Germany bewildered about how to halt the rise of the AfD

The consequences of the AfD’s rise has massive implications not just for Germany but also for the European Union | Omer Messinger/Getty Images

Markus Ziener is a senior visiting fellow with the German Marshal Fund in Berlin.

In Germany, news regarding the seemingly unstoppable rise of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) appears on an almost weekly basis. But nowadays this isn’t just true of the notoriously AfD-friendly states in east Germany, it’s also spreading further west.

In Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, the AfD is currently running well above 30 percent. The party is gaining ground in the former West German states of Hesse and Bavaria as well, where it is expected to land at around 15 percent in this weekend’s elections.

Once labeled as only appealing to the marginal far right, today the AfD has become acceptable to significantly more voters. And although polls aren’t election results, they are sending shock waves through the German political landscape.

At regional and local levels, it is now becoming increasingly difficult to successfully form coalitions against AfD candidates. In Sonneberg, a district in southern Thuringia, an AfD candidate managed to overcome a united front of The Left, Social Democrats, Greens, Liberals and Christian Democrats (CDU) to win a district council seat. Similarly, in Raguhn-Jeßnitz, a town of 9,000 residents in Saxony-Anhalt, a right-wing candidate prevailed over a joint nominee that was backed by all other parties, and was elected mayor.

It seems the more that parties to the left of the AfD join forces, the less they can be distinguished. And this, in turn, feeds the AfD’s narrative that it is the only genuine opposition, and that voters should turn away from the old, long-established parties.

It also turns out that maintaining the so-called “firewall” against the AfD — i.e., the political isolation of the right — is tricky business, as strong AfD representation in state parliaments makes it difficult to govern against them.

For example, in Thuringia, when a recent CDU motion to lower the land transfer tax was supported by the AfD and thus won a majority of votes, the conservatives were accused of cooperating with the far-right party. The CDU found itself in a quandary: Does it really make sense to not introduce a sensible bill just because it might be supported by the AfD? Such a move would drastically limit any party’s scope for action — but especially the CDU.

As the party that is politically closest to the AfD, this situation has had dramatic consequences for the conservatives. While they had proclaimed the goal of halving support for the AfD, the far-right party has instead nearly doubled its electorate since the last federal election in 2021, polling at around 20 percent nationwide — the CDU currently stands at 30 percent at best.

But the CDU has not only missed its targets, it is also increasingly bewildered as to how to respond.

Whenever the party has advocated positions that the AfD also uses in its campaigns, almost all other parties immediately point to it crying foul. This has been the case on migration, climate change and education — the exact issues that usually figure on top when voters are asked about their main concerns. While other parties take the moral high road and distance themselves from the AfD — which works particularly well with the electoral base of the Greens and, to a lesser extent, the Social Democrats — the CDU has yet to figure out how to navigate this toxic environment, and is left looking weak and indecisive.

However, the consequences of the AfD’s rise has massive implications not just for Germany but also for the European Union. If the party manages to carry its current momentum into next year, it is likely to achieve a good result in the upcoming 2024 European Parliament elections.

But the AfD is deeply euroskeptic — not to say outright hostile to the EU. The party recently elected Maximilian Krah as its top candidate for the EU elections. Krah believes that Europe must be turned into a “fortress” against migrants and that 80 percent of EU bureaucracy should be abolished. Also, decidedly pro-Russia, he is massively critical of the bloc’s focus on climate.

According to Björn Höcke, the AfD’s parliamentary group leader in Thuringia, “This EU must die so that the real Europe can live.” And a strong AfD will almost certainly risk moving the Parliament’s right-wing faction even further to the fringes, and disrupt politics in Brussels.