Germany’s ‘Firewall’ Against the Far Right Is Being Tested as Never Before
New York Times · LC · trust 27/100
A blowout win by the far-right Alternative for Germany party in a state election has revealed a split among voters about whether to uphold a decades-old strategy for sidelining extremists.
Listen · 7:03 min Share full article Ulrich Siegmund, an Alternative for Germany candidate, speaking in Magdeburg, Germany, after Saxony-Anhalt state elections on Sunday. Credit... Matthias Schrader/Associated Press By Jim Tankersley
That argument now faces its biggest test in the wake of Sunday’s election in Saxony-Anhalt, a small state of 2.1 million people in the east that broke decisively for the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.
The result was an example of a fundamental disagreement among Germans about what constitutes a risk to democracy. Voters were asked by pollsters on Sunday if they considered the AfD a danger to democracy, as Germany’s mainstream parties do. About half saw the AfD as a threat, according to exit polling released by a public television network . They voted almost exclusively for its rivals, from the far left to the center right.
The other half of voters said there was no threat.
It was a vivid illustration of the growing divide between Germany’s mainstream parties, which govern from the center-right and the center-left, and populist voters who have grown convinced that politics as usual can no longer solve their urgent problems.
To the political mainstream, the far right is a threat to democracy. AfD leaders have made dog-whistle comments about Nazism, including by repeating Nazi slogans and diminishing the significance of the Holocaust, and portrayed minorities as second-class citizens.
To the AfD’s supporters, particularly in the country’s economically struggling eastern states, the AfD has become a last, best shot for making their voices heard — a feeling only reinforced by governing parties’ refusal to work with it.
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