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So... big win for AfD last night: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4zejgz3z9o. How important is this?
Since I'm not one to closely follow European politics, at first I thought this meant that they had won control of the entire national parliament. But then I noticed that, no, it's just one state election, and they're still short of a majority. In every other state, they have far less support, and every other party is still maintaining a rule to never work with them, so the AfD is still effectively shut out of power everywhere.
I suppose it's another sign of their trajectory, though. They seem to win more and more votes in every election. I remember when, not long ago, they were an extreme minority fringe party. Now they get enough votes that it's difficult for the other parties to form a coalition without them.
Is this a sign that the people of Germany are secretly longing to Nazi again? I doubt it. They seem to still be, on the whole, an extremely leftist-liberal nation. Pro-immigration, pro-welfare, anti-militarism, anti-nationalism, and anti-nuke. So I wonder how much this surge in support for AfD is driven by immigration, or how much of it is just them being the only real conservative party that gives voters an alternative to the status quo?
I also wonder what the AfD would actually do if they came into power? There's a big range between "slightly restrict immigration" and "force all the immigrants to pack up and go home." I suspect they haven't entirely figured it out themselves, since for now they're still just a protest vote. Not to mention how they'd have to figure out their policy on every single other policy issue. It's easy to make big promises when you have no actual power to deliver on them.
But I don't know! Maybe I'm wrong. I really don't know much about German politics, I just saw this and I thought it was interesting. Anyone else have thoughts?
Ok, seems you beat me to the post. Still, here is mine. German election in the state (Land) Sachsen-Anhalt. The far-right AfD got 43.8% of the vote, which is about 5% more than a far right party ever got in a fair and free election before there.
Together with the BSW (a splinter group of the Left who split off when the rest of the party became disenchanted with Russia in 2022) they have an absolute majority.
So far, the parties to the left of the AfD have had a policy not to cooperate with them, a concept called Brandmauer (fire wall, in the building safety sense). On the one hand, it is reasonable: if a party is incompatible with your values, you should not cooperate with it. On the other hand, being stuck in the opposition is a great way for a party to become more popular as other parties get blamed for policy failures. This is even clearer with the present situation in the German East, where the other parliamentary parties (Left, Green, social democrats, conservatives) would have to form one block (and get tolerated by BSW) to form a majority. Five years of a democratic spectrum coalition is unlikely to leave any of the parties with clear victories for their bases, so next time the AfD would simply score 60%.
At this point, I am hoping that BSW will just tolerate an AfD government instead -- it is Putin's will, after all. Sure, it will suck for the people who voted for traditional parties, but it will also not be the end of the world. If Hungary could survive Orban, Germany could probably survive an AfD government if push came to shove. Unlike in Weimar, we have built a few decades of democratic tradition. Still, if the price for avoiding this at the federal level is Sachsen-Anhalt (or most of the rest of the East, for that matter), then I for one am willing to pay that price.
Let them try to fix their demographic problems by blaming the immigrants. Let's see how their two (or so) universities will fare under their stewardship. Let's see how the AfD will influence the availability of medical services, after all, not only are a significant fraction of physicians in Germany foreign-born (and may feel slightly unwelcome), but a decent fraction of the German-born doctors would likely want to avoid their kids going to schools where the AfD sets the curriculum.
I get that people in the East feel left behind. It is not like Merz has their best interests at heart, he's working for Blackrock instead. But protest votes are not the answer. Germans of all people should know that there is always room for worse equilibria.
Satirist Martin Sonneborn has called for a reestablishment of the wall for decades (and this time it would actually be an antifaschistischer Schutzwall), and more and more I feel that reunification was a mistake. It would have been better to let them join what would become Schengen but keep them separate. An AfD running the government of East Germany would not be so different from Orban in Hungary, PiS in Poland, Haider in Austria and so on, all very tolerable from West Germany.
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