Can Germany’s move to the far right be stopped?

Few people outside of Germany pay attention to that country’s regional politics. But we should take notice. The Basic Law, which established the Federal Republic in 1949, assumes that power is exercised by the 16 individual German states (Länder) except where the federal government is explicitly empowered.

State governments, then, are solely responsible for most policing, education, housing, prisons and the media; they cooperate with the federal government on health, welfare and taxation.

This means that last weekend’s elections to the Landtags (regional assemblies) in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony are important, affecting around 6.1 million people. In both, the far-right, anti-immigration AfD (Alternative for Germany) party won around one-third of the vote. AfD is now comfortably the largest party in the Landtag of Thuringia, and in second place by a single seat in the Landtag of Saxony.

The AfD’s strong performance was made sharper by the disastrous results for the three parties that form the coalition government in Berlin, the Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the Free Democrats. The Greens won no seats in Thuringia, and the Free Democrats are absent from both Landtags.

Germany is particularly sensitive to the strength of its far right. Its modern democratic structures were developed in the long shadow of Nazism, and the mantra of “never again” has hung over German politics for 75 years. Now, in Thuringia, the unthinkable for many Germans has happened: a far-right party has topped the poll in a state election.

The June elections to the European Parliament saw anti-immigrant populist parties show well across the continent. In Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Germany itself, populists and nationalists gained ground. What has happened in Thuringia is not a freak electoral disaster, but the culmination of a growing, pan-European trend.

The AfD is a conservative and nationalist party. It seeks to protect Germany’s sovereignty and cultural identity, and it regards mass immigration as an existential threat to the people and the nation. In particular, it opposes Muslim immigration and seeks to ban the wearing of the burqa and the Islamic call to prayer in public places. It has also blamed violent crime and social unrest on Muslim communities and a lack of integration.

Whether described as “populist,” “nationalist” or “far-right,” the AfD sees Germany as an ethnic and cultural construct, as well as a political one, and believes that it is under attack by Islam.

Voters are not imagining the problems the AfD promises to solve. During the migrant crisis that started in 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel suspended immigration procedures and allowed in 1.2 million refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Now nearly 30 percent of the German population has what is called a “Migrationshintergrund” or migrant background. That number soars to 41 percent of those under 15. More grimly, 41 percent of crimes in 2023 were committed by foreigners.

The German economy is also uneven. Germany’s unemployment rate is only 3.2 percent, among the lowest in the EU, but unemployment is much higher in the states of the former East Germany — in Thuringia it is 6.3 percent, and in Saxony 6.6 percent. The conflation of this enormous rise in immigration, its relation to crime and economic stagnation in the east is stoking popular anger.

There are two important qualifications. First, the AfD is not an explicitly fascist or Nazi party, and it accepts and operates within the boundaries of democratic politics. Nonetheless, it does contain more extreme elements that are ethno-nationalist, racist and closely connected with neo-Nazism.

The second qualification is that, so far, there is no prospect of the AfD taking power in Thuringia or Saxony, despite last weekend’s electoral success. Traditionally, parties from across the political spectrum have maintained a so-called “firewall” against the AfD, refusing to cooperate or enter into alliances with it. So although the AfD is the largest party in Thuringia, with 32 of the 88 seats in the Landtag, and a close second in Saxony with 40 of 120 seats, it cannot find partners to create a governing majority.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has encouraged parties to maintain that firewall. “All democratic parties are now called upon to form stable governments without right-wing extremists,” he urged this week. “Our country cannot and must not get used to this.”

This will leave the center-right Christian Democratic Union trying to forge grand coalitions in both states, which will not be easy.

Scholz’s hand-wringing is not enough, however. When one-third of the electorate in two states votes for a party condemned as racist and nationalist, it is inadequate to fall back on Berthold Brecht’s 1953 satire of Communist East Germany: “Would it not in that case be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

The mainstream parties have to do two things simultaneously. They must reassure voters that they understand the problems driving them toward the AfD — including economic stagnation, social division and a perception of rising levels of violent crime — and persuade them that they have credible policies to address them.

They also have to convince Germans that the AfD is no more than a vessel for grievances, and draw attention to some of its darker corners. A number of senior AfD figures, for example, were revealed to have attended a private far-right gathering in Potsdam last year, prompting large-scale anti-extremist protests throughout Germany. The party’s leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has criticized how Germany memorializes the Holocaust, and he has been fined twice in recent months for adapting Nazi slogans in his speeches.

Brandenburg, another eastern state with a population of 2.5 million, elects a new Landtag on Sept. 22. The AfD has led opinion polls consistently. Other parties cannot just sit by and allow a repeat of events in Thuringia and Saxony. Even if the AfD tops the poll in Brandenburg, the government and opposition must both prove they can and will address the electorate’s concerns about immigration and the economy.

A firewall is not enough. You may dislike a far-right party, but in a democracy, you do not have the privilege of dismissing its voters. If you ignore them, they will continue to vote for the party that they believe is listening.

Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.