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I see Twitter throwing a fit over AfD winning or almost winning in Germany. Can somebody please loop me in about the drama of it all?
AfD is the national-populist party in Germany, that is, they favor socially reactionary and economically redistributive policies. Germany has coalition governments at both federal and state levels, and all other parties have agreed on a "firewall" against AfD: no matter how much they win, they won't join their coalition. The biggest sin of AfD in their eyes is that it's openly tolerant of ethnonationalists all the way to "Hitler couldn't have done everything wrong".
Saxony-Anhalt is a state in former East Germany, which has a different approach to the legacy of the Third Reich, and AfD has just won a plurality of the votes there, almost a majority. What makes West Germans run like headless chicken is that BSW (a splinter Left party that favors economically redistributive and socially reactionary policies) is willing to enter into a coalition with them, threatening the integrity of the firewall.
Which, in my opinion, would be the best outcome. By being locked out of the government, populist parties like AfD are free to criticize the mainstream parties as much as they want, earning free points with the electorate. "We would show them, oh, we would show them how it's done, but they are afraid of our methods working and losing their popularity forever!" they keep on saying. Well, now they get a chance to show everyone how it's done in a single state; they run it into the ground without affecting the rest of the country, and their popularity craters. Or, suddenly thrust into the driver's seat, they self-moderate their populism and become much closer to other mainstream parties in actual policies, obviating the need for a firewall.
IMO the AfD can only lose. They didn't outright lose the election, good on them, apparently they managed to sway the voters. But the voters aren't their biggest problem. Now they need to wheel and deal in parliament to make things happen, with partners all of whom hate their guts and will do everything in their power to make them fail. And even if that were not the case, they would have to work against the strict resistence of all institutions public and private, of the federal government, of the EU, and of everyone else who gets to interfere. Regardless of how well they do in the election, they're set up for failure in any case, and will come out of it looking bad.
Doubt. The AfD has the black spot. They're the designated target that everyone can legitimately direct their hatred at. In the public consciousness, they inherit all the detestability of the OG Nazis. Associating with them is a surefire way to get unpersoned in polite society. If they moderate now, become closer to the mainstream, then all that will do is lose them their popular support since "not part of the mainstream" is pretty much all they have going for them. Thus weakened, any incentives to remove the firewall will be similarly weakened, and the AfD remains more valuable as the socially agreeable punching bag than as a coalition partner.
I think the bigger issue for the long-term trajectory of the AfD is that it, just as the populist-left-leaning parties, is riding a general wave of discontent with the current state of affairs for which immigration, the main thing that distinguishes it from its competitors, is just one aspect among others. That current state of affairs is over-determined though, so to speak, by factors that no party, even the AfD in a hypothetical win with a solid supermajority and no institutional resistance, can fix. For example, what is the AfD going to do about German demographics before the welfare state that a large majority of the population worships comes crashing down? In this particular regard, they're actually worse than the mainstream parties, their commitments with regards to e.g. pension spending are only ever so slightly less insane than those of the far-left parties. Or how will they spur competitiveness and cost reductions among the German industrial giants before China grinds them into dust?
There are plausible approaches to both these and the other problems Germany faces, but they're extremely unpopular because they either go against the direct self-interest of the voting population, a majority of which is retired or will be soon, or violate cultural dogmas that have been in the groundwater for so long that to directly reveal their falseness is akin to heresy. The AfD deserves credit for being a large part of why one of those dogmas, the one around migration, has started to dissolve, but they're IMO just as blind as the mainstream parties on many others.
No to defend Merz or anything, but this general idea applies to him as well. He has the bad luck to be the face of government at a time when historical trends that he personally has little to do with have finally come to a head and have begun to enforce themselves on political reality. No doubt his constant gaffes and affinity for offending every single interest group is fairly unique, but I feel like everyone, especially far-rightists and -leftists who seem to particularly hate him, uses him as an easy scapegoat to avoid thinking too hard about the fact that their personal political program would probably fail just as hard, given the material and more importantly cultural constraints he has to work under.
I fully agree with your assessment.
Just one quibble: I don't think the AfD failing to fix the country's actual issues will be held against the AfD any more than the current government's attempts to fix some of the symptoms will be held in the current government's favor. Voters don't respect work on fundamentals. Voters go for vibes and handouts.
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What's the sort of thing that they could (theoretically) make happen on the state level, by the way?
There's a handful of things that are actually still up to the states in this heavily centralized pseudo-federation:
And there's a good bit of culture warring to be done in all of those. But as with everything in Germany, it's all secured by lightyears of red tape, so what little they can do there will take disproportionate amounts of effort and time, and always against the resistance of the establishment in each of those areas, and is likely to be swiftly undone by the next government that actually has the deep state on its side.
As for the big issue, immigration, they can't really do much. Maybe redirect some immigrants to other states, maybe inconvenience immigrants here and there, but ultimately the incentive structures are created at the federal level and the enforcement failures are at the EU level. Sachsen-Anhalt, being a Binnenstaat, isn't even at the German borders.
Question because I legitimately don't know- is the AFD likely to have access to the human capital to start doing any of this stuff? That's been a problem for controversial right wing governments in very established, procedurally suffocating countries. Germany's cordon sanitaire has seemed unusually effective until now.
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