German
election 2025: Will the far-right AfD break through the firewall and take
power?
With
international politics in flux, three leading historians give their views on
the most consequential election in a generation for Europe’s most powerful
country.
February 22,
2025 4:04 pm CET
By Tim Ross
Germany will
elect a new parliament on Sunday, at a precarious moment for the West.
The vote is
almost certain to deliver a change in Berlin, with center-left Chancellor Olaf
Scholz set to be ejected from office and replaced by the conservative Friedrich
Merz, whose CDU/CSU is on around 30
percent in polls, once coalition talks are done.
But one key
question will be how much support the second-placed Alternative for Deutschland
(AfD) attracts, with its far-right policy mix including the mass deportation of
migrants. The party has won the backing of Donald Trump’s most influential
adviser, Elon Musk, while U.S. Vice President JD Vance has demanded mainstream
politicians ditch their convention of uniting to keep the far right out of
power.
The rise of
the AfD over the past decade — to around 20 percent in polls now — has
triggered deep soul-searching in the political establishment in a country still
wracked with guilt over its Nazi past. Could German history repeat itself?
POLITICO
spoke to three leading historians to hear their analysis of what the election
means, and what sort of threat the AfD poses to stability in the European
Union’s most dependable and economically significant member.
These
conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
Is
Germany heading back to the 1930s?
Timothy
Garton Ash, author and Professor of European studies, Oxford University: What
we see in the opinion polls is already shocking. One in five voters according
to the current opinion polls favor a party which really is hard right, calling
for “remigration” — kicking out people of migrant background who may already be
citizens; is calling not only to finish with the euro and restore the
deutschmark but for Germany to leave the EU. That’s extraordinary. I don’t
think it should be underestimated at all.
Katja Hoyer,
German-British historian and author of “Beyond the Wall: East Germany,
1949-1990”: In terms of comparisons to the far right in the 1920s and ’30s,
people overestimate the danger to democracy. Germany is acutely aware of its
own history and looks back immediately to the ultimate catastrophe of the 1930s
as the reference point. But the difference is that the Nazis operated in a
climate of mass political violence that came out of the First World War and
that just doesn’t exist today. There is no SA, no SS. The other political
parties haven’t got their own military wings. Even the Social Democratic Party
(SPD) had a military wing in the 1930s.
In terms of
the AfD’s capacity or even willingness to dismantle democracy, they are not
outright setting out to do that in the way that the Nazis did. The same applies
to voters. There’s not a resentment of democracy itself that’s behind the AfD
vote, whilst that was definitely the case back in the past.
Can the
AfD win power?
Timothy
Garton Ash: I do think there’s a real danger for 2029 if you have a so-called
grand coalition, Christian and Social Democrats once again, i.e. pretty much
the mainstream center and they don’t deliver significant change. There is a
really major crisis of the German political economy, of the German political
model and the discontents are incredibly widespread.
Katja Hoyer:
With Germany’s coalition system as it stands, they [the AfD] would always have
to work with somebody to get majorities in parliament to get anything passed.
So even in the medium and long term, their extremism would always be tempered
in some shape or form.
The CDU
[conservative Christian Democrats] have also shown they are quite happy to
accept AfD votes on an ad hoc basis. That gives them quite a strong negotiating
platform to say to the SPD, as the most likely coalition partner, if they want
to do something the SPD is unhappy with they can potentially still go ahead and
do it with the AfD.
An election
campaign billboard that shows Alice Weidel, chancellor candidate of the
far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), stands vandalized on February 19, 2025
in Berlin, Germany. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
James
Hawes, bestselling author of “The Shortest History of Germany”: That phrase
“second-biggest party” sets alarm bells off to an Anglo-Saxon who knows a
two-party or three-party system. Of course, it’s nothing of the sort in
Germany.
In a sense
it doesn’t really matter which of the big three or four parties one votes for
because they share an overarching commitment to what we would call, in this age
of Trump, really important core values. And they can all work together and do
work together at every level to protect those or work within them. Although
there are different offers, really German politics has an enormous great
center.
Why is
the AfD so popular?
Katja Hoyer:
If you look at the Cold War era in West Germany, there were basically two
options on the table: You could either vote for the conservative program under
the CDU which was really very conservative on a lot of issues, or you could
vote for reform and modernization under the SPD. They would each only work with
one small party as an add-on, usually the liberals.
So you had a
clear choice at every election: Do you want things to stay the same or do you
want them to get modernized? What’s happening now is even under Angela Merkel
you had those two main parties working together, that choice wasn’t there
anymore, and people think whatever you did on the ballot paper was the same
center-left going forward.
That’s why
the AfD is called the “alternative” for Germany — because they’re presenting
themselves as the only opposition. When people aren’t happy with the status quo
and they’ve got nowhere to go, you’ll see the AfD grow.
James
Hawes: The AfD draws its support
distinctly from one particular part of the country, the East. It really isn’t
spectacularly spreading in the West. I don’t think there’s any more danger of
it doing so than there is of New York adopting Utah gun laws, because there’s
this cultural difference between East and West Germany.
Any
democracy that can’t cope with a kind of splinter group of around 20 percent
can’t really call itself democracy. We have to be able to cope with that.
Really, West Germany doesn’t have to worry too much about the AfD. Even if
every East German state government went to the AfD, so what?
Timothy
Garton Ash: I have absolutely no doubt that the AfD is at 20-21 percent partly
because they have this articulate professional woman [Alice Weidel] as the lead
candidate, who can have a chat with Elon Musk on X.
The fact
that she presents well like that and she is genuinely articulate and speaks a
rather sophisticated, university-educated German, and is in command of the
economic figures, together with the support of the world’s richest man; plus
the fact that the sister party, the Freedom Party in Austria, is now being
asked to form a government; plus the fact that hard-right parties are doing
well all over Europe — all of that makes people feel it’s OK to vote for them.
How
important is AfD leader Alice Weidel?
Katja Hoyer:
This is what makes her dangerous I think: She’s able to project the more
moderate side of the AfD well beyond Germany’s borders because she speaks
English quite well, so she’s able to talk to Elon Musk or do her own thing on
the international stage.
But she’s
also in a minority within her own party despite being a leader. She tried to
take the “remigration” term out of her manifesto because she considered it to
be too extreme and it makes it basically impossible for them to have a
coalition with the conservatives, and she was outnumbered and outvoted at the
party conference and they put it back in.
And the same
is true for other things like the definition of family as mother, father and
child, which was in the manifesto. She took it out and they put it back in,
despite her own situation not meeting that definition [she is in a same-sex
relationship]. So it’s an odd thing in that you have a comparatively moderate
leader leading a party that’s far more radical than she is but she’s willing to
go along with it as well.
She knows
what she has to say and do in order to stay in power and that I think is quite
dangerous. If you look in history there’s plenty of examples like it where
ideological flexibility makes some of the most extreme leaders in the end.
Timothy
Garton Ash: If we say she’s untypical, untypical perhaps in her personal story
but not in her political views. She has now in her campaign speech endorsed the
idea of remigration, that is a position that until now has really been
identified with the often Islamophobic hard right. It’s a really radical
position.
What
happens next?
Katja Hoyer:
I don’t think most voters, even AfD voters, are as radical as the AfD is. They
don’t really want a pure AfD program implemented because that is too extreme
for most people. So if there is a way forward, the mainstream parties can do
some of the things on immigration and also the economy that people want and
there’s a sense that things are really moving forward, I also think that would
take the wind out of the AfD’s sails.
The problem
is if we have quite an unstable situation where nothing much gets done because
the new coalition parties can’t agree on anything. If that’s the case, then
voters will get more frustrated. And if the AfD doesn’t get so divided that
they become dysfunctional, really they just need to hold out and wait for more
people to come their way. So I can see a kind of Austrian scenario coming up if
nothing changes.
James Hawes:
I think the AfD is very close to the limit of where it’s going to get any more
votes from. I just don’t see where they’re going to come from, especially given
the CDU’s and CSU’s current noises on the big topic of migration. I do not see
sufficient Germans wanting to take that sort of risk at all.
Timothy
Garton Ash: Between now and [the next expected election in 2029], a whole bunch
of external factors could change the situation. But thinking about Europe,
thinking about what mainstream parties have to do to get our economies going
again, to give people a sense that irregular migration is under control, make
people feel secure in terms of doing our own defense if Donald Trump isn’t
going to do it for us, I think centrist parties should say to themselves, “Hey
guys, we’re drinking in the last chance saloon.”
I can’t
think of any time in the last 50 years when the forces of integration and
disintegration in Europe have been so finely balanced. It really is unclear
which is going to prevail in the next four or five years.
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