As the now-annual floodwaters lapped at central Europe’s doors—a sacrificial Mitteleuropa tradition invented for the autumn equinox by climate change—the region turned right again. A band of brown runs from the boot of Italy up through the Alps to the tip of Rügen’s chalk cliffs.
Austria voted the far-right into first place. The Czech Republic looks headed for a Eurosceptic and national conservative government led by Andrej Babiš, a kind of bohemian Berlusconi. A Slovakia at war with itself—assassination attempts, bullets in the mail—has had an ungainly coalition of social democrats and the far-right in charge for some time, while Hungary’s Orbán toasts his neighbours catching up to his vanguard chauvinism. The Balkan states are a mix of populist and right parties that lash out at internal enemies even when nominally of the Left, as in Serbia. Poland is the outlier following the late 2023 electoral success for the centre-Left after years of Catholic nationalism. Still, the grinding war in Ukraine and its fallout will no doubt challenge their grip on power and influence its politics, as the Russia-Ukraine-NATO stand-off has done in many of these countries.
Germany, the biggest power in the region, ends the year an ungovernable mess, with a federal coalition that appears emotionally and politically rudderless. In state elections in the former East German areas, coalition governments of bizarre hues—a post-ideological Pantone—have become necessary to keep the lights on, the teachers paid and the trains running. Or as it is in today’s Germany, keeping the lights blazing via coal, the overstretched schools and teachers underpaid and the trains running late: these declining services and aspirations hint at the malaise that the rightward turn, paradoxically, appears to answer.
In the national Bundestag, a cumbersome coalition model—social democrats, Greens and laissez-faire liberals—marches into its final year. A 2025 election will put it out of its misery. The country looks to be tipping into a recession, with export orders down, economic strife at national talismans such as Volkswagen and a demographic puzzle that migration sought to solve before the anti-immigrant discontent came to dominate national politics.
Unstinting support for Israel is about the only thing the current federal coalition can agree on. The topic of Israel and Palestine has never been more freighted and frightening in the ideological lock of parliamentary members and media discourse. The horrific attacks on Palestine, let alone the censorious national atmosphere inside Germany, haven’t featured in recent elections. In party political circles, obeisance to Israel is near-total outside pockets of the far-left Die Linke. At the same time, pro-Palestine and anti-war movements and critical Jews have faced state and cultural repression: Muslims and the left protesting Israel are swept up in accusations of antisemitism by an absurd philosemitic machinery. The NGO complex in Germany—some of which was stood up during the Syrian war, some of which is really a quango, a state-funded post-Holocaust ‘political education’ apparatus—has rallied behind Ukrainian refugees. But it has been tellingly cruelled by disagreements and prejudice about support for the attack on Palestine and Lebanon.
In what Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor analyse as the ‘moral triangle’ of Germans, Israelis and Palestinians, the state allegiance is clear. But outside the ideological vacuum, the relationship between Germany and the Israel–Palestine question is more vexed. National surveys suggest support for Israel is hugely diminished. Germany is also more multicultural and less homogenous than its ideologic organs outwardly pretend. Berlin hosts one of the largest Palestinian diasporas in Europe—twice the size of its Israeli diaspora. Yet the migration of Israelis to the German capital has been feted in the national and local media, particularly over the past decade—a good-news story, a kind of moral salve, a measure of repentance and national good standing, a ‘remigration’ everyone can get behind. Ironically, many of this cohort were leftists escaping a draconian atmosphere in Israel—the very irritants now regularly harassed by German police at demonstrations.
As bemused observers from outside have looked on, the German Left has paraded a fracture born of post-Holocaust reckoning and the anti-nationalist turn during German re-unification in the early 1990s. At Cologne cathedral on 6 October 2024, one left coalition’s event (‘antifa stands for solidarity with Israel’) hoists Israel flags and protests anti-Semitism as well as ‘fascism, Islam and the authoritarian Left’, while a counter-demo suggests they are genocide deniers and are merely in line with the German government; in Munich, one group rallies under the banner of ‘365 days of genocide’, a smaller under the banner ‘365 days—Munich against antisemitism’, and the same standoffs occur in Berlin, Hamburg and on. Meanwhile, the German weapons industry is booming: shortly after the 7 October commemoration this year, as Israel piled into Lebanon, Chancellor Scholz boasted of sending more munitions to the Israelis.
New landscapes
In recent years, the major parties of postwar German democracy—including the mainstreamed neoliberals of the FDP and the Greens, both serving in that unloved federal coalition with the social democratic SDP—have been outwitted by new political formations. The best-known of these is the far-right AfD, which has launched itself to the top tiers of party politics over the past decade with taboo-breaking anti-migrant rhetoric, shameless Nazi memes and a canny social media presence.
In this year’s state and EU elections, the AfD essentially won over the young, becoming the dominant party among those under thirty-five, while pensioners held the party back from greater success. These young voters, facing an uncertain future and, as borne out by surveys, feeling resentful about pandemic measures, have turned to authoritarian answers. Edgelord shitposting and an organised far-right—particularly the cross-border Generation Identity, which is strong in Austria and Germany and has made inroads into the AfD’s fascist-friendly youth movement—have fomented a nationalistic youth culture with a worrying popularity.
On TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, a conjuncture of conspiracy theorising, sociopolitical deadlocks and fragmented ‘democratic’ platform engagement has allowed the AfD and its outriders to provocatively combine internationally popular right fixations (e.g. Jordan Peterson’s moral-psychological-mythical hectoring of lonely young men) with German histories and events. None of the posted set-pieces is particularly original: ‘family instead of gender’ and ‘people (Volk) instead of migration’ are two cliches of AfD members on TikTok, echoing rallying cries from Wisconsin to Warsaw. Such is the economy of attention on these platforms—an admixture of banality, repetition and transgression.
Over the last year, AfD posts on TikTok were seen twice as often by young voters as all the other parties combined. Yet, as much as some on the left envy this social media success, the reality is that the right is in the right (digital) place at the right (crisis) time to capitalise—which is also to say that conditions may swiftly change in different political or technological circumstances. Recognising the Angst over eco-crises among the young, much of the far-right’s energy has come from organising around an image of ineffective Greens, leftists and EU flunkies—something I will return to below—even as the AfD’s politics offers only retrograde measures that will deepen the crisis. Any period the party spends in or near power will likely deflate its following, as it, too, comes up against the structural limits on action.
Although not as canny on social media, the other recent electoral gains have been for the new party around Sahra Wagenknecht, the BSW. Rather than TikTok, this party draws on Wagenknecht’s profile with more traditional media—particularly the marathon political talk shows that German TV broadcasts with punishing regularity. Born in East Germany and an erstwhile communist, Wagenknecht has been a media favourite for years because of her direct talking, criticism of Die Linke and palatable contrarianism. A recent biography—one of several rushed to booksellers, although Wagenknecht is also a prolific self-mythologiser—summarised her persona as ‘the Joan of Arc of the humiliated, the insulted, the disappointed’.
The BSW, a cadre party formed around her name and profile, is a more recent development in the German party system than the AfD. It has leapfrogged Die Linke, the left party that Wagenknecht departed to begin her insurgent electoral attack. Wagenknecht’s media attention—uncommon for a politician from the far Left—seeded her aspirations to get outside the stifling dogfights of Die Linke and tilt at a charismatic politics. Resolutely anti-democratic in its structures, the BSW is a ‘post-Left’ or ‘left conservative’ patchwork party, born in its leader’s image, incorporating disgruntled SPD and Linke types with some unnerving red-brown tendencies, especially around refugees and migration.
Wagenknecht initially tested these waters with her Aufstehen (Stand Up) movement, alongside sociologist Wolfgang Streeck and some disgruntled SPD elements. This short-lived collective focused on left-wing responses to right-wing movements and managed some sizeable rallies. Above all, Aufstehen opposed an open-border policy for Germany, a position Wagenknecht has held since 2016, shortly after Merkel decided to accept a million refugees. Ever since, Wagenknecht has effectively situated herself as a left nationalist. It’s a socialism-in-one-country platform, albeit with a diminishing emphasis on socialism. In interviews around the recent elections, Wagenknecht has pitched to rescue the Mittelstand, the petit-bourgeois layer of small to medium businesses, often family firms, that play an outsized role in the political-economic self-understanding of Germany. Rather than a sharpened-up far-Left candidate, some now speak of Wagenknecht being the new left wing of the Christian Democrats. Her electoral success has not stymied the AfD but supplemented it.
In the autumn state elections, AfD and BSW—which, aside from border closures, share NATO scepticism and a desire to appease Russia, making them pariahs in the EU political class—took 40 to 45 per cent in each state vote. As yet, these parties are unlikely to enter a red-brown coalition due to mutual distaste—Wagenknecht for the fascism of the AfD and vice versa, the AfD being anti-communist to its bones. However, a shared national prejudice could cohere if they land a majority two-party coalition in future election cycles. For now, potential coalition partners have sounded out not the AfD but BSW, including conservative Christian Democrats.
For the autumn state polls, the right’s ascendancy in the mid-year EU elections gave a taste of what would come. There was a sense of foreboding, as German results in the continental elections showed strong support for AfD and BSW—although this was briefly overshadowed by Macron’s centre-right accelerationist electoral gamble in France and the banal nationalism of the Euro soccer championship, held in Germany around the same time.
Off the back of the strong far-right performance in the elections and an emboldened posture among its activists, there was some anxiety about what a poor performance by the German national team would mean. The concern was that this would see the usual thing of the tabloids and social media users turning their guns on Turkish and other players with a ‘migration background’ (to use the official phrase). Parts of the Left were generally on edge about the flag-waving and large official events, reminders of the normalisation of German nationalism after 1989. Thankfully, the German team did middlingly well—enough to keep everyone happy without tipping into patriotic exuberance, which felt labile and worryingly directed over the summer.
After the summer football interlude, the autumn election results brought political reality back into view. Given their successes in the mid-year EU elections, the AfD co-presidents announced their domestic intentions at their annual congress: ‘We want to govern, first in the east [of Germany], then in the west, then at federal level’. They are on track for this, but around the country, the anti-fascist firewall is still holding against involving AfD in state or federal government.
The evident hope among the SPD and CDU was that freezing the AfD out of power would see the far-right wither on the vine or tear itself apart, like most right groupuscules. However, this tactic has proven fundamentally mistaken, as the party has grown in its oppositional energies. Attempts to ban AfD-adjacent publications and groups—possible because they touch on Germany’s historical crimes and atrocities—are also of dubious political impact. Of course, this assumes that the aim among the mainstream parties remains nobler than simply maintaining the CDU and SPD as the ‘natural’ heads of the coalition governments that have long been the norm in (west) German politics.
After all, the other tactic to hold off the far-right’s electoral advance has been a collective political shift to the right, co-opting talking points and policies such as welfare cuts and tightened access to unemployment benefits, the expatriation of migrants and running unprecedented border checks in the Schengen Zone. All this has only fed the illiberal beast: why vote for the imitation when the real thing is also on the ballot? While not in government, the AfD is setting the agenda.
AfD came second in the Saxon vote and first in Thuringia. The party leader in Thuringia is Björn Höcke, a West German history teacher convicted of using Nazi slogans and under state watch for constitution-contravening extremism. Höcke’s weird visage is enough to make you believe again in the art and science of physiognomy. His pressure-cooked Aryan head—a reluctant smile, blue eyes rheumy in protest at the hours-long YouTube videos he must watch until the early hours about the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy, a Kopf roiling with hateful ideas and grievance over the treatment of German history and the Germanic people post-45—seems to betray a soul eating itself in a country fretfully uncertain of its future. The election of such hateful figures to prominent positions is what worries most in German politics. Höcke has torched almost every guard-rail of postwar German democracy, yet he still ascends. Attacks on him by state institutions only bolster his anti-systemic profile, and offer no shortage of material for the conspiracists who flocked to the party during the pandemic.
With less prominent candidates elsewhere, the AfD still finished second in the Brandenburg election. This state of lakes, forests and left-behind villages surrounds Berlin. It is increasingly home to the capital’s commuter belt, and has seen an influx of wealthy western Germans since the fall of the Berlin Wall—and the political geography shows these pockets of wealth and social capital do not vote for the AfD, while everywhere else does. The state election again returned an SPD government, though barely.
The social democrats have governed the state since the first elections after German reunification in 1990, and got over the line this time thanks to a hell of a lot of tactical voting. The Christian Democrats landed their worst-ever election result in the former east. Meanwhile, this anti-AfD voting strategy decimated parties to the left of the SPD, including Die Linke, who lost nearly 8 per cent of their vote, and the witless Greens, who lost almost 7 per cent. Both failed to clear the hurdle for entry into parliament. Die Linke, which briefly functioned as a home for national and international anti-capitalist debate, is now in a severe crisis, having declined precipitously in all three elections. It still holds sway in Thuringia, where its fatherly state leader, Bodo Ramelow, has governed the state and is outspoken about Höcke’s extremism. But across the country, Linke members now speak of regrouping as a predominantly extra-parliamentary organisation.
In Brandenburg, only a disaffected consent held the AfD from victory. Exit polls showed that a huge majority of SPD and CDU voters assented to the statement, ‘The party did not convince me, but I’m voting for it to prevent a strong AfD’. This inverts the trajectory of the AfD, which for much of the decade was favoured for its anti-systemic protest character and less for its substance. Recent surveys suggest the party has found a stable core of voters, and that its members are fully signed on to its anti-immigrant politics above all, followed by its anti-eco measures. If the AfD maintains favour among younger voters and the anti-AfD pensioner vote continues to ‘organically’ die out in the next elections, it could well triumph in all eastern states by 2030.
After Brandenburg, any sense of relief among the SPD and those further Left is understandable but ultimately false hope: the SPD scraped ahead of the AfD by just 1.6 per cent and two seats; the results delivered more constituency seats for the AfD than the SPD (25 v 19) but less party seats for the AfD than the SPD (13 v 19). These numbers represent a dire result for the Left in Europe’s biggest economy. An SPD and BSW coalition government is being worked out for the next few years, including a position pushed by BSW in all states against NATO and allies having hypersonic and medium-range weapons in the state. In other matters, the coalition seems to be more of the same: unsurprisingly so, as BSW’s state leader was in the SPD for 40 years until shifting to BSW last year.
Pumps and brakes
This has the feel of a conjunctural crisis, as Alexander Gallas and Moritz Ege have argued in some post-election commentary. Like elsewhere, the major parties in Germany have been moribund since the neoliberal consensus took hold. As the above suggests, the reactions to this consensus are more interesting, as they have taken the form of ‘outsider’ challenges over the last two decades.
Die Linke was the anti-systemic challenger in the former east for a decade, but it has declined as the AfD and BSW have risen. The German Greens have existed since the 1980s but, unlike some pockets of their Australian counterparts, have not articulated anti-neoliberal politics for a long time. They have adopted a respectability politics that is bourgeois to its core. The Greens have hitched their wagon to several coalitions, including those dominated by conservative parties, and this has decomposed their constituency, even in a country with one of the most active youth climate movements in the world.
The AfD and BSW will have noted with interest the fate of the Greens as a coalition partner. The Greens’ handling of the federal government’s attempts to change German heating systems and fossil-fuel dependence has been a lesson in political incompetence. The opposition it has now generated to making these changes has potentially put the national transition back a decade or more, such is the damage to the party and the necessary transitions it fumbled. No party will touch that important reform for years.
Governing Germany today is an unenviable task: the fissures in its political economy run deep. Precipitated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which saw another influx of refugees and an outflow of military funding and weapons, the country endured a significant decline in living standards. Energy price shocks, real wage declines (10 per cent) not seen since the 1950s and a contraction in economic output—all these data points now have entities from Volkswagen to that fabled Mittelstand jockeying for a special dispensation from the government and unions. Politically, much of this has been sheeted home to the Greens, as well as the SPD.
Less prominent but ultimately more damaging over the past two decades has been the economic fixation on the Schwarze Null (‘black zero’). This is the debt brake that the FDP, the other federal coalition partner, politically enforces with the self-denying pleasure and pain of the sadomasochist. This mechanism, introduced by the CDU and SPD to keep spending to a maximum of 0.35 per cent of GDP, has held back public spending on important infrastructure and initiatives over many years (see that broken train network, plus dicey bridges and shuttered hospitals). It applies to both federal and state budgets.
Last year, the current coalition tried to find a loophole by using money from an array of ‘special funds’, such as unused pandemic cash. This was marked to finance €60 billion in climate and railway investment. However, the Constitutional Court, responding to a case filed by the conservative CDU, shut it down. Declaring it illegal, the Court left the government in disarray, unable to act on many signature policy proposals. In response, the government declared an emergency for the fourth consecutive year—the only tool to circumvent the brake. Even mainstream economists in Germany now say it undermines the government’s capacity to respond to challenges. One told the Financial Times last year, ‘it was the biggest mistake in German economic policy in the last 20, 30 years. The stupid thing is now in the constitution and you can’t get rid of it’. Doing so requires a two-thirds supermajority—a political non-starter for the foreseeable future, given that the AfD’s founding doctrine was not belligerent Islamophobia but economic rectitude, seen in its orthodox German relish to punish debtors during the Eurozone crisis.
The debt measure was introduced into the constitution in 2009 following the GFC and Germany’s role as fiscal backstop, and public support for it remains very high. The logic of the brake has subsequently been pushed to fiscal pacts at the EU level by German administrations, including the current finance minister and leader of the FDP—awkwardly, the same one reprimanded by the Constitutional Court’s decision. The stricture has produced endless workarounds, and the court decision in 2023 revealed the contradiction, as well as the fact that because of its enshrinement, lawyers and judges are deciding on economic policy. But in German politicking, the blame for the austerity the constitution demands and the visible effects of neglect have found their target not in fiscal rules, but in the apparent largesse of migrant support. This also plays into disaffection with democracy and politics per se, as political ineffectiveness, broken electoral promises and worsening conditions diminish any sense that problems can be fixed through existing institutions.
Friend-feind distinction
Germany’s most prominent political cleavage is the split between those who trust political institutions and those who do not. Due in no small part to the mishandling of many government projects and broken promises, the AfD and BSW have generated a shared political Feindbild, or enemy image: the out-of-touch, pro-eco, pro-migrant demographic of the major cities that they figure as a Green or Linke voter. Given their different political projects, the two upstart parties have rounded on these derided, left-coded moralists in different ideological terms.
At heart, though, both AfD and BSW intimate that these are the enemy within—hell-bent on forcing their agenda on the little people of Germany’s smaller cities and increasingly expensive exurbs. Given the election results, genuine self-reflection from the German Left on the role of abstraction, technologically mediated relations and alienation from power have been absent.
The current Feindbild in Germany points to the knowledge classes and the intellectually trained, the manipulators of symbols, predominating in political, social and cultural power. Superficially, the evolution of intellectual and economic practice may look somewhat different in Germany—the land of poets and engineers, where university is free and a (plagiarised) PhD has long been the necessary ticket to a government ministry. But the cultural politics are near enough. (Indeed, national mythologies obscure the facts: the percentage of Germany’s population with a tertiary degree equals that of Australia at 32 per cent.)
For example, the AfD vote in Thuringia was depressed by university towns, including the Hegel haunts of Jena and Weimar, and the tourist- and civil-servant-heavy state capital, Erfurt. Likewise, in Saxony’s Dresden and Leipzig, the AfD vote was lower than the state average. But as with much conspiratorial politics, there’s at once deep distrust of these figures and too much trust in their power to do what they’re claimed to do. The institutional block on action is more complicated, as the debt brake debacle suggests.
Above all, the Left needs a response because this plays well in the eastern states that have seen recent elections. Sociologists such as Steffen Mau have noted these regions are still fundamentally oriented around, and can be mobilised via, a vertical ‘us’ and ‘them’ politics—the governed and the governing, the decision-makers and the little people. Drawing on this model, resonant from the end times of GDR state socialism, the AfD has successfully run under these terms in elections. They have repurposed slogans from the revolutions of 1989 and suggested that today’s overwhelmingly western functionaries—no less among the upper echelons of the eastern AfD, it turns out—are the blowhards who need to be taught a lesson.
Paired with the contemporary Feindbild, this catalysation of historical memory—overthrowing mean-spirited do-gooders—conjures the long-endured and much-hated experience of the GDR’s ‘tutelary state’. This was the GDR’s institutionalisation of the Left’s worst paternalistic and condescending tendencies. It was prey, equally, to the notion that temporary pain will launch a brighter tomorrow, an austerity ethos that late socialism and late capitalism share. Historical experience and memory mean that many living in the eastern states see this as a bribe, not a promise.
This layering of past and present has been effective for the AfD and BSW. Before them, it was also the basis of much eastern support for Die Linke through the 2000s and most of the 2010s. Since reunification, people in these states have had little interest in joining political parties—a problem for Die Linke in embedding itself—but have nevertheless maintained a culture of street protest, as the anti-migrant, Islamophobic movement of PEGIDA demonstrated. That movement was catalysed, roughly a decade ago, in response to Angela Merkel’s briefly open policy for refugees, and had its rallying point in Dresden, the capital of Saxony. The AfD swooped into this space.
Since reunification, the eastern states had begun to converge with western states on NATO. Those living there still tended to be ambivalent about Russia and Putin, contrasting with overwhelmingly negative western positions. However, after the invasion of Ukraine, reliable surveys show a significantly more pronounced sense of insecurity in eastern Germany, including the concern that Germany could be drawn into military conflicts. Almost half of eastern Germans would like to reduce aid to Ukraine, compared to just over a quarter of westerners.
Conversely, eastern Germans are less afraid of climate change and the rise of the AfD. Mau has suggested that the differences here can only be explained historically and by various mental, cultural and social factors: in other words, by a persistent cultural repertoire, now intergenerational, marking out an intranational difference. Some thirty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this stubborn difference appears to be a division in unity. In contemporary life, it is far more salient than the north–south, Catholic–Protestant, Prussian–Bavarian distinctions that have riven the project of German unification since Bismarck.
Nevertheless, beyond the particularities of political entrepreneurialism and historical memory in the eastern states, the success of the AfD and BSW in these elections is not the bizarre ‘eastern problem’ it’s often painted as. The West German far-right—including harder factions of the CDU and neo-fascist chancers—saw an opportunity in the eastern political vacuum after re-unification in the 1990s. It began embedding itself within the vacant spaces, snapping up youth centres, farms and other cheap real estate—a canniness bearing fruit a couple of decades later. At the same time, a state bruised by the Red Army Faction remained fixated on repressing the far-left and active anti-fascist networks, which largely managed to survive where they had some mass (i.e. those Feindbild cities) and declined in those regions that are now AfD strongholds.
The social ‘centre’ of German politics, as Stephan Lessenich wrote in a critical review of some of Mau’s recent work, appears now to be populated by motifs and Völkisch emblems of far-right politics: immigration, welfare, crime, gender, family, property, Israel, Islam, debt. The late 2023 Bavarian and Hessian elections in wealthy western German states also saw the AfD vote surge. Taken together, those western state election results, the national vote in the EU elections and polling ahead of the 2025 federal election indicate a broader political and conjunctural shift in the country, if not the region.