Germany’s mature democracy must beat the far right without banning it

The writer directs the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution

On Sunday, Europe’s most flagrantly far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), failed to achieve a breakthrough in bellwether local elections in its stronghold of Thuringia. But it’s a little too early for sighs of relief. 

Thuringia is a thickly wooded state of 1.7mn inhabitants, hardly representative of a complex post-industrial economy of 84mn. However, the weekend’s vote marked the beginning of Germany’s super-election year. It continues in June with the European parliament elections (they do double duty as a referendum on national politics) and local polls in eight of the 16 states. Then the three eastern states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia hold votes in September. So German observers had watched this vote anxiously: would the AfD, whose party colour is blue, sweep the state in a “blue wave”? 

Not by its own expectations. Overall, the AfD stayed in second place (25.8 per cent) behind the conservative Christian Democrats (27.3 per cent). It gained no mayor’s offices or district administrator’s posts, but will contest a handful of run-offs. Still, it gained 8.1 per cent over its tally in Thuringia’s last local elections in 2019, increasing its power in many district and municipal councils and making it harder for the democratic parties to maintain their non-cooperation pledge. One of the candidates in the June 9 run-offs is a neo-Nazi. Not a blue wave, then, but the slow and steady rise of a toxic blue tide.

The AfD achieved these results despite an extraordinary string of scandals which have hurt the party in nationwide polls (down to 16 from 22 per cent), but in reality proved its staying power under duress. 

First, there were the revelations about a secret meeting of rightwing extremists, including an AfD member of parliament, who were plotting the mass deportation of migrants and German citizens of immigrant extraction. This led hundreds of thousands of Germans to march in protest across the country at the beginning of the year. 

This month, AfD MP Petr Bystron was stripped of his parliamentary immunity after raids on his home and office, based on accusations of money-laundering and corruption linked to Russia. The AfD’s flamboyant top candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah, had already attracted notice for his frequent embrace of Beijing talking points. German police recently arrested his Chinese staffer on suspicion of spying.

Now Krah has had to stop campaigning and step down from his party’s board after asserting that not all members of the SS had been criminals. That was too much even for Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally (RN). She declared she was severing ties with the AfD. 

Meanwhile, the AfD’s Thuringian branch has, like its youth organisation, been formally classified as rightwing extremist by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. Its leader Björn Höcke is a nationalist firebrand of whom a German court ruled that he could legitimately be described as a fascist. Earlier this month, he was convicted of deliberately using a Nazi slogan. Der Spiegel has quoted from a document which, according to western intelligence sources cited by the magazine, is a political manifesto for the AfD drafted by Kremlin strategists. Der Spiegel noted that the document’s key tenets were echoed in AfD speeches, including one by Höcke.

All this is happening as Germany observes the 75th birthday of its Basic Law — the constitutional document which in 1949 carefully set out the principles of a liberal representative democracy that was to forever defend itself against totalitarian temptation. Yet the country is not in a celebratory mood. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way coalition is fighting bitterly over the national budget. German courts are currently trying a group of conspirators for plotting the violent overthrow of the government. After several brutal attacks on politicians, the Federal Criminal Police Office reports that politically motivated crimes have doubled to 60,000 in the past decade. By far the most were committed by the extreme right. 

No wonder that debates about petitioning the German constitutional court to ban the AfD — an option under the Basic Law — are heating up again. But that path is fraught. The political theorist Philip Manow has pointed out that this would entail not just the juridification of a political conflict, but a politicisation of justice. He is right. In a mature constitutional order, it should be the citizens who stem the illiberal tide: by speaking up for democracy, by demonstrating for it, by running for office — and by not voting for the authoritarians.