FAR RIGHT LEADER STIRS GERMANY’S LONG-SUPPRESSED NATIONALISM
AfD’s rapid rise worries mainstream parties
At a chandelier-lit beer hall in Dresden, the lean blond man’s voice boomed out over a crowd of hundreds — some middle-aged and working class but with a contingent of polished young professionals. “The AfD is the last revolutionary, the last peaceful chance for our fatherland,” declared the man, Bjoern Hoecke, referring to the political party Alternative for Germany and employing a reverential term for Germany, one of several nationalist buzzwords usually shunned in the country’s politics.
“Jawohl!” a few shouted. “Yes!”
When Mr Hoecke lamented that “German history is handled as rotten and made to look ridiculous” — a subtle but clear reference to guilt for the Holocaust and other Nazi war crimes — the crowd responded by chanting “Deutschland, Deutschland”.
His speech at the rally in Dresden on Tuesday touched off a wave of national alarm by challenging Germany’s national atonement for the Holocaust and for its Nazi crimes. His comments drew broad criticism for their venom and because Mr Hoecke, a rising star in the AfD, has found growing success with his messages of extreme nationalism.
He challenged the collective national guilt over the war that has restrained German politics for three generations. At times he even used language that seemed to hint at lamenting Nazi Germany’s defeat.
Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of its capital,” he said, referring to a memorial to murdered Jews in Berlin. He added that Germans had the “mentality of a totally vanquished people”.
Mr Hoecke, who began his speech by triumphantly raising his arms over his head, represents the rightward flank of AfD. He is on the fringe, but that fringe is growing in numbers and in willingness to defy the usual restraints.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany called the comments “deeply deplorable and fully unacceptable”. Charlotte Knobloch, a former president of the council, said the speech was “unbearable agitation” and warned that “the AfD is poisoning the political culture and social debate in Germany”.
AfD is polling at nearly 15%, ahead of some mainstream parties, for this autumn’s national election. Its rapid rise demonstrates that German nationalist politics can find a foothold in unexpected places, such as the educated young people at Tuesday’s rally. Those 20-somethings, many in coat and tie, looked clean-cut and primly trendy.
Mainstream parties in Germany have long eschewed charisma-driven politics and tried to avoid shows of overt nationalism. But that leaves an opening: a populist party such as AfD can indulge those ideas just enough to excite its supporters without scaring off larger groups of voters.
Julian Waelder, a 21-year-old law student, said he had initially joined the youth league of the Christian Democratic Union, the centreright party to which Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs. But he said the party did not feel like “real politics”.
Since 2015, when Germany received nearly one million asylum seekers, AfD has sought to portray national identity as under threat from migration and multiculturalism.
Establishment parties and other enemies, Mr Hoecke told the crowd, “are liquidating our beloved German fatherland, like a piece of soap under warm running water. But we, we beloved friends, we patriots, we will close this open tap, and we will win back our Germany, piece by piece.”
Yascha Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard and fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund, said Germany had a style of government that could leave an especially wide opening for fringe parties. Because the German parties tend to govern in a grand, cross-ideological coalition, voters often see little change when parties shift in and out.
Politics in Germany usually play out in quiet, polite negotiations among members of the coalition rather than in dramatic public clashes between competing parties. The coalition blocks fringe parties like AfD, which can then paint mainstream politics as an elite conspiracy to impose unpopular policies and to shut down real debate.
The crowd chanted a line Mr Waelder had also used: “We are the outsiders.” It was a jarring moment, as many of the “outsiders” were young, white and wore suits and ties — seemingly the definition of an insider in Germany.
Because these young Germans say that the political establishment has denied them sufficient pride in their national identity, they feel as if they are being oppressed, even though they have every right and live in a country that has one of Europe’s best-performing economies.
But young and old supporters of AfD seemed to find something at Tuesday’s rally that is not common among far right politics: a sense of impending victory. Not in the sense that they would oust Ms Merkel’s government this year — she is likely to retain power — but in the belief that their movement would quickly shape and perhaps one day overcome a system that they see as denying them their German pride.
Mr Mounk said the rise of extremist voices in Germany may have been inevitable given the failure of mainstream parties to satisfy the desires for national self-esteem and for charismatic politics.