-called traffic light consisting of SPD, FDP and Greens, are responsible for the misery. The obvious feuds within the traffic lights, the sides of which differ widely politically, should really fuel the AfD’s success – but it’s not the cause of it. And the war in Ukraine, which sent Germans into steep inflation and sparked fears of a blackout, can only partially explain the party’s high ranking in the polls.

The Other History of East Germany

The AfD didn’t just get strong yesterday: it reached 18 percent in polls in 2018. The root causes of its rise will therefore probably be sought elsewhere. On the one hand, there is the different post-war history of the FRG and the GDR. The main difference is that the GDR was a dictatorship, recruited far fewer guest workers than the FRG, and was less economically prosperous than its western neighbour.

These factors led to a different development of political consciousness in the new Länder after reunification. Feelings of deprivation mingled with xenophobic tendencies, which – as is often the case – became all the stronger the fewer foreign-looking people were present in everyday life. Countless people lost their jobs, their social security. And there was a huge emigration of the young – backward, to put it bluntly, old and stragglers.

The left initially benefited from this (initially as the PDS successor party to the SED), while the party-affiliated extreme right – such as the NPD – was hardly able to achieve electoral success. Right-wing extremists attracted attention through pogroms, not through political programs. In the meantime, however, the left has also been in decline in the East and the AfD has established itself as a protest and “anti-system” party.

Grand coalition and refugee crisis

On the other hand, the CDU shifted somewhat to the left in the Merkel era – at least in the years it formed a grand coalition with the SPD (2005 to 2009 and 2013 to 2021). This gave the AfD, which was originally founded as an economically liberal and socially conservative anti-euro party, plenty of room to develop. In the 1980s, as the far-right Republicans were on the rise, CSU chairman Franz Josef Strauss issued the slogan: “There must be no democratically legitimate party on the right of the CDU/CSU.”

While the grand coalition’s policy has not been exactly pro-migration, the chancellor’s decision in the summer of 2015 to take in a large number of refugees (“We can do it!”) probably boosted the AfD’s strong growth on medium term. The party managed to channel frustration and resentment about the policies of the grand coalition into the refugee issue and turn it into votes.

unsuccessful approach

In opposition, the CDU shifted back to the right and adopted some themes and rhetoric from the AfD. But this “conservative populism” failed to contain the AfD; voters preferred the original to the copy, which they viewed as opportunistic. In East Germany in particular, CDU politicians are increasingly working with AfD representatives at the local level; this means that the so-called firewall that the other parties have erected against the AfD is becoming increasingly permeable.

This attempt to isolate the AfD behind a “cordon sanitaire” worked quite well for a long time. Such political firewalls were and are also in other countries, because the rise of the AfD is not an isolated German phenomenon. Right-wing populism was also successful in other European countries – often long before Germany – namely in Italy, France and in some Eastern European countries, but also in Switzerland.

The problem with the cordon sanitaire

One problem with isolating populist political competition is that it can present itself as “genuine opposition” to “the system” and make the other parties look like a power cartel. In addition, the temptation for the established parties to enter into an alliance with the isolated party is great – especially if there is a risk that power will otherwise be lost. This has even happened several times in Europe, for example in Austria, where the conservative ÖVP formed a coalition with the right-wing populist FPÖ, or more recently in Sweden, where a liberal-conservative government is supported by the Swedish Democrats.

How the German parties will tackle the AfD’s challenge cannot yet be said. If the AfD continues to rise in the east, the results of the upcoming 2024 Thuringia state elections will at least exacerbate the problem. Then either a normalization of the AfD threatens, as happened with the FPÖ in Austria or the Swedish Democrats in Sweden. Or the AfD will remain politically isolated – which, however, will force the other parties to form ever broader and therefore more difficult coalitions.