The firewall against the German far right is crumbling

 

The firewall against the German far right is crumbling

 

By entrenching itself in small towns, Alternative for Germany is winning over swathes of the country.

 

August 30, 2024 4:00 am CET

By Nette Nöstlinger

https://www.politico.eu/article/far-right-germany-afd-extremism-far-right-nazi-party/

 

GROßSCHIRMA, Germany — When members of the volunteer fire department in Großschirma, a small town in the eastern German state of Saxony, marked their institution’s 100th anniversary, it was only natural that Rolf Weigand would be there.

 

Weigand, a 40-year-old politician from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, is deeply enmeshed in town life. He’s active in the association that supports the local elementary school, and is also involved in the local poultry breeding club, once proudly scoring 94 points in a contest with his Thuringian bearded chicken. Earlier this month, he worked the beer tap at the local talent show.

 

“We have always sought contact with citizens here on the ground,” Weigand said of the AfD during the fire department party as children hopped around in a bouncy castle. “I think this closeness to citizens, this contact, makes us particularly strong.”

 

Indeed, there are few places in Germany where the AfD is stronger.

 

Nearly 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a jagged political schism runs through the country, tracing the former border between East and West Germany. On the east side of the divide, the AfD is surging despite its growing radicalism and persistent warnings from mainstream leaders that it is an extremist, even Nazi, party.

 

Ahead of three state elections across eastern Germany this September — including in Saxony and Thuringia this Sunday — the once-fringe party is polling first or close to first in all contests. That success is due to the party’s increasingly deep roots in small towns across the east like Großschirma, where in municipal and European Parliament elections in June, the AfD won around half the local vote, illustrating the extent to which it has become the dominant political power in the area.

 

 

 

The fact that so many voters in eastern Germany are increasingly embracing the far right points to the core issue underlying the divide: a stark loss of trust in the mainstream parties, institutions and the media. In the state of Saxony alone, only 41 percent of people are satisfied with the functioning of their democracy, according to a survey commissioned by the state government. Only one in ten people said they trust political parties, and only 15 percent said they trust the media.

 

The AfD, while doggedly stoking that mistrust, has stepped into the void, increasingly entrenching itself in eastern German society on the most local of levels. For the AfD, it is all part of a larger strategy: Begin by winning in municipalities and state parliaments across the east. That dominance, the thinking goes, will normalize the party despite its extremism, allowing it to one day expand to the highest levels of national government.

 

Figures like Weigand, who also runs his own ceramics-coating business, are critical to that strategy. In March, Weigand won nearly 60 percent of the vote in an election for mayor of Großschirma against two other centrist candidates. Due to a technicality, the vote was annulled, compelling Weigand to run again this Sunday. This time, he’s running unopposed.

 

The surge in support for the AfD comes despite the fact that state-level domestic intelligence authorities have classified the local branches of the party in both Saxony and Thuringia as extremist organizations aiming to undermine German democracy.

 

But in towns like Großschirma, the AfD is already almost a banal fact of life. At the fire department anniversary, citizens — even those who don’t support his party — praised the mayor, with one person calling him a “nice” guy.

 

Weigand, at one point, addressed the crowd.

 

“I would like to thank you very much for always standing together so well, for supporting each other, for really coming together as one,” he said, winning an enthusiastic round of applause when he concluded.

 

The crumbling firewall

The leaders of Germany’s mainstream parties are mindful of the fact that Adolf Hiter was initially able to rise to power at the ballot box — and that conservatives then helped normalize the Nazis by partaking in coalition governments with them, first in the eastern state of Thuringia, and later on a national level.

 

It’s in order to avoid a repeat of that history that mainstream parties now vow to maintain a Brandmauer, or firewall, around the AfD, refusing to include them in coalition governments — or, for that matter, to cooperate with the party on passing any kind of legislation.

 

The leaders of the AfD, however, intend to knock down the firewall by making it impossible to avoid working with the party in small towns. If elected representatives need to cooperate with the AfD to do things as mundane as repairing roads and schools, their thinking goes, the mainstream parties will one day be forced to work with the party on more sweeping policy issues.

 

“If people come into direct contact with the AfD in local government, make contact and also recognize that pragmatic policies are made there, then this is of course an origin or a possible beginning for cooperation at other levels,” Torben Braga, an AfD state parliamentarian in Thuringia, considered one of the party’s main strategists in eastern Germany, told POLITICO.

 

In Großschirma, even local politicians in parties opposing the AfD say that strategy is working.

 

One afternoon, Gunter Zschommler, a longtime local politician for the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a dairy farmer who had run against Weigand for mayor and lost, sat in the kitchen of his farmhouse and lamented the state of local politics as cows grazed outside. The far-right is rising, he argued, because mainstream parties have long neglected rural areas.

 

“Over the last two decades, major parties have focused exclusively on cities,” Zschommler, an affable 61-year-old, said. “The AfD has exploited this gap, promising people they will take care of them.”

 

Zschommler’s neighbor, Volker Scharf, a local politician from an independent citizens alliance, agreed and argued that a political gap emerged after East and West Germany unified in 1990.

 

“After reunification, first it was industry that left, then the state left,” Scharf said. “What remained was an empty space. That’s where the AfD stepped in.”

 

Due to the AfD’s popularity in local politics across the east, the firewall has in many ways already fallen. Between 2019 and 2023, there were more than 120 cases of cooperation in local government between the AfD and mainstream parties, most often with the CDU, according to a recent study published by the progressive Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

 

Examples of that cooperation include a case in Saxony where mainstream parties in one town council supported an AfD motion to forbid the use of gender-neutral language in advertising for the town’s theater. In another instance in Thuringia, mainstream parties supported an AfD motion to hold a vote on a leftist mayor’s dismissal.

 

“The firewall at the county level no longer exists and this will only get worse,” said Jana Pinka, a local politician for the Left party. “I’m really scared that it’s going to get even darker. I sometimes look for parallels with the 1930s.”

 

The weakening resistance

Many locals say that, despite the wholesome, practical image many small-town AfD politicians project, politics in the area have become increasingly raw since the party’s rise.

 

Zschommler, the dairy farmer, said that local politicians from all sides would often meet for beer and Schnitzel after town council meetings, but those days are long gone. “Things have gotten very cold,” he said.

 

There are starker examples of the increasingly tense political climate.

 

Dirk Neubauer, an independent who served as the commissioner of the county to which Großschirma belongs, was long one of the fiercest critics of the AfD in the area. “We are really on a very dangerous path here,” he said in a video message after the AfD’s strong performance in Saxony in the European election in June. “We are not rewriting history, we are repeating history.”

 

But in July, Neubauer abruptly resigned, citing threats from far-right extremists. “For months, I’ve been confronted with a personal, diffuse threat from right-wing groups,” he said in another video message. “I receive anonymous letters, I receive anonymous emails, I’ve had one or two personal confrontations,” he went on, adding: “All of that has extended to my private circle, and I’ve reached a point where I say: ‘Enough is enough.’”

 

Neubauer’s experience is by no means an isolated event. Between May and October of last year, every second local politician in eastern Germany experienced hostility in the form of verbal attacks, physical assaults or hate postings, according to a nationwide survey of municipal and county politicians.

 

In Großschirma, Weigand said that he is reaching out to his political opponents to undo the polarized climate. “We must grow together as one, that is what I am standing for,” he told POLITICO.

 

On social media, however, his tone is often more charged.

 

On his Telegram channel, he once posted a picture of heavily armed police officers standing in front of a church to protect it. “Mama, why are there police with big guns standing in front of the church?” read a caption over the photo.

 

“Because we are open-minded and tolerant,” came the reply from the fictitious mother.

 

The subtext was that the German government’s migration policies had brought the threat of terror attacks to the country — or, as Weigand put it in the post: “The consequences of the ideology of failed woke multiculturalism in one picture.”

 

He added: “We’ll take back our country one bit at a time.”

 

That kind of rhetoric seemed distant when, one recent evening in Großschirma, Weigand was sworn in as acting mayor, pending his inevitable victory in Sunday’s election.

 

Right after, the members of the town council gathered for a meeting, and Weigand was presented with a congratulatory, pink bouquet.

 

The acting mayor then quickly moved on to discuss the items on the agenda —  the repair of a local road, the renovation of the town swimming pool, followed by a dialogue about what time locals are permitted to mow their lawns.