When they meet, on February 6, 2013, in the village hall of Oberursel, in Hesse, the founders of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) gathered around economics professor Bernd Lucke, want to offer an “alternative” Merkel’s policy, which has just saved the euro in Brussels by paying billions to Greece. These liberals, a bit populist, address the conservatives who no longer feel represented by the Chancellor. Of the 18 founders present that day, there are hardly any left today. Bernd Lucke, Frauke Petry… all the “moderates” were ousted by the identity wing embodied by Björn Höcke, the head of the AfD in Thuringia. “The radicals have taken control”, recently summarized Jörg Meuthen, the last of the “liberals” to have thrown in the towel, in January 2022.
This turn to the extreme right has in no way slowed down the rise of the AfD, quite the contrary. The victory in the small district of Sonneberg in Thuringia on Sunday June 25 demonstrated that voters were not afraid to vote for candidates monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz, the equivalent of general intelligence) because of their anti-Semitic, racist and anti-democratic positions.
Second political force
Composed of conservatives from the CDU but also from the radical left (Die Linke), the “republican front” only served to strengthen the determination of far-right voters. “It had the opposite effect to that expected, analyzes Ursula Münch, director of the Tutzing Academy of Political Science. The AfD has succeeded in strengthening its profile as an anti-system party and ‘All against us'”. Even on a small scale, the AfD can boast of having won a triumph with nearly 53% of the vote in a context of high turnout (60%). This victory in a district of 54,000 inhabitants confirms its rise in the polls. The AfD has become, on a national scale, the second political force in the country, ahead of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Chancellor Scholz. With nearly 20% of voting intentions, the far right would currently do twice as well as in the 2021 federal elections.
If the AfD is present in practically all the German Länder, it is taking control of a local authority for the first time in Sonneberg. “The particularity of this election is that the winner of the ballot, Robert Sesselmann, will have to manage schools, nurseries and roads, but also the reception of refugees”, remarks Hans Vorländer, political scientist from the University of Dresden. The capture of Sonneberg recalls the era of the 1990s when the National Front won its first town halls in France in Orange, Marignane, Toulon and Vitrolles. “Sonneberg will become a kind of AfD laboratory,” he adds.
The victory is all the more significant as it takes place in the region which concentrates the most radical factions of the party. Over the years, Thuringia has turned into the headquarters of the AfD. Nothing is decided on a national scale without the agreement of Björn Höcke, the president of the regional federation. “This party is too often described as populist when it is clearly a far-right party which challenges the fundamental principles of our rule of law”, insists Hendrik Cremer, expert on racism and violence. far-right at the German Institute for Human Rights and author of the publication Why the AfD could be banned.
Threat to democracy
Current party officials are known for their violent statements against migration policy, the main campaign theme. We must “shoot the refugees at the border, including women and children”, declared in 2017 Beatrix von Storch, the current vice-president of the parliamentary group. Party co-chair Alice Weidel warned Germans against “headscarf girls”, “good-for-nothings” or “knife men” who “swept” the country. For Björn Höcke, the strong man of the party, Europe needs “ethnic homogenization”. “We, the German people, don’t want to integrate these people who are mostly ignorant, young and Muslim into our country,” he said, while railing against the “strategic methods of reproduction of Africans”. “Björn Höcke is clearly inspired by National Socialism. He advocates the deportation of German citizens whom he does not recognize as German according to his ideas of identity… If he came to power, it would affect millions of people in Germany”, insists Hendrik Cremer, who believes that political parties must imperatively become aware of the threat this party poses to our democracy and distance themselves from the AfD.”
As for Alexander Gauland, the éminence grise of the party, no one has forgotten his expression of “cat pee” to qualify the Nazi period in German history. A defector from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), he defends the thesis of the “great replacement”. “Today we are tolerant. Tomorrow we will be foreigners in our own country,” he said, using a slogan from the neo-Nazi NPD party.
Party “anti-everything”
The party has built its success on the rejection of the elites and the “system”. The AfD positions itself against the euro, against refugees, against health measures, against arms deliveries to Ukraine, against NATO, against the United States and above all against any compromise… It is a party which rejects democracy and clearly manifests the desire for a putsch. “The fight for the existence of our nation will not be decided in Parliament, but in the street”, insists Björn Höcke.
For the AfD, Russia is a “natural ally of Germany”. “Let’s never forget that the Russians and the Germans are in the same vein”, declared Björn Höcke last October 3 in Gera (Thuringia), the day of the national holiday which celebrates German unity. “We Germans see Russian culture as an expression of a certain human warmth.” As for the United States, endowed with a “primitive conscience”, they seek to “stop the German-Russian union” in order to “muzzle Europe” and ensure their “world hegemony”. “Our enemies are not in Moscow but in Washington and Berlin,” added Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, vice-president of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, that day.
The AfD mobilizes especially in the former communist regions of eastern Germany, which are developing a growing distrust of democracy by idealizing the former authoritarian regime, according to a study by the Else-Frenkel-Institut. Brunswik (University of Leipzig). “What Germany needs is a strong party that embodies the national community as a whole”, approves more than 50% of respondents in a poll published in June 2023.
Unpopularity of Olaf Scholz
The AfD’s rise in the polls is partly explained by the unpopularity of the Scholz government. “The energy policy [avec l’obligation de remplacement des chauffages au fioul et au gaz] sparked popular anger that benefited the AfD,” says political scientist Julia Reuschenbach of the Otto-Suhr Institute in Berlin. The conservative opposition was unable to capitalize on this discontent. As a result, the victory of the far-right constitutes a cruel disavowal for the strategy of Friedrich Merz, the chairman of the CDU, who in 2019 promised his troops to “halve” the number of AfD voters. .
While hammering that the cordon sanitaire will not be broken, Friedrich Merz continues to walk on the flowerbeds of the far right by resuming his narrative. He attacks young people from sensitive neighborhoods by calling them “little pashas”, while Mario Voigt, his CDU counterpart in Thuringia, jeers at environmentalists with the same rhetoric as the AfD by denouncing the “Stasi-worthy” methods of the Ecologist Ministry of Economy and Climate, as if the government were leading the country to dictatorship… “By speaking thus, the conservatives have provided grist for the mill of the AfD. However, the experts have been telling them for years not to copy the far right, deplores Julia Reuschenbach. We have the impression that they refuse to listen”, she says before adding: “Basically, to win, the far right has just need… to do nothing”.