Rise of far-right leaves Germany’s conservatives at a crossroads

The surge of the Alternative for Germany party has shaken the country’s political establishment

Mario Voigt, a leader of Germany’s mainstream conservative party, has watched with concern the slow but steady string of victories notched by the far-right Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD.

In his home state of Thuringia, in eastern Germany, the AfD just last month won the district administrator’s seat, giving the far right bureaucratic authority over an area for the first time.

Since the spring, the AfD has only gathered momentum. The party has gained at least 4 points in polls since May, rising to 20% support and overtaking the country’s governing centre-left Social Democrats to become Germany’s second-strongest party. A more recent poll, released Sunday, put the AfD at a record high of 22% support.

The AfD is now nipping at the heels of Voigt’s own Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, which remains the country’s most popular but now sits in opposition.

“Now is the critical juncture,” Voigt said in an interview. “We have to understand, if we are not showing or portraying ourselves as the real opposition in Germany, people will defect to the Alternative for Germany.”

The ascent of the AfD, a party widely viewed as a threat to Germany’s democratic fabric, has posed a crisis for the country’s entire political establishment, but an especially acute one for the Christian Democrats, who are struggling openly with how to deal with the challenge.

Should they pivot further right themselves and risk their centrist identity? Should they continue to try to isolate the AfD? Or, as that becomes increasingly difficult, should they break long-standing norms and work with the AfD instead?

Those questions have bedevilled not only the Christian Democrats in Germany but also other mainstream conservative parties around Europe as nationalist and hard-right parties have made strides. Most recently, in Spain, the conservative Popular Party began partnering with the far-right Vox party at a local level. It even seemed prepared to do so nationally, until Spanish voters rebuked Vox in elections Sunday.

As state parliament elections approach in eastern Germany, including in Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony, finding answers is urgent for the country’s Christian Democrats. Eyeing potential victories in the former East Germany, the AfD has vowed to foment a “political earthquake” in the months ahead.

For now, the AfD has the political winds at its back. Germany’s support for Ukraine as it fends off Russia’s invasion — and the energy and refugee crises the war has provoked — has fueled German anxiety and, along with it, support for the AfD.

As the current government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, tries to reorient Germany’s economic and security policies, critics say it has not made its case convincingly enough for many Germans.

But neither, perhaps, has the CDU in opposition. “The CDU, its more moderate worldview and its position is not really equipped for the situation of this time, when we are having a war, when we have in the energy crisis, with high costs and now with a government which tries to ideologically influence people’s lives,” said Voigt, the leader of the CDU in Thuringia’s state parliament.

“This together, in my opinion, forces the CDU to answer the question: What is your DNA? What is your different perspective?”

It is a remarkable round of public soul-searching from a party that as recently as 2021 had a lock on political power in Berlin for nearly two decades under Merkel. But now the party is engaged in a sometimes messy public debate over how to meet an angrier, more uncertain time.

Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats, in a television interview on Sunday night appeared to open the door to working with the far-right AfD in local governments. The party had previously vowed never to cooperate at any level with the AfD, which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has classified as a “suspected” extremist organization.

“At the municipal level, party politics have advanced a bit too far anyway,” he said. “There has now been elected a district administrator in Thuringia. And, of course, this is a democratic election. In Saxony-Anhalt, in a small community, a mayor has been elected who belongs to the AfD. And, of course, this is a democratic election. We also have to accept that.”

After members of his own party bristled at his comments, Merz walked them back. One of his deputies, Carsten Linnemann, said that Merz was merely pointing out the policy’s “difficult implementation on the ground.”

“If it’s about a new day care centre in the local parliament, for example, we can’t vote against it just because the #AfD is voting along,” Linnemann said in a statement on Twitter. “We do not make ourselves dependent on right-wing radicals.”

Some political experts view the resurgence of the AfD as a rejection of Merkel’s policies — particularly her immigration and climate-friendly stances. That has created a particularly awkward situation for current members of the party. To win back voters, “it will be necessary to reject some of the policies of Merkel,” said Torsten Oppelland, the chair of the political science department at the University of Jena. But, he added, doing so ran the risk of alienating others.

The Christian Democrats, he said, “will go on being an important party. But for winning governing majorities, it’s a huge problem.”

Many in the party have declared that they will never resort to pushing the kind of far-right, populist rhetoric that the AfD traffics in. Markus Söder, the head of the state in Bavaria, has warned that the party cannot campaign on a message of “anger and frustration.”

“Repeating and chasing after populists does not bring any positive results; on the contrary, it strengthens the right-wing original and not the copy,” Söder told a local newspaper. “I will not risk Bavaria’s political decency for a fleeting percent of approval in the populist area.”

Yet some in the party have begun tilting further right. Merz this month replaced a top party aide responsible for day-to-day political strategy with a more conservative member. Voigt believes the Christian Democrats can still find electoral success with the party’s “pragmatism” and “moderate worldview.” But its message, he said, must be “understood at people’s tables.”

The New York Times