You could hear it in the voices of our news presenters, that capitulative tone of “Oh dear, here we go again”, as they reported from the state capitals Erfurt and Dresden.
The AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland or Alternative for Germany, had just romped home in regional parliamentary elections in the state of Thuringia in which Erfurt is the administrative centre. The party had also come a perilously close second to the CDU, the party of the centre right, in the state of Saxony in which the city of Dresden sits.
The AfD is the flag bearer of Germany’s “extreme right”, so the image of jackboots and swastikas is never far away. Actually, when the British encounter the Germans it rarely is. English football fans can barely resist taunting their German counterparts with “Two World Wars and one World Cup”, and love playing with “Achtung Shpitfeuer” and “For you Inglish ze var eez over”.
But then I am also staggered by how little most British people know about Germany beyond the above to which can be added that they drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of wurst. The Germans refer to themselves as “Das Land der Dichter und Denker”, the country of poets and thinkers which is quite remarkably captured by none other than Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the most English of eccentric comedy troupes, when they laid on a football game between Greek and German philosophers. Who other than those two nations could provide an 11-a-side team of recognisable names? True, the Germans had been reinforced by Franz Beckenbauer but apart from that they had Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Jaspers, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Not a bad bunch for a nation seemingly more closely associated with goose stepping and one Adolf Hitler.
Most of us have been on holiday in France, Greece, Italy and Spain and are more likely to have seen the Taj Mahal or Machu Pichu than Cologne Cathedral or maybe even Bavarian King Ludwig III’s fairytale castle at Neu Schwanstein. We have of course conveniently been able to put away our prejudices when it has come to owning German cars, German white goods or German garden tools. But what do we really know and understand about the AfD and, more to the point, who has ever even heard of the BSW?
We trip up when looking at the latter, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, a political grouping that has emerged around the MP Sahra Wagenknecht who comes from the old left and not the right but who is, nevertheless, anti-immigration, eurosceptic and socially conservative. Wagenknecht is herself formerly a member of Die Linke which in turn positions itself to the left of the traditionally social democratic SPD, the party of Olaf Scholz, Willy Brand and Helmuth Schmidt which is, for all intents and purposes, the spiritual successor to the party that ruled the GDR with an iron fist, the unrepentantly Stalinist SED.
Germany’s complicated political culture has grown up around proportional representation and this is not a phenomenon of post-war reconstruction. It was, in many respects, straight PR that led to the doors of the Chancellery being opened to Hitler in response to which, when the Federal Republic was formed, the legendary 5 per cent hurdle was implemented that determined that no party with less than 5 per cent of the popular vote would be considered when it came to allocating seats in parliament, be that of the federal Bundestag or the states’ Landtags.
I recall as an undergraduate writing a paper that postulated that democracy is not a form of government. It is, I argued, a social phenomenon, a collective state of mind to which the elective parliamentary system is most suited. I wrote this at the time in order to test Germany a little less than 25 years after the 1949 establishment of the Federal Republic yet at a time when the Soviet-created GDR was still alive and kicking, minting Olympic medals and a long way from its 1989 collapse. I concluded that the FRG, West Germany, was as such not a fully formed democracy as its society lacked the bottom-up democratic instincts of Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians but that it was a serious and laudable experiment of developing a democratic society from the top down.
From 1949 until reunification in 1990, young West Germans were being inculcated with the principles of democracy while, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, one authoritarian government had replaced another. We used to joke that at the formation of the FRG and when Konrad Adenauer, the new county’s first Chancellor, had ordered his people to be good democrats, they had clicked their heels and obeyed. We vaguely supposed at the time that democracy would take root and, with the likes of Willy Brand and above all the towering personality of Helmuth Schmidt at the tiller, who could believe it would not happen.
When the Berlin Wall eventually fell, there was in the West a sense that in the old East there was not just a huge unsatisfied demand for consumer goods – one has to have visited the old Eastern bloc to know just how scarce even items were that we would not regard as luxuries but basic to everyday life – but also for institutions reflective of a democratic country. The people of the GDR had not only lived under authoritarian government from 1933 until 1945, as had been the case in the West, but until 1989. So for 56 years which is by all accounts two generations rather than one.
Die Linke, simply The Left, always polled well in the old East or as referred to in Western parlance, the “new states” where there was enduring nostalgia for the relative carefree, cradle-to-grave protection that the notionally communist GDR had provided. Reunification was economically tough on the East where outdated and inefficient industries went to the wall by the score and where West Germans went carpetbagging. At the time, I had already tried to point out that it all looked dreadfully like a leveraged buyout in the style of America’s corporate raiders, except that instead of Michael Milken providing the funding, it came from West German taxpayers.
We must be very, very careful when decrying AfD voters as far right racists and fascists. There are certainly some pretty unsavoury individuals but let’s face it, not everybody who votes Republican loves Trump and most certainly not everyone who voted Labour in July is a card-carrying socialist. There is a huge anti-establishment vote in the old East for, even 35 years after reunification, the people in the formerly two parts of the country remain miles apart.
Economically, the East began the marriage with a 40-year economic deficit and, although billions or even trillions have been spent by Berlin in trying to bring it up to speed, the area is still trailing by a country mile as many of those with a bit of get up and go did indeed get up and go. Talent was relentlessly sucked out to Stuttgart, Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg and the other West German centres of excellence. Comparisons with the divide between the Northern and Southern states of the Union that developed in the aftermath of the American Civil War and, in some parts, persist nearly 180 years later are maybe not that farfetched.
The best way to overcome an inferiority complex is by a strong display of swagger and the AfD does that in spades. Donald Trump has turned appealing to those who feel left behind into a fine art. So have Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. Their parties might be right of right of centre and both media and traditional right of centre parties might like to stamp them as far right but are their parties necessarily of the far right? What really constitutes far right? How far to the right of right of centre must a movement be in order to constitute far right and, as already asked, do all its voters, many in protest, deserve to be painted as racist and fascist?
In the eastern states of Germany and, in the face of Sahra Wagenknecht, all those platitudes fall apart. In the UK, millions of centre-right voters backed Reform out of protest. They couldn’t and wouldn’t vote for Labour or for the Liberals and Reform gave them an alternative. My guess is that no more than a single-digit percentage of those who put their tick against the Reform candidate had ever picked up and read the party’s electoral manifesto and I wouldn’t be surprised if the figures of the AfD and the BSW are not much different.
Germany’s much-vaunted 5 per cent plus PR electoral system has, just as in the 1920s, left the country with a broad coalition government made up of parties with irreconcilable ambitions and with no clear plan. For decades, the towering economy, largely powered by the Mittelstand, the provincial SMEs, has kept the country happy and the government of the day has been given the space to be indecisive and dysfunctional. But when the wheels fall off the industrial powerhouse, as is currently the case, the incompetence of the established parties is ruthlessly laid bare.
The states of Thuringia and Saxony have never had the strong economy that might let the political class off the hook and the Greens, proud members of successive Berlin coalitions, now find themselves locked out in the former – they failed to get 5 per cent of the vote – and, with only 5.3 per cent in the latter, they barely scraped over the line. The Liberals, one of the three coalition partners in Chancellor Scholz’s national government, don’t even figure.
There is a term in German which is “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”. It means first facing up to, and then coming to terms with, the past. It was central to politics in the West as the FRG did what it could to cope with the legacy of the Nazi era. This never occurred in the GDR; the ideologists appear to have determined that the Nazi baddies were to be assumed to either be dead or to have fled to the West. A 55-year deficit in liberal and democratic thinking is coming home to roost.
It would be a mistake to extrapolate the results of these regional elections to the rest of the country and to the Bundestag elections of next year, but that should not detract from the probability that the formation of the next coalition government will be no easier than it was for the current one or that it will be any more decisive in decision-making and execution.
But what to do with the AfD which in Thuringia polled 32.7 per cent, one percentage point less than the 33.6 per cent that gives Keir Starmer and the British Labour party a landslide and 63 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons?
The German papers were full of graphs which tried to divine what coalition variations existed that could block the AfD from joining the respective state governments, one of which even looked at the conservative CDU coalescing with the communist BSW. Really? Germany is becoming progressively more ungovernable. The British First Past the Post system has more than enough flaws but those who seek Nirvana in PR might look at the political pigpen that is Europe’s leading nation and think again.
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life
