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Austria’s
‘firewall’ against the far right collapsed. Could the unthinkable happen in
Germany too?
John
Kampfner
Events in
Vienna are forcing Germany’s bickering mainstream parties to rally together.
But the AfD could yet outflank the centre
Tue 21 Jan
2025 07.00 GMT
Could
Germany go the way of Austria? Could the party of the far right be invited to
form a government? What was previously deemed impossible, then revised down to
improbable, is now possible. There are two scenarios in which this could
happen.
Fast forward
to Germany’s general election day on 23 February and the following assumptions:
Germany’s Christian Democrats (CDU) win, reasonably comfortably, at around
their present poll rating of 30%. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland
(AfD) comes second, with an impressive vote share of between 20% and 25%.
Nevertheless, it is excluded from coalition negotiations thanks to the
“firewall” established several years ago by the mainstream parties to keep
extreme groupings at bay.
The CDU
leader and probably next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, will be required to open
talks with either the Social Democrats (SPD) or the Greens. Both parties of the
centre left, however, are predicted to suffer a drubbing, seeing their vote
share cut to the mid-teens.
Coalition
negotiations in Germany have traditionally been carried out in an atmosphere of
gravity, but also civility. Coalitions are one of the cornerstones of the
postwar federal republic. They are built into the system at every level,
requiring consensus-building, compromise and goodwill.
That is now
largely absent. The deliberative politeness of German politics – which some
outsiders have in the past wrongly dismissed as dullness – has been swept away
by the onrush of populism and the near-panic that the rise of the far right has
engendered. The outgoing coalition, known as the “traffic light” because of the
colours of the three parties involved, disintegrated in acrimony.
Previous
governments, for sure, have had arguments, but never so openly or with such
vitriol as characterised the spats between Scholz, his finance minister,
Christian Lindner, of the free-market Free Democrats (FDP), and the Greens’
economics minister, Robert Habeck. By the end, the protagonists could barely
stomach being in the same room as one another.
The rancour
has carried over into the start of the election campaign. The mainstream
parties are emphasising their differences with one another on issues ranging
from borrowing and spending, to climate and welfare payments. The CDU and SPD
are each trying to sound tougher than the other on immigration.
Fair enough.
That’s what parties are supposed to do in election campaigns. Yet what is
different this time is the tone. Some of the key players are employing methods
– such as making personal attacks or exaggerated claims against one another –
that are rare in the political culture. These parties know they will have to
form a coalition and cooperate – not least to keep out the AfD – but in this
new accusatory climate that will be difficult.
This is
exactly what has happened in Austria: three parties, from centre right, liberal
centre and centre left, promised to build an alliance, come what may. Their
talks collapsed on 4 January. They failed on the basis of the narcissism of
small differences.
Faced with
political crisis, the president (a Green and a man with impressive democratic
credentials) had to resort to asking Herbert Kickl, the leader of the far-right
Freedom party (FPÖ), a man who borrows Hitler’s terminology for the role of
chancellor, Volkskanzler, to try to form a coalition with the mainstream
Conservatives. Those talks continue, but Austria could soon have its first
government led by the far right since the second world war.
The pressure
is intense, therefore, on Germany’s parties to prevent such a calamity, and the
impression I have from speaking to strategists in the mainstream parties is
that they are sufficiently alarmed and galvanised by developments in Austria to
rally together.
Friedrich
Merz of the Christian Democratic Union, likely to become Germany’s next
chancellor
Which is
where the longer term scenario comes in. It is eminently possible that the
electoral arithmetic will require Merz to bring both the SPD and Greens into
government. Let’s assume that the talks go smoothly, ministries are divided up
without acrimony and a coalition treaty is agreed. All’s well that ends well,
except …
Assuming
Lindner’s ailing FDP fails to meet the 5% minimum to get into the Bundestag (a
threshold originally designed to keep out the extremists), the following would
happen: all the mainstream parties would be in government, while the excluded
populist parties – the AfD and probably the smaller far-left-meets-far-right
Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) – would make up the entire opposition.
Given how
quickly pendulums swing against governing parties in present-day politics, it
is not far-fetched to conclude that the AfD could be in pole position in four
to five years’ time when the next general election is called.
As the past
six months in the UK have shown, it does not take long for a government, even
one with an enormous majority, to fall out of favour. Whether public
dissatisfaction with Keir Starmer’s Labour administration is real or concocted,
whether it is recoverable or not, a clear path has emerged for Reform UK to
grab power at the next election. The same applies across Europe. One electoral
term now provides ample opportunity for opposition parties to see their
popularity surge and for governing parties to collapse as they grapple with
deep-seated problems that require more than one term to fix.
Back to
Austria: in the 2019 general election, the FPÖ, a party founded by former Nazis
in the 1950s, was in a similar position as the AfD is now, trailing the centre
right by a significant margin. At the most recent election in September, the
FPÖ won an unprecedented victory.
Reinforcing
this increasing uncertainty is the nagging suspicion that maybe the opinion
polls – which have a strong record of accuracy in Germany – may be understating
the AfD’s position. They have gained a couple of percentage points since late
November when Scholz collapsed his own government and called for early
elections, but it seems surprising, given the outrage caused by the terrorist
attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, that their share has not risen
further. Or that this has not been reflected by pollsters.
The AfD has
become, in any case, part of the political furniture. Not only does the AfD’s
candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, appear on chatshows hosted by Elon
Musk, one recent report showed that at local level, the party is integrated
into much of civic life – particularly in the former German Democratic
Republic.
The
populists will not go away. The post-election challenge for Merz and the rest
is to form a government that functions cohesively and tackles Germany’s
economic and social challenges at speed. If they fail, what until recently was
deemed unconscionable will come horrifyingly into view.
John
Kampfner is the author of In Search of Berlin, Blair’s Wars and Why the Germans
Do It Better
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