German democracy’s hardest test since

Politicians, media and civil society must learn to resist the AfD’s constant attempts to trigger them with polemics and distract them from solving problems

ermany, my country: It is a sombre day for you, for me and for democrats across the West.

In Germany’s earthquake national elections, a radical rightwing party entered the federal legislature for the first time in more than half a century. Founded in 2013, Alternative for Germany (AfD) failed to pass the 5 per cent threshold in that year’s elections. But today it gained nearly 13 per cent of the vote, becoming the third-largest force in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament.

The governing parties of the current grand coalition — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of her challenger Martin Schulz — were both brutally punished: Merkel was dealt her worst personal result at 32.9 per cent; the CDU, its Bavarian sister party CSU and the SPD saw their worst-ever outcome since 1949. Small parties, meanwhile, benefited overall: The Liberals returned after a four-year hiatus at 10 per cent, and the Greens as well as the Left Party at around 9 per cent. Voter turnout, at 77 per cent, was significantly higher than four years ago — but that did not help the democratic parties.

This is a caesura in German postwar history. In her fourth term, a weakened Merkel will have no other choice but to painfully forge an unprecedented, difficult threeway coalition between her CDU, the Liberals (FDP) and the Greens; the SPD has already ruled out another grand coalition. The Liberals have made it clear that they want a much more restrictive immigration policy and are sceptics on European Union integration — a blow to France’s young president, Emmanuel Macron, who had set his hopes on a renewed Paris-Berlin partnership to reinvigorate the EU. The Greens’ leadership will be wrestling with a fierce fundamentalist left wing that would rather be waterboarded than compromise. So expect coalition negotiations to last until December at least — and an introverted, conflicted Germany that is barely present in international debates.

At the same time, this outcome sets up a fight for Merkel’s succession and a harsh power battle between her own camp of moderate modernisers and those in her party who want to chart a much more hard-edged conservative course. It will darken the tone of German political debate, polarise the country and possibly change the political party landscape forever. The future of social democracy in Europe is more in question than ever. Let there be no doubt about it — the AfD is no alternative for any democrat. It is a party bent on disruption and destruction. It seeks to tear down my country’s postwar centrist consensus, its postwar commitment to atonement for the Second World War and the Holocaust, and reconciliation with their victims. Its programme is nationalistic and xenophobic, anti-European integration, antiNato, anti-western, anti-Muslim and overtly pro-Russian.

AfD’s leadership — once content with discreet dog-whistling signals to the extreme right, and with refusing to distance themselves from the party’s most Islamophobic and anti-Semitic elements — managed to nearly double the number of its supporters within a month with a ferociously aggressive, deliberately taboo-breaking campaign waged on all fronts. On social media, it developed a commanding presence (supported, it seems, in the final stretch by repurposed Russian bots). On the street, the AfD made sure to send jeering and howling protesters to each and every one of the chancellor’s appearances. In his first postvictory speech on national TV, party leader Alexander Gauland promised to “hunt down the government” and to “take back our country.”

Act of protest

My parents, who are now both dead, would have been horrified. My father, born in 1927, was drafted into the Wehrmacht at 16; my mother, born in 1933, was bombed out of Berlin as a child. They were part of a generation who despised the Nazis and rebuilt their country as a strong democracy so that it would never again succumb to totalitarian temptation.

And yet — it’s important to look at the exact reasons that people voted for the AfD. Germany has been spared major terrorist attacks, it boasts full employment and record surpluses; and the uncontrolled inflow of refugees has slowed to a trickle. But more than two-thirds of respondents in exit polls said they were concerned about terrorism, crime and immigration, showing that they remain worried about integrating the more than a million refugees that are likely to stay in Germany. Revealingly, two-thirds of AfD voters said they had cast their vote as an act of protest rather than as an act of conviction.

This, sadly, speaks volumes about the grand coalition’s — and, yes, Merkel’s —inability to speak to and calm ordinary Germans’ concerns about the ability of institutions and civil society to cope with historic challenges. The AfD pulled in 740,000 new voters, half a million votes from the SPD and over a million from the CDU. But it also shows the way out of this debacle.

The 90-strong party grouping of the AfD in the next legislature will contain many members with no experience even in local government. Its leadership has spent much of its four-year existence with vicious infighting. Experience with the AfD’s performance in the European parliament and 13 of 16 state legislatures has shown that it is mostly neither willing nor able to engage constructively on the business of legislation and governance.

Still, the fight is the democrats’ to lose. Politicians, media and civil society must learn to resist the AfD’s constant attempts to trigger them with polemics and distract them from solving problems. They must learn to fight the enemies of democracy on issues, not on slogans; on merits, not on morals. And they need to address the concerns that drove nearly 13 per cent of German voters into the arms of a radical right-wing party — but not by adopting its positions. This has to be the end of the sleepwalking complacency that has so often irritated even our friends.

Without a doubt, this is the hardest test for German democracy in my lifetime, perhaps of the republic’s postwar history. It will take a huge effort, but I believe our institutions and our civil society are strong enough. We owe it to ourselves, to our neighbours and allies, and to fellow democrats worldwide.

Constanze Stelzenmller is a Robert Bosch senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Post contributing writer