Germany’s AfD Continues to Gain Support

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The popularity of the right-wing Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) is surging in Germany. It is now the second strongest party in nationwide opinion polls, behind the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) and ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SDP).

According to the latest survey of 1,302 eligible voters conducted at the end of September by pollster infratest dimap, Scholz’s three-way coalition government of the SDP, Greens, and Free Democrats (FDP) has slumped to an all-time low: 79 per cent of respondents said it was not doing a good job. Meanwhile, the AfD reached a record-high 22 per cent.

The party won only 10 per cent of the votes in the 2021 general election, but since then, it has benefited from frustration with the rising cost of living, worries about the war in Ukraine, and a surge in immigration.

The AfD is anti-immigrant, anti-American, and pro-Russian. It is also opposed to the European Union. For Germany’s established parties, the AfD is not only a political competitor, but an opponent and an enemy.

But its ideological stance finds favour with many Germans. One out of every 12 people in Germany has a right-wing worldview, according to a study by a team at Bielefeld University commissioned by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is politically aligned with the SDP.

The representative study of German society has been conducted every two years since it was launched in 2002. About 2,000 people aged between 18 and 90 took part in the most recent survey in January and February 2023. According to the researchers, eight per cent of respondents this time held a clear right-wing extremist orientation. In earlier studies, it was only between two and three per cent.

Chief researcher Andreas Zick, the head of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at the university, pointed out that the less money people earned, the more widespread their right-wing extremist attitude. “The country is increasingly perceived to be gripped by national crises. And these affect people more harshly when they are less affluent,” he told Deutsche Welle.

Mainstream parties are increasingly spooked by the rise of the far-right AfD, which now leads the polls in four eastern states. In Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia, states that will hold regional elections next year, the AfD currently tops the polls, raising the possibility that the AfD might, for the first time, win power at the state level.

Conservative parties won state elections in Bavaria and Hesse Oct. 8, but to their right, the AfD still made gains, rising to 18 per cent in Hesse and 16 per cent in Bavaria, compared to 13.1 and 11.6 respectively in 2018.

In June, the AfD won its first directly elected chief administrator, or Landrat, in a small district council in eastern Thuringia. In July, the party won its first directly elected mayor in eastern Saxony-Anhalt state. Both victories strengthened the AfD by showing voters that ballots cast for it aren’t wasted on politicians doomed to opposition.

Thuringia’s Interior Minister George Maier (SPD) called these “an alarm signal for all democratic forces. The democratic parties must show that they can do better,” he continued, adding that it was time to “put political interests aside to defend democracy together.”

With support for the AfD at an all-time high, calls to ban the party outright are growing louder among increasingly unpopular national politicians, along with the mainstream liberal press.

Speaking last Aug. 10, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the president of the Federal Republic, appeared to call for the AfD to be banned. “We all have it in our hands to put those who despise our democracy in their place,” he remarked. The following day, in an unmistakable show of support, the left-liberal newspaper Der Spiegel ran an editorial titled “Ban the Enemies of the Constitution!” 

Chancellor Scholz on Sept. 6 warned Germans that the AfD is benefiting from the country’s ailing economy. “The vast majority of citizens know that the self-proclaimed ‘alternative’ is in fact a demolition squad -- a demolition squad for our country,” he said on Sept. 6, accusing the AfD of aiming to benefit from the economic downturn.

None of this has stopped the AfD’s continued growth. The growing influx of asylum seekers is seen as the main catalyst. This is a continuation of former chancellor Angela Merkel’s politics in which she revived a then-dying AfD by refusing to close Germany’s border to huge numbers of migrants in 2015. The AfD pivoted from being an anti-EU party to opposing migration and surged in popularity.

So President Steinmeier also warned on Sept. 20 that Germany “is at breaking point,” as 162,000 people applied for asylum in the country in the first half of the year. That’s “more than a third of all applications within the EU,” Steinmeier added in an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper.

 In short, AfD support comes from people who feel the German political class thinks that anything outside their liberal framework is politically illegitimate. Many, especially in the old Communist east, consider this highly ironic.

 “We had this in communist East Germany,” Harald Malek, a forester in Gardelegen, told the British Spectator magazine Aug. 5. “A regime that was always telling us what to think, what to do and, above all, how to vote.”