The far-right protest party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is doing so well in the opinion polls that calls have gone up for it to be banned.
Recent remarks by the German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, have been interpreted by some observers as support for a ban:
“Our Basic Law tolerates hard and hardest controversy. However, the constitution cannot integrate enemies of the constitution – and we must not ignore the danger they pose. Political opposition is one thing, hostility to the constitution is something else entirely. Enemies of the constitution want to destroy their political opponents, their goal is rule without contradiction, and that is not the democracy of the Basic Law.”
Steinmeier was speaking at Herrenchiemsee, Ludwig II’s Bavarian version of Versailles, on the 75th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention which drafted the post-war German constitution, known as the Basic Law.
If one reads Steinmeier’s speech, one finds that without mentioning AfD (as President he must remain above party politics), he is clearly responding to its present success, which is especially marked in the former East Germany.
AfD is currently second in nationwide polls, on about 21 per cent, but in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, three federal states in the former east which will next year hold elections, it is on course for victory.
Steinmeyer wished to remind everyone of the legitimacy of the Basic Law, which among other things meant showing it was not just imposed on the former east by West Germany. He pointed out to his listeners that it was “written with a pan-German perspective”, and remarked that Hermann Brill, who helped draft it, had been forced by the Soviet occupiers to flee from Thuringia to what became West Germany.
A tremendous effort was made, in the Basic Law, to ensure that the lessons of the Nazi period could never be repeated:
“The tortured in Buchenwald and Dachau, the murdered in Auschwitz, the fallen in Stalingrad and the dead on D-Day should not be forgotten.”
Nor, he added, should the East Germans who “fought for democracy” in the uprising of 1953 be forgotten.
All this was tactful, reputable, high-minded and a bit beside the point. The AfD is not the Nazi party. True, it trades on an abhorrent racism: Leon Mangasarian, a journalist turned forester who knows the rural east well, recently wrote a first-hand report for The Spectator on the everyday anti-semitism and anti-Polish sentiment which can be found there (and indeed elsewhere), and which the AfD well knows how to exploit:
“The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz, says the AfD is ‘spreading hatred and hate speech against all types of minorities’ .The party targets Muslims and Jews with subtle messages skirting German defamation laws. An AfD election poster showing two women in bikinis has the words: ‘Burqas? We like bikinis.’ Earlier this year, the AfD demanded a ban on kosher and halal animal slaughter in Germany.”
But as Mangasarian points out, it was Angela Merkel, as Chancellor, who in 2015 revived AfD by refusing to close Germany’s borders to huge numbers of migrants.
The party was founded in 2013 by a group of professors who campaigned against German membership of the euro. They narrowly failed in the general election held that year to clear the five per cent threshold needed to obtain parliamentary seats, and in 2015 AfD veered to the populist right, into space vacated by the established parties.
It is particularly successful in the former East Germany because as Tilman Fichter, a veteran Social Democrat, remarked this week to ConHome, “a majority of East Germans are not very satisfied with how unification has gone”.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a genuinely popular moment: ordinary Easterners poured through into the West. After unification in 1990, money poured in the opposite direction to repair and modernise the East’s derelict infrastructure, and with it came Westerners who made no secret of their belief that they knew better than the poor, benighted Easterners how to run things.
At the same time, some of the most highly qualified Easterners departed to make careers in the West. Many of those who remained felt themselves treated as second-class citizens, who to this day are told what opinions they should hold.
“We had this in communist East Germany,” Harald Malek, a forester in Gardelegen, north of Magdeburg, told Mangasarian. “A regime that was always telling us what to think, what to do and, above all, how to vote.”
Many East Germans responded to this by developing a satirical attitude to anyone in authority.
The Greens, influential members of the ruling coalition in Berlin, are keen to inflict their ideas on everyone: conventional heating systems must be replaced with heat pumps, nuclear power is out of the question, wolves must not be shot however many livestock they kill. All this has helped raise AfD’s poll ratings.
So has AfD’s opposition to arming Ukraine, and support for Russia. These opinions are found also on the German Left. Conspiracy theories about the part played by the CIA and the State Department circulate freely.
As Fichter points out, “a lot of people think the Americans organised the whole struggle, to force Germany to end their privileged business relationship with Russia”.
Many in the former East Germany want the gas pipelines which brought them cheap energy from Russia reopened.
This sentiment may be quite wrong, but it is one of which Vladimir Putin, who served as a KGB officer in Dresden in the late 1980s, is well aware. He knows the Germans, having fought the Russians twice in the last century and suffered terrible losses, are determined not to be drawn into a third conflict.
By threatening to escalate the war, Putin hopes to divide NATO. He can hope too for relief from the greatest American populist of the present day, Donald Trump, who last month promised to have “a peace deal negotiated within 24 hours”.
What strange bedfellows a crisis like this makes: Donald Trump, AfD, Sahra Wagenknecht from Germany’s Left Party (successor to the old Socialist Unity Party which ruled East Germany), Jeremy Corbyn, George Galloway…
Populists thrive, or hope to thrive, by behaving badly. The greater the agony Trump inflicts on the Washington Establishment, the better he serves as an instrument of revenge on that Establishment for having looked down on his voters and subjected them to moral lectures.
So too AfD. Its supporters feel themselves despised by the German Establishment, and would like to punish it by electing populists who flout the rules of civilised behaviour.
“When bad men combine,” Edmund Burke wrote, “the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
Any attempt to ban AfD would be madness, an assault on freedom which would just give the party a further boost. When Bismarck sought from 1878 to destroy the Social Democrats by passing laws against their activities, he ended up strengthening them and weakening his own position.
Under the present Basic Law, only two parties have ever been banned, a neo-Nazi group in 1952 and the Communist Party in 1956. More recent attempts to ban the neo-Nazi NPD failed, partly because it was found to be riddled with agents from Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, so it was impossible to show in the Federal Constitutional Court what outrages had actually been committed by the NPD.
The only way to take the wind out of AfD’s sails is for the established parties to address whatever reasonable grievances it is at present managing to exploit. The governing coalition between the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Liberals, and the main opposition party, the Christian Democrats (currently on about 26 per cent in the polls), cannot afford to go on ignoring the concerns of the fifth of voters who now support AfD.
When Merkel announced her open door policy, one of her fellow Christian Democrats, Reiner Haseloff, Prime Minister of another of the eastern states, Anhalt Saxony, said Germany could not absorb an unlimited number of migrants. Haseloff is still in office. The Bavarian CSU also called for an upper limit on the number admitted.
The established parties have so far maintained a “firewall” against AfD, refusing to contemplate entering a coalition with it. But as Peter Franklin recently pointed out on ConHome, if AfD gets to 25 per cent of the vote in the general election due in October 2025, that policy is likely to become unsustainable, and a full-blown crisis will ensue.
Steinmeier worries about legitimacy. In a democracy that comes from listening to what the voters want.