The Growth of the German Right-Wing

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition is in trouble ahead of the September 2017 federal election. And much of it emanates from the right.

Founded in 2013 as a protest party focusing mainly on financial neoliberalism and the Eurozone crisis, the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has seen its polling numbers rise significantly since pivoting towards anti-migrant rhetoric in the wake of Europe’s refugee crisis.

The AfD has a strong profile in the former communist east of Germany but a growing following in western parts as well. It has become a national political force, with a presence in 10 of the country’s 16 federal states.

The party is confident they have found a base for long-term success with their anti-migration, anti-establishment message.

Earlier this year, support for the AfD reached fifteen per cent in national polls, three times more than for any previous right-wing party, and well beyond the five-per-cent threshold required to enter the Bundestag after next year’s national elections.

There were five state elections in Germany this year, and in all of them, the party made substantial gains.

In March, the AfD garnered 12.6 per cent of the vote in Rhineland-Palatinate, good for 14 of 101 seats. The 15.1 per cent it took in Baden-Wurttemberg gave the party 23 of 139 seats. It captured 24.2 per cent of the vote, and 24 of 87 seats, in Saxony-Anhalt.

Six months after Merkel had adopted a “we can manage this” mantra towards migration, the election was the first big electoral test of the German leader and her policy, one that had seen over one million asylum applicants arrive in the country.

In Saxony-Anhalt, 56 per cent of AfD voters said they had opted for the party because of the refugee crisis, according to one poll. The news weekly Der Spiegel described the results as a “black Sunday” for her.

Merkel suffered further damaging losses at the hands of Germany’s resurgent far-right in elections in Berlin and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in September.

The latter result was particularly humiliating, as it is her home state. Her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) came third behind the Social Democrats (SPD) and the AfD.

While Mecklenburg-Vorpommern provided the AfD with 20.8 per cent, good for 18 of 78 seats, in Berlin the AfD won the highest share of the vote for a right-wing party since the Second World War, with 14.2 per cent. It resulted in winning 25 of the city-state’s 160 seats.

“From zero to double-digits, that’s a first for Berlin,” stated the AfD’s top Berlin candidate, Georg Pazderski. “We have achieved a great result,” added Beatrix von Storch, one of the AfD’s leaders. “We have arrived in the capital and are on our way to the Bundestag.”

In none of these states did the party have a single seat prior to 2016. “The migration crisis was the catalyst for our success,” Frauke Petry, the party’s chair, admits.

A former entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in chemistry, Petry is a member of the state parliament in Saxony, the first German state to elect AfD legislators.

The arrival of 890,000 refugees last year has deeply polarized Germany, and misgivings against the newcomers run particularly deep in eastern states like Saxony, with unemployment fueling resentment and xenophobia.

She predicts that the AfD will benefit from a breakdown of the two big parties, the CDU and SDP. Alexander Gauland, a leading party spokesperson, told supporters that his party would “chase the old parties to hell.”

The party’s relationship with the Dresden-based hardline protest movement Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) has come under scrutiny, with the AfD often referred to as the group’s political arm.

While Petry, who was herself born in Dresden in what was Communist East Germany in1975, denies this, the overlaps are undeniable. In April, the AfD issued a statement declaring that “Islam does not belong in Germany.” It said that head scarves should be banned in schools and universities, and minarets prohibited.

The AfD is an “outbidder” party, one that adopts radical strategies to maximize support among voters belonging to an ethnic group. Democratic competition involving ethnic parties often leads to outbidding where parties adopt ever more extreme positions to avoid defeat.

Will Petry force the CDU to move further to the right? Angela Merkel, in power since 2005, has yet to confirm whether she will run for a fourth term in 2017. The party’s convention, scheduled for December, may provide an answer.