Germany
looks on nervously as AfD crowds cheer nation’s most feared politician ahead of
state elections
Alternative
for Germany’s Björn Höcke was in a bullish mood at a rally in Thuringia, one of
three regions where support is high for the far-right party ahead of elections
next month
Deborah Cole
Deborah Cole in Erfurt, Germany
Sun 25 Aug 2024 06.00 CEST
The most feared man in German politics cleared his throat
and took a sip of water as his audience hushed in anticipation, their mobile
phones aloft and set to record. “I’ve got to protect my voice for my first
speech as state premier,” Björn Höcke said with a grin. The crowd went wild.
Three eastern German states hold elections next month and,
by a quirk of the calendar, the regions up for grabs are among those with the
most supporters of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. If the polls are
accurate, the AfD could wind up the strongest party in all three, a year before
the planned date of Germany’s next general election. Depending on who you ask,
it would be a political earthquake, a catastrophe or a wake-up call for the
country.
The strength of the AfD and a new populist upstart, the
“leftwing conservative” Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance),
underlines dovetailing trends in Europe’s top economy: mounting frustration
with incumbents, anxiety about Germany’s military support for Ukraine and
festering divisions between east and west more than three decades after
reunification.
Höcke, 52, co-heads the state chapter of the AfD in
Thuringia, which will vote on 1 September along with Saxony. The AfD, polling
at about 30%, has been classed as “confirmed rightwing extremist” by the
Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic security
watchdog, in both states. Brandenburg, the largely rural state surrounding
Berlin, will hold its election on 22 September. Its AfD chapter is listed as
“suspected rightwing extremist”.
Two national magazines splashed the face of Höcke, a trim,
grey-haired former history and sports teacher, across their covers this month.
Der Spiegel ran his image, along with those of France’s Marine Le Pen and US
presidential hopeful Donald Trump, with the tagline: “How fascism begins”.
Stern had Höcke staring into the camera, his scowl covered with the words: “Who
votes for this man?”
Höcke has belonged to the AfD since it was launched in 2013
as a Eurosceptic party. He is seen as the driving force of its ever-stronger
embrace of radical anti-migrant, anti-Islam sentiment, as he calls into
question the foundations of Germany’s democratic order and postwar penance for
the Holocaust.
It is the performance of his state that will be watched most
closely in Germany, which has long prided itself on consensus-oriented politics
and having learned the lessons of the Nazi past, when the results trickle in on
election night.
With Thuringian pork sausages sizzling on the grill and
frothy pints flowing in a pop-up biergarten in the state capital, Erfurt, Höcke
basked in the bullish mood at his rally.
On a small square framed by communist-era housing blocks,
about 800 people appeared rapt as he railed against the government in Berlin
and the justice authorities who had repeatedly filed charges against him for
incitement. Höcke, who grew up in West Germany, mockingly calls the
constitutional protection office the “Stasi”.
Children with their parents clutched strings of AfD-blue
helium balloons while older men in socks and sandals stand for Höcke’s speech
with plastic flyswatters bearing the party logo tucked under their arms.
A few hundred counter-protesters rhythmically shouted a
rhyme from the sidelines behind a police cordon: “Höcke ist/ein Faschist”
(Höcke is a fascist). He dismissed the demonstrators, whose whistles and
jeering could be heard above the large sound system, as “filled with
self-hatred” and “needing therapy”.
Höcke said to applause that leftist NGOs mobilising against
the far right hated Germany and hailed action taken by Hungary’s prime
minister, Viktor Orbán, to crack down on progressive groups as an effective
model.
Looking like a tech executive in a smart shirt, his sleeves
rolled up in the summer heat, Höcke appeared slightly out of step with his
largely working-class audience as he compared Germany’s mainstream parties to a
cartel with a monopolistic stranglehold on the democratic “market”.
But he had supporters in thrall to him when he intoned the
key talking point of the movement, that the centre-left-led government in
Berlin wants to “do away with you, the German people” and “replace you with a
multicultural society”.
Höcke’s supporters gathered in Erfurt repeatedly said their
top concern was not Germany’s anaemic economic growth or the inflated cost of
living but “criminal foreigners” in their midst. “I have nothing against
foreigners – my wife is from Indonesia and my daughter’s boyfriend is from Sri
Lanka,” said Christof Meiering, 62, who retired from a job in IT. “But when
foreigners become criminal they have to be deported, and quickly.”
“It wasn’t easy in the GDR but we were safe,” said sales
clerk Manuela, 44, accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter Lea, referring to
life under communism. She said she was worried about Lea on Erfurt’s streets
and at school. “Everyone thinks that the AfD hates foreigners – that’s not
true. They can do what they want as long as they integrate, behave themselves
and pay their own way.”
In Germany’s fractured electoral landscape, an outright
majority is exceedingly rare, meaning that leading parties must usually form
coalitions to govern. The system was specifically designed in the postwar
period to make it difficult for an extremist fringe to gain power.
All of the democratic parties have maintained a “firewall”
against the AfD, vowing never to join forces with it – a policy that has so far
kept the far right out of government at the state and federal level.
André Brodocz, a political scientist at the University of
Erfurt, said he expected the blockade to hold but that an AfD sweep in the
state elections would palpably shift the centre of gravity in German politics
on contentious issues including migration, Ukraine and the “green” energy
transformation. “Other parties will try to occupy the issues and positions of
the AfD to conquer its voters” in the run-up to next September’s general
election, he said.
The traditional parties have proved incapable of winning
back a swath of voters, particularly in the east, where they have gone from
considering the AfD a protest party to giving its increasingly radical stances
their full allegiance in election after election.
“The other parties are totally unprepared to address that
spread of rightwing extremist political views,” Brodocz said.
Meanwhile the BSW party, whose firebrand leader Wagenknecht
is, like the AfD, highly critical of migration, Nato, the US and aid to
Ukraine, is polling in the double digits in all three states. Her
seven-month-old party has been billed an “alternative to the Alternative” for
voters – and potential coalition partners – who see the AfD as too extremist.
Its own positions on many pivotal issues are so vague that
the national daily Süddeutsche Zeitung called it a “black box” whose contents
remained sealed and mysterious.
Mathematically, it is possible that the BSW will be an
essential component in the ruling coalitions of all three states, however
ideologically awkward. In the elections for the European parliament in June it
stole voters from across the party spectrum.
The party’s candidate in Thuringia, Katja Wolf, said she
sensed “fear of the AfD wherever you go in the state” and that the BSW was
responding to the spread of “hate” by directly addressing the enduring
disappointment and alienation of easterners.
“The promise [after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989] was
you’ll be better off than before,” she said. “And in material terms, they were
right.” But she said lasting inequality with the west, a sense that rural
regions were “cut off” without access to local doctors, schools and public
transport, plus demographic shifts taking a bite out of property values, left
many citizens feeling cheated. Add to that the soaring cost of energy since
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and an influx of more than a million Ukrainian
refugees into Germany.
“This is a war for which Thuringians are not responsible but
they are bearing the brunt of it here,” she said, echoing the sentiments of
many easterners who question Germany’s role as the top European weapons
supplier to Ukraine and wonder how long vast, nuclear-armed Russia can be
treated as a pariah.
A poll this month for the independent Allensbach Institute
found stark differences of perspective between east and west. More than half of
easterners – 53% – said Germany should “try to build up and strengthen ties
with Russia”, versus 25% in the west.
In the east, 54% of voters said they agreed with the
statement: “We only seem to be living in a democracy, in reality citizens don’t
have a say,” while just 27% in the west shared that view.
Bodo Ramelow, of the far-left Linke party, who has governed
Thuringia for a decade, admitted that he was part of the “establishment” as
stiff political winds blew against the system. He said he refused to “insult
AfD voters as fascists” and was fighting for every vote against the far right.
“The 30% [support for the AfD] defines the state but I’m talking about the 70%
and it has to grow,” he said. “I’m fighting against the normalisation of
fascism.
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