Germany's rightward march

Noelle King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King here with Nina Haase.

Nina Haase: Thanks for having me.

Noelle King: So, big election in Germany this weekend. What's the headline today?

Nina Haase: The headline is that the Conservatives swept the Social Democrats out of the chancellery. And we will see a new German government in a couple of weeks' time that is going to be led by the Conservatives in a coalition, probably with the Social Democrats. And that is still going to be a pro-European, a centrist government facing lots and lots of challenges.

Noelle King: Also, the headline underneath is that for the very first time in a national poll, a far-right party, the AFD, managed to get one in five German voters to vote for them.

Nina Haase: That's right. The new chancellor is a man called Friedrich Merz. He's a grandfather. He is not an unknown figure. He entered politics in the 1990s and he was then swept out of political power by a certain Angela Merkel from his same party. He then re-entered politics when Angela Merkel left and he has decided to shape the Conservatives in a way that he sees fit to deal with the current challenges.

Noelle King: He was always a fierce critic of Angela Merkel's open door policy. Our heart is big but our ability is limited. I wish someone had said that in 2015 or 16. This can't happen again.

Nina Haase: So he's adopted a much more hardline stance on immigration, for example, and that has been one of the key issues for him in this election campaign. The other issues that led the conservatives to do so well this time were that Germans showed a lot of desire for change, big change. The current government had started out on a progressive, on a liberal agenda, and then Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So they had to make a lot of very tough decisions. They had to try and keep the country together at very, very challenging times. So we had a lot of political infighting. And the conservatives at the time were the biggest opposition power. So they used that to their advantage to essentially say this government is overwhelmed and we're going to be the ones dealing with all the desire for change that Germans are expressing.

Noelle King: That sounds familiar. This party that came in second, the AFD, tell me about it. Where does it come from?

Nina Haase: The AfD is called Alternative for Germany. That's the name that they've given themselves. They're a fairly young party. They were founded just over 10 years ago. They started off on a platform that was EU-sceptic, that wanted to get out of the euro, the common currency that we have here in Europe. And over the years, they have radicalised. Over the past decade, Germany has faced a wave of far-right violence and plots against Jews, Muslims, immigrants and politicians. At the same time, support has soared for the far-right party, the AFD, alternative for Deutschland. They don't always talk about Islamification anymore. They talk about migration. But when you ask them what they mean, they quite clearly mean migration from Muslim countries.

Noelle King: They have gone from being an economy-focused, financial policy-focused party to being an anti-immigrant, pro-Russia, pro-China party. And that is something where lots of people here in Germany are saying this would shake up the fundamental pillars of the liberal democratic system that we have here in this country.

Nina Haase: They are under observation by Germany intelligence agencies. The top court here in Germany has ruled that the far alternative for Germany party is a potential threat to democracy. Journalists gathered evidence that AFD members and neo-Nazis met in secret to discuss what far-right thinkers call a re-migration project. In other words, a plan to expel millions of people. They have people in their ranks that have very close ties to the Kremlin. They have a leading figure in the east of the country who is a history teacher, but says that Germany needs to move on and stop this whining about this short period of time when this thing called the Holocaust happens.

Noelle King: He criticised Berlin's Holocaust memorial, arguing that Germany should reverse the way it remembered its past. Prosecutors said his use of the phrase everything for Germany to a crowd of AfD supporters was illegal, effectively repeating the slogan of Adolf Hitler's stormtroopers.

Nina Haase: And that is, of course, something that has made a lot of alarm bells ring here in Germany, given our history, where many people feel reminded of just how quickly populism can lead to real-life fascism.

Noelle King: Having said all that, the AFD say of themselves that they are libertarian conservative. They got a big push in this election campaign by Elon Musk. I'm very excited for the AFD, and I think you're really the best hope for Germany. He held an hour-long chat with their co-leader Alice Weidel and gave them a lot of visibility on his own platforms.

Nina Haase: Okay. Thank you very much, Ilan, for having me and to give this opportunity to openly speak about different matters. Let me just, can you hear me?

Noelle King: I can, yes. Perfect. Perfect. So they have definitely benefited from that. They've also managed to be very present in market squares, so they're very visible. They're very good at describing problems. They haven't offered many workable solutions when you look at the details in their programs. But what they've also done is they've convinced a lot of working class people to vote for them instead of the social democrats.

Nina Haase: What does their second place finish mean? Does this mean that they now help write German law, that the Conservative Party, that one has to deal with them on a regular basis? Like how much power do they have coming in where they did?

Noelle King: They're now the second strongest political group in the parliament. And that means that they have certain privileges when it comes to appointing the chair people of the committees, for example.

Nina Haase: So traditionally, the biggest opposition group, which is in this case the AFD, they lead the budget committee. So they can influence the agenda of committee meetings. Then the AFD also gets a lot of time to address Parliament as the second biggest group in Parliament. So shaping the debate in Parliament, we'll hear a lot more from them.

Noelle King: And last not least, we have a system here in this country where you have a blocking minority for certain fundamental changes to our basic law. And the AFD alone cannot do that at the moment. But if, for example, the current government wanted to make fundamental changes to the constitution to allow for more spending in support of Ukraine, then they would have to change the constitution because that is currently a part of our constitution. And the AfD, together with the far left, Die Linke, that also made it into Bundestag, can now block that.

Nina Haase: Your new chancellor, Mr. Mers, has already spoken this morning. What is he saying about working with these parties, primarily the AfD?

Noelle King: The AfD is not going to get into government. I think that is a very important message to send also to listeners in the US, that it's considered way too far right by all the other democratic parties. And the conservatives have therefore ruled out collaborating with them. That is known as the firewall here, that the firewall still stands because of our country's history.

Nina Haase: Now, the AfD are also very clear that they were aware that they wouldn't enter government this time, but they're hoping for an unstable German government under Friedrich Merz now in the next couple of years. And they have their eyes on 2029 when they say that their positions will become so normalized that they might then actually enter government, if not the chancellery.

Noelle King: Hmm. What do these results mean for Germany over the next year or two?

Nina Haase: The results mean that Friedrich Merz will have to enter coalition negotiations very quickly with the Social Democrats and very quickly come to a good deal with them so that he can form a stable government. He has a lot of challenges ahead of him. This is really the last warning to the political parties of the democratic center in Germany to come to joint solutions.

Noelle King: So he said he needs to get the government together and in a stable way so that Germany can answer and give proper solutions to all these geopolitical challenges that we're facing. Because at the moment the feeling is that liberal democracy in Europe is under threat from Russia. We're considered to be in a hybrid war with Russia and also increasingly from the United States' new administration.

Nina Haase: Vice President J.D. Vance shocked Germans earlier this month in Munich when he suggested that their posture toward the AFD violates the principles of free speech.

Noelle King: What he talking about?

Nina Haase: Stay turnt

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Constanze Stelzenmüller: Germany has gone so far as to talk about banning the far-right AFD, which banning a political party is a really serious thing in a democracy. And I want to get a sense of why so many Germans are so concerned about the AFD. Is it something that this group is doing or is it something that they're saying?

Noelle King: Both of those things.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: Okay, go ahead. So, I mean, at the risk of stating the obvious, Germany has very special rules for prohibiting parties and for hate speech because of its history, because of national socialism that was in power in Germany between 1933 and 1945, and that led to the Holocaust and to World War II.

Noelle King: But to answer your question about why the AFD has even gotten into the crosshairs of these legal rules, it is that its members and its leadership over the past decade have repeatedly made overt or barely veiled references to Nazi slogans and Nazi ideas. They cooperate with extreme right and neo-Nazi movements They ally themselves with parties in the rest of Europe and also in the European Parliament that are overtly neo-Nazi As for prosecuting hate speech for the longest time after 1949, throughout the Cold War and much of the decades after reunification in 1990, there were always hard right movements, there were always neo-Nazi movements, but they were socially and politically fringe, right? So it has only been the rise of the AFD in the past decade that has led to the broadening of the spectrum of what is sayable in Germany, right? What is socially and politically possible.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: And therefore, there has literally been more hate speech in the public domain that has received the attention of not just other political competitors, but also the courts.

Noelle King: I will just say this, that the American constitutional order has always privileged freedom of speech in ways that the Germans after 1949 felt that they could not do because of the horrific experience that they had just gone through. You have never had a Holocaust. You have never started a world war. We did. And we felt that it was necessary to prescribe statements that declared allegiance to an ideology that had not just been toxic, but literally murderous.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: Earlier this month, Vice President J.D. Vance got on stage at the Munich Security Conference, and he talked about laws throughout Europe that he says restrict free speech. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be, quote hateful content And then he talks specifically about Germany Where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti comments online as part of quote combating misogyny on the Internet Here he says he believes that allowing citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger. Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations.

Noelle King: Now, again, we don't have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when people represent, when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: Vice President Vance never said AFD, but it seemed very clear to everyone in Germany that he was talking about the AFD. Is that right?

Noelle King: Well, I can say that I was there in Munich. I wasn't in the exact same room. I was in the overflow of the overflow because that speech had been awaited with some, I think, a mixture of anticipation and apprehension is fair to say by everybody there. And one of the things that was so startling about it was that everybody had expected a speech about foreign and security policy, about the future of NATO, about the peace negotiations with Ukraine and Russia. And instead of which, the vice president said the greatest threat to security in Europe was not external, but the threat to freedom and democracy. The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: That's something with which I think 95% of those present at the conference and listening to him would have begged to differ. I mean, it's extraordinary. We are in the middle of a war in Europe, right, where the Russians are killing people every day on the front line and by bombarding Ukrainian cities every day, and where they are also committing acts of disinformation and sabotage across Europe, including in my own country, Germany, every day. and to suggest that a public debate about prohibiting the AFT or other extremist parties or the prosecution of hate speech to suggest that that is somehow a greater threat to security in Europe left people absolutely flabbergasted it left me flabbergasted you could literally you know see and hear the shockwaves ripple through the room because it's never happened that an American senior official, apart obviously from the efforts made by Elon Musk, who is, after all, not an elected official, that an American senior official had in front of a European audience espoused parties that seek to subvert the German constitution.

Noelle King: Again, you're right that he didn't mention the AFD, but it was pretty clear whom he meant. And the people in the and the people at the Munich Security Conference and public commentary in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, I think completely correctly read that as an endorsement of the AFD. And by the way, the AFD is problematic not just because it references in a positive manner Germany's Nazi history. It is also problematic because it is pro-Putin. It is pro-China. It is against the European Union. It is against NATO. And I think it should also interest American listeners that it is also very anti-American, right? It's just now getting so much support from senior American figures that it is letting that part of its platform drop under the counter.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: And so, There were multiple, multiple genuinely offensive aspects of that speech. But if the vice president was trying to help the AFD gain a greater vote share, it hasn't worked. Again, consider the following. The AFD is stuck at around 20%, which is exactly where it was in the polls before Elon Musk and the vice president began their efforts to help it.

Noelle King: I will say this, that while I am relieved that the AFD did not experience a triumphal result, it remains in second place and none of the democratic parties will coalition with it. And my greatest concern is that we could see a next German government that has to govern with a volatile and perhaps fragile three-way coalition, actively opposed by a very strong anti-system right-wing party, the AfD, and which in turn finds vocal and determined supporters not just in Moscow and in Beijing but also in Washington, D.C.

Noelle King: Constanze Stelzenmuller. She's director of the Center on the U.S. and Europe at the Brookings Institution. Travis Larchuk produced today's show with help from Avishai Artsy. Amina El-Sadi is our editor. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter engineered. Laura Bullard and Victoria Chamberlain check the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.