Frustrated voters see Germany shift further to the right

For a workable government, Friedrich Merz will have to deal with Alternative for Germany.

AfD’s Alice Weidel (centre, with co-leader Tino Chrupalla) has predicted that a Merz government will be short-lived. Picture: AFP

The German elections are, in many respects, paradoxical. The electoral shifts, which saw the major parties’ combined vote share plummet, are seismic. But the outcomes, in terms of public policy, are unlikely to vary significantly from those successive governments have pursued in recent decades.

To say that is not to deny that the centre-right party, the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union, has hardened its policy stance.

Its new leader, Friedrich Merz, who is almost certain to be the next chancellor, has advocated slashing red tape, reducing prohibitive power costs and impos­ing far tougher restrictions on immigra­tion and refugee policy, as well as vastly ramping up defence expenditure. However, having ruled out any relationship with the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Merz will have to govern in a coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) which, after recording its worst electoral performance in more than a century, faces pressures to move to the left.

To effect his wide-ranging reforms, Friedrich Merz’s could seek an agreement with the AfD on migration and refugees. Picture: AFP

Accentuating those pressures, the Greens, with whom the SPD both co-operates and competes, are themselves likely to tilt left so as to reverse their loss of votes to The Left, a direct descendent of the former East German Communist Party that did far better than anyone expected. Stung by The Left’s highly effective campaign against “austerity” and its attacks on the major parties’ alleged Islamophobia, the Greens and the SPD may well balk at the sweeping changes Merz has proposed.

As a result, while the election will not be entirely inconsequential, large parts of the voting population could become ever more frustrated by a system that appears determined to ignore their demands for change. That, in turn, would add fuel to the anger that is rapidly stripping the political centre of its electoral mandate.

The trends are stark. On average, across the period from 1950 to 2000, the parties of the centre left (that is, the SPD) and the centre right (the CDU/CSU along with the Free Democratic Party) secured 92 per cent of the vote. In the most recent election, by contrast, they narrowly reached a combined share of 45 per cent.

The centre has, in other words, lost nearly half the electorate to the extremes, with the loss being even greater among workers, who largely vote for the AfD.

The mechanics of the German electoral system still make it possible for the centre parties to form a viable government; but if the centre parties’ combined vote share slips by another few percentage points that will cease to be the case – making the post-war consensus that Germany must be ruled from the centre completely unviable.

The simplest option would be for Merz to seek an agreement with the AfD, at least on the issue of migration and refugees, thereby defusing the immense damage that issue is inflicting on his party and on the centre more generally.

Understanding the intense resentments migration has generated is hardly difficult. Between 2013 and 2023, 6.43 million more people settled in Germany than left – the biggest net inflow of any country outside the US. Reflecting the scale of that movement, the share of the population born in another country soared from 12 per cent to nearly 20 per cent, including about one million Syrians and half a million Afghans.

Moreover, with 42 per cent of people under age 15 being foreign-born or having at least one foreign-born parent, the ethnic and religious character of the population is sure to change even more markedly in the years ahead.

But it is not just the sheer extent of the demographic upheaval that creates the tensions. It is also that the foreign-born account for 60 per cent of welfare recipients while being responsible for 40 per cent of crimes. And to make things worse, there are around 200,000 people who – having had their refugee status rejected or revoked – have been ordered to leave the country but cannot be deported; another 200,000, if not more, seem set to join that group across the next two years.

With all of those people depending entirely on (extremely generous) welfare payments, there is a widespread sense that Germany has lost control of its frontiers.

It is therefore unsurprising that the AfD, whose share of the vote now exceeds that of the Social Democrats, has begun to talk about “remigration” – that is, large-scale deportations. While that may be unacceptable to the CDU/CSU, it is not inconceivable that Merz could convince the AfD to give him the parliamentary support the CDU/CSU needs for a sweeping reform of Germany’s migration laws. And a similar deal could be required to reverse an energy policy that is decimating what was once a manufacturing powerhouse.

The co-leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, deliver a statement. Picture: AFP

The obstacle to those deals is the “firewall” that the centre parties have imposed against any agreements with, or parliamentary reliance on, the AfD. That firewall was pilloried in the run-up to the election by tech billionaire Elon Musk and US Vice-President JD Vance, but it is deeply engrained in Germany’s recent history.

While the English-speaking countries emerged from World War II with their confidence in democracy strengthened, the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the descent into the horrors of Nazism convinced many Germans that democracy was inherently fragile.

Nor were they alone in holding that view: the victorious Allies, and especially the Americans, insisted that Germany could return to full self-government only if its political institutions insulated the democratic process from the threats posed by “unconstitutional” political parties – that is, by political parties whose basic values were at odds with a “free democratic basic order”.

As a result, it became a de facto condition for the acceptance by the Western occupying authorities of the newly formed Federal Republic’s Basic or “Ground” Law that it include provisions banning and in other ways severely restricting parties that would, if they ever came to power, undermine fundamental rights. Put in the language of the time’s debates, the constitution had to establish a “wehrhafte demokratie” – a democracy that was “fortified” against its potential gravediggers. The resulting provisions were used extensively, both in the transition to full self-government and once self-government had been achieved.

For example, in the parliamentary elections of 1949, the Germans who had been expelled from central and eastern Europe were prohibited from forming a political party of their own, even though they accounted for 16 per cent of the electorate. General Lucius Clay, deputy military governor in the American occupation zone, justified the ban by arguing that since the newcomers were “strongly Nazi”, a refugee party might become a centre of irredentism.

Equally, the Americans insisted that the constitutional prohibitions be applied to ban the rightist Socialist Reich Party, which they viewed (with some justification) as neo-Nazi. Indeed, unless the SRP was dissolved, said the Allied authorities, they would override the elected government and ban it themselves.

As things turned out, the Constitutional Court concurred with the prohibition application the government eventually filed, banning the SRP in 1952. It then proceeded, again under US pressure, to ban the Communist Party as a threat to basic freedoms, despite that party securing a trivial and rapidly shrinking share of the vote.

Inevitably, those constitutional processes were accompanied by ongoing institutional mechanisms – headed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – tasked with ensuring that the platforms, rhetoric, methods and ideals of registered political parties were not inconsistent with the “free democratic basic order”.

However, those safeguards proved increasingly problematic. That was in part because the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights lifted the bar for prohibition. Ruling in 2003 that “Drastic measures, such as the dissolution of an entire political party, may be taken only in the most serious cases”, the court determined that bans could be imposed only where “the risk to democracy” was not merely substantial but “sufficiently imminent”.

At the same time, there was a broadly shared view that Germany’s democracy was not as fragile as all that – having, for example, withstood the terrorism of the 1980s. And it seemed that the threat now came less from the electoral process than from extra-parliamentary movements, notably Islamic extremism.

Reflecting those factors, the Constitutional Court dramatically altered its interpretation of the constitutional provisions in 2017. Whereas the previous bans had sought to nip threats in the bud, now bans would be imposed only where there was a real possibility (or in the court’s terms, “potentiality”) of the “free democratic basic order” being grievously harmed, taking into account the size and political weight of the party at issue. But this ruling immediately provoked widespread concern. It is one thing to ban tiny fringe parties, as was the case with the SRP and the Communist Party; it is entirely another to seek to outlaw a party once it has secured a substantial electoral base.

Given the obvious risks such a ban would create, the court had effectively eviscerated constitutional provisions that formed a fundamental part of the Federal Republic’s “birth bargain”.

The result was twofold: a constitutional amendment that introduced a subtle, probably unworkable, distinction between the treatment of “unconstitutional” and “anti-constitutional” associations; and intense pressure for a political, rather than primarily legal, firewall against extremism.

All of that seems to be completely unknown to Musk and Vance. But their abject ignorance of the background – and the irony involved in seeing Americans criticise provisions the US had originally imposed – does not mean the concerns are entirely unfounded.

It is, to begin with, clear that the greatest threat to the Germany polity does not come from issue-by-issue deals between parliamentary parties, including, where necessary, the AfD, but from voters’ growing frustration with a political system that is fundamentally unresponsive. That is all the more the case as the persistent refusal to deal maturely with the AfD strengthens the public perception that the major parties, faced with increasingly intense competitive pressure from upstarts, have entered into a cosy cartel to shut their rivals out.

Like all cartels, that cartel inflicts costs: and it is voters, who are prevented by the cartel from determining public policy, who bear them.

Nor could anyone plausibly claim that German democracy, with its strong separation of powers and robust federalism, would be seriously compromised by agreements needed to solve major problems. There are, on the contrary, good grounds for thinking it would be strengthened.

Few things are more important in that respect than the impact on the AfD itself. Yes, the AfD is unsavoury – indeed, on some issues, positively repellent. But so were Italy’s Italian Social Movement (MSI) and the National Front in France. What led them to change was the prospect of sharing in power: that is, of acceding to government. In Italy, the evolution from the MSI to Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy saw the party make a decisive break with its fascist legacy and move to a policy program that now informs one of Europe’s most stable and respected governments.

Exactly the same evolution is under way in France, where Marine le Pen’s National Rally, which is the successor to the National Front, increasingly has the trappings of a party of government.

Those changes are unsurprising: power may corrupt, but in politics powerlessness does too. It breeds irresponsibility and prizes rhetoric over realism, while governing a country brings harsh realities home to politicians and voters alike.

None of that implies there would be no difficulties. Alice Weidel, who heads the AfD, does not have anywhere near as much control over her party as do le Pen and Meloni. Even more important, Merz would have to cope with a torrent of internal criticism. And the left, led by the SPD, would descend into hysterics.

The question, however, is what is the alternative. Weidel has predicted that a Merz government will be short-lived, collapsing as the new coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD tears itself apart.

For all of its weaknesses, the Federal Republic has, until now, been a bastion of stability. But if stability becomes an excuse for paralysis, WB Yeats’s grim prophecy – “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” – may once more ring true.