One night during my recent visit to Germany, I flicked through the TV channels. Among badly dubbed American and British shows and the odd made-for-TV German film, I came across a surprising number of talk shows. This struck me as odd given that my country of birth is not particularly well-known for its ability to make small talk. But German talk shows are a different beast altogether. Personalities from politics, business or culture engage in serious discussions about the socio-political issues of the day. The flagship shows, running from Sunday to Thursday most weeks, are simply named after their hosts (with the exception of one called ‘Hard but Fair’)—Caren Miosga, Maybrit Illner, Maischberger (who dropped her first name, Sandra, for increased punchiness) or Markus Lanz—and often set the agenda for political discourse.
German talk show culture is a manifestation of the country’s Streitkultur, literally ‘culture of debate’, the lesser-known sibling of the famous Erinnerungskultur, ‘culture of remembrance’. Both are considered core tenets of a militant democracy that responded to Nazi rule and its ‘fetishization of harmony’ (in the words of social historian Harald Jaehner), which subsequently necessitated Germans relearning how to debate constructively.
Over this German summer, the dominant topic of these shows was undoubtedly the rise of the far-right populist party Alternative fuer Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) or AfD. This was in the context of the elections in the city-state of Berlin and two former GDR States: Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
All eyes were on Saxony-Anhalt: the first state to go to the election on September 6 (with the other two states to follow a fortnight later); the state where the AfD had polled the highest; the state whose internal security services had declared the party a ‘proven right-wing extremist endeavour’, predominantly because of its policies towards citizens of Muslim background. The AfD, said the security services, aims to ‘exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, to expose them to unequal treatment in contradiction to the constitution and thus to assign them a legally devalued status’. The elections in Saxony-Anhalt were also seen as a test case of the ‘firewall’ policy, an informal agreement between the other parties not to enter into any arrangement with the AfD.
As it turned out, the AfD won convincingly with almost 44% of the total vote, missing an absolute majority by only three seats. Assuming the firewall holds, there are now two options to form government: toleration of an AfD government by the pro-Putin, anti-migration splinter group, the BSW, who did not subscribe to the ‘firewall’ and barely achieved the 5% share of the vote necessary to enter parliament; or alternatively a popular front-type government (already dubbed the ‘Frankenstein-Coalition’) comprising all other parties from the Conservatives to the Socialists, the inevitable dysfunction of which would further play into the hands of the far Right.
In either case, the AfD’s landslide win is a pivotal moment for Germany. For the first time since 1945, an extremist right party has the opportunity to lead a state government. How did it come to that?
The rise of the AfD, and of the extreme right more generally across Europe, can be seen as the final act in a story of multiple failures.
It is the failure of neoliberalism, which was never able to deliver its promises of prosperity for all, leading to decades of increasing inequality and fracturing of the social fabric of society instead. Nevertheless, neoliberalism became the doctrine of most Western liberal democracies from the late 1970s onwards and is now so deeply entrenched that it is barely conceivable for it to be replaced by any other ideology within the current political system.
Saxony-Anhalt is the poorest state in Germany, and together with the rest of the former GDR, a case in point of the destruction neoliberal policies have wrought. Even 35 years after unification, the former GDR states are at the bottom of the country’s two-tier economic system, struggling to catch up with their Western counterparts. On a recent trip to Chemnitz (Karl-Marx-Stadt in GDR times and declared European Capital of Culture only last year) in the State of Saxony, my travel companion and I were shocked by the great number of empty and boarded-up buildings pointing to the economic decline of the pre-unification manufacturing powerhouse the city once was. Yet, as historian Katja Hoyer rightly points out, while the AfD is particularly strong in the former East, with a national support of 28% of votes, it can’t be written off as a purely East-German problem.
Right-wing populists like the AfD have responded to this de-industrialisation with a vague and contradictory policy mix of nationalist protectionism (e.g. exiting the EU; preferencing German skilled labour over migrants) and neoliberal deregulation. Economists frequently point out that these policies will not alleviate the economic grievances of voters. Modelling shows again and again that they will end up worse off. No matter, though. Ultimately the rise of the far Right is about sentiment, not argument, about the anger of having been left behind. It is driven, in the words of social commentator George Monbiot, by the ‘urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded’.
This feeling of exclusion is closely aligned with the failure of centrist politics capable of minor reforms at best, but mostly managing a status quo which has obviously alienated a significant part of the population. The weekly broadsheet Der Freitag reported a recent poll in which a clear majority of 55% saw the need for radical political change. Not surprisingly, this figure rose to 86% among AfD voters, but 71% of the socialist Die Linke (The Left ) and 41% of the Greens supporters also opted for fundamental change. Among the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, in government as a coalition, this dropped to a meagre 28%. Germany’s much-touted system of coalition governments, traditionally seen as integral to its social cohesion, is now the main cause of the country’s political stagnation. As the political system has fragmented, with the strongest party in the last federal election, the conservative CDU, getting less than a third of the votes, coalitions had to become broader by necessity. With coalition partners barely able to reach compromises across their respective political positions, inertia followed, further disenchanting the electorate.
Finally, extreme-right populism is exacerbated by a failure of the ‘knowledge class’. Bewildered by the rejection of their ‘progressivist agenda’, they don’t know how to respond to this phenomenon, as Guy Rundle wrote about the rise of One Nation in this very publication recently. In Germany, this failure reveals itself in the decline of Streitkultur, which mirrors the stasis of the country’s politics. The same pool of pundits seems to be caught in an endless loop of rehashed arguments. Should the AfD be banned as anti-constitutional? Should it be robbed of its electoral attractiveness through inclusion into everyday politics? Streitkultur, in the immediate post-war era imbued with the hope of finding moral truth through constructive debate, has become a performative and ultimately inconsequential TV spectacle where passively observing political rows is mistaken for democratic action.
At its core, the cluelessness of the ‘knowledge class’ can be traced back to the failure, or refusal, to address the need for belonging in a tangible or, as Rundle puts it, ‘parochial’ sense, instead of via abstract notions of multiculturalism and global community. In the 1960s or 1970s, this sense of belonging was in part met by organisations such as a strong union movement. Filling this void now is virulent anti-migration sentiment paired with a nostalgia for a past that never was. The AfD campaigned with the slogan ‘Take Back Your Country’ and its lead candidate, Sigmund Ulrich, regularly arrived at campaign stops on a vintage Simson moped—a cult brand from the old GDR.
While One Nation and the AfD seem superficially aligned in their rejection of migration, important differences remain. The AfD is without doubt the more radical party, openly proposing a policy of mass deportation on cultural grounds. Its narrative is ethno-nationalist: to reestablish an ethnically pure German community with its sinister echoes of another historical period which also strove for a racially homogenous community.
Here, even if one wanted to, any attempt to re-instate what would in essence be the White Australia policy would be impossible given that more than half of the population is either foreign-born or has at least one parent born outside Australia. Witness the intellectual contortions by One Nation to defuse the fallout from Pauline Hanson’s comments about Australia needing to become mono-cultural.
Despite these differences, could what happened in Germany repeat itself here in Australia? On the face of it, the conditions are ripe for the success of the far Right: the failures of neoliberal ideology, the stasis of centrist politics and a disconnected inner-urban progressive class are all evident. In the by-elections in Farrer, NSW, where One Nation received a whopping 40% of the primary vote, or Secret Harbour, West Australia, where it won with about 57% of the two-party preferred vote, punters have already rejected both the insipid incrementalism of the Labor government and the torpor of the Liberal/National opposition. This trend is likely to continue unless voters are offered a credible alternative on the Left. In Germany, the vote for the socialist party, Die Linke, is encouraging. While no match for the AfD yet, it has managed to carve out three direct mandates in the recent election in Saxony-Anhalt. In Berlin, the polls show a dead heat between AfD, Die Linke and the incumbent CDU. Finally, in Mecklenburg-Pomerania, the party also recorded some gains, pushing it well ahead of the CDU and the Greens into third place.
Pauline Conversions? Australian Politics after Farrer
Guy Rundle, Jun 2026
The spectacle of One Nation’s sudden success seems to have stunned many into an almost ritualistic recitative of cod-sociological explanations for right-wing movements.