Germany’s extreme right continues to gain ground

News

It is the rising party of the radical right in Germany. Like the Front National (FN) in France and UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) in the United Kingdom, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) is gaining ground at the polls with its anti-system, xenophobic and ultra-conservative positions.

The regional elections held in March in three German states saw the AfD reach double figures. Winning between 12 and 24 per cent of the vote, it came in third or second in certain regions. The AfD currently has seats in seven regional parliaments and has two Members of the European Parliament, where it is considering joining forces with the FN.

Born three years ago at the height of the Greek debt crisis as an essentially Eurosceptic party, the AfD, formed by a group of economists, has since been shifting ever farther to the right.

"The AfD underwent an identity crisis during the summer of 2015. It was a very strong internal dispute. The party finally decided to distance itself from liberal positions and to occupy a place to the right of the conservative party," explains Werner Patzelt, a political scientist at the Technical University of Dresden. "This new positioning was essentially driven by the migration issue."

Other the months, in the midst of the Europe-wide migration crisis, the AfD expressed ever-firmer opposition to the welcoming of refugees and to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s relatively open-door policy. The party’s leaders have gone extremely far at times in their statements regarding migrants. In February, the party’s spokesperson, Frauke Petry, and an AfD MEP, Beatrix von Storch, went as far as to call for the police to be allowed to shoot refugees attempting to enter Germany.

By taking this violently anti-immigrant line, the AfD has taken over, in the political arena, from the Pegida xenophobic demonstration movement, born in eastern Germany in Autumn 2014.

"Pegida and the AfD are two faces of the same phenomenon," says political scientist Werner Patzelt.

According to the surveys he carried out with hundreds of people taking part in Pegida demonstrations in Dresden between early 2015 and January 2016, the vast majority said they would vote for the AfD in the next legislative elections. In 2013, the votes gathered by the AfD fell just short of the five per cent threshold needed to enter the Bundestag.

The party now looks set to cross that threshold hands down at the next national elections in 2017. The manifesto it has just adopted for these elections is at once extremely conservative and unequivocally neoliberal.

On the issue of migration, the AfD manifesto advocates a "total closure of EU borders". The new German party also wants to see the state reduced to a minimum, to its most basic functions such as defence, security and the management of the country’s finances. At the same time, it is calling for a return to a "Europe of nations" within the European Union.

The AfD makes no mention of workers, of the mounting precariousness affecting them in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and no mention of poverty in its manifesto. The party does, however, call for fewer taxes: it wants to do away with wealth and inheritance taxes. And to cut public spending in return.

In terms of social policy, the AfD presents itself, in its manifesto and in the public positions taken by its leaders, as a great defender of the traditional family and the classical roles of men and women. It is opposed to the right to abortion and the policy of quotas in favour of women.

Clearly at odds with the current government on the refugee issue, the AfD manifesto also takes a totally opposite line to Merkel’s energy policy. The Chancellor headed the initiative to phase out nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima. The AfD wants to overturn this decision, and to bring an end to subsidies for renewable energies.

The new party is also a firm climate sceptic. "For as long as the earth exists, the climate will change," writes the AfD in its manifesto. And goes on to say: "Carbon dioxide is not a toxic substance but an integral part of all life. The more there is in the atmosphere, the more plants grow."

Until now, the presence of Germany’s extreme right parties, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) or Die Rechte, had been confined to the municipalities and a few regional assemblies. They had never gone beyond more than a few per cent in the legislative elections.

The AfD, however, seems to be following the path of the French FN and the ultra-reactionary right-wing wave sweeping across Europe, from Poland to Great Britain.

 

This article has been translated from French.