The AfD stands for an unprecedented political success, but also for a history of radicalization. Like any new party, breaking taboos is the AfD's lifeblood, but its shift to the right has continued unabated. And anyone who has stood in the party's way has gotten steamrolled. First it hit Lucke, the well-behaved co-founder and former party head; he was overthrown by the much more politically shrewd Frauke Petry. [...]
In January, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published a book titled, "How Democracies Die." In it, they write that in the decades since the end of the Cold War, liberal systems haven't been overthrown through force and military coups alone. More than anything else, democracy has been undermined non-violently through the election of anti-democratic politicians. [...]
For years, politics in Germany had been shaped by the old polarity between left and right. But those days are over. The question of identity now seems to be more important, which seemingly scrambles the party system. Sahra Wagenknecht of the Left Party is creating a new movement called "Aufstehen," German for "Stand Up," that she hopes will be a magnet for voters who would like to see a bigger welfare state and fewer immigrants. The move places additional pressure on the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which has fluctuated between a culture of welcoming refugees and warnings of a loss of control since the refugee crisis. The business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), meanwhile, has morphed into a law and order party. And the only thing still holding the CDU and Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU's Bavarian sister party, together is the fear of losing power. The only parties that seem to be profiting from the new political complexities are the Greens and the AfD. [...]
Slowly but surely, the AfD is also advancing into areas that possess even more powerful weapons than the military: the media and the world of culture. As the third-largest group in German parliament, the AfD has access to a number of administrative bodies, from the Holocaust memorial in Berlin to the Stasi Records Agency, which administers the vast number of files kept by the East German secret police on its own citizens. When it comes to choosing its representatives for such bodies, the AfD sometimes seems to be intentionally trying to provoke. For example, for the board of the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation, which fights for gay rights, the AfD chose Nicole Höchst, who believes that homosexuals have an abnormal inclination to pedophilia.
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