The Irish Times: Germany has suffered a political earthquake. What happened?

He accepted, as the price for power, votes from the AfD. It began life as a euro bailout protest party but has over time radicalised into a hard-right party with an increasingly influential far-right wing. Thuringia’s AfD, and its head Björn Höcke, is head of this far-right wing. He calls himself a “social patriot” while critics accuse him of flirting with Holocaust denial and relativising Nazi crimes. As minister president, critics warn, Kemmerich will be dependent on this extremist support to govern.[...]

Because the Thuringian tremor could crack the federal government. Until now a gentleman’s agreement existed among all other parties not to co-operate with, or allow support from, the AfD. Chancellor Merkel described Wednesday’s vote as “unforgivable” and has demanded the parliamentary decision be revoked. Her successor as CDU leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, has attacked her party colleagues in Thuringia for breaking their own internal party agreement to boycott the AfD. [...]

With quiet triumph. After just seven years in business, it now sits in all of Germany’s 16 state parliaments and is the largest opposition party in the federal chamber, the Bundestag. In Thuringia it is the second-largest grouping. While the local CDU and FDP fear a snap election, the wrath of other parties and of local voters, the AfD can sit back and watch the drama unfold.

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The Local: Could Merkel’s Christian Democrats really work with the far-right AfD?

But on Monday an open letter signed by 17 local CDU officials and reported on by the Ostthüringer Zeitung, urges the party to start "open-ended talks" with the AfD. They consider it unthinkable that "almost a quarter of the voters" in Thuringia "should remain outside the talks". [...]

The AfD surged into second place with 23.4 percent, more than doubling its share of the vote since the last state election in 2014, while the CDU tumbled down to 21.8 percent, from 33.5 percent in 2014. [...]

The CDU previously ruled out working with the Left, but Thuringia CDU leader Mohring said he was open to talks with the party's local leader Ramelow.

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Politico: Far left and right outflank center in regional German vote

The far-left Die Linke party largely held steady to secure first place at 31 percent of the vote in the state of Thuringia, thanks in part to the popularity of state premier Bodo Ramelow, according to preliminary results. Meanwhile, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) once again demonstrated its strong support in the east of the country by surging ahead to finish second at 23.4 percent, more than doubling its vote share in the last election of 2014. [...]

The ballot in the state of a little more than 2 million is expected to have limited impact at national level as Thuringia is a rural region of small towns rather than teeming metropolises. However, the result means efforts to build a coalition will be fraught, testing party red lines. The prior coalition made up of Die Linke, the SPD and the Greens now falls short of a majority. [...]

All parties have ruled out working with the AfD. Its regional leader, Björn Höcke, is a right-wing firebrand whose controversial statements about the Nazi era have prompted some within the party to try to oust him from its ranks.

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Politico: Germany passes controversial migration law

The new law's aim, according to its draft version, is to "significantly increase" the proportion of successful deportations. Approximately half of the planned 188,000 deportations from Germany since 2015 failed or were not carried out, according to interior ministry data.

Yet the policy package also included measures to improve access to Germany's labor market for skilled migrants. For instance, migrants without asylum status who arrived before last summer will be able to stay for the time being if they have a job and speak German. In addition, it scrapped previous rules that required German employers to prove that they found no German or other EU citizen to take the job in order to employ a skilled non-EU migrant. [...]

Ahead of Friday's Bundestag debate, the Greens and the far-left Die Linke party had unsuccessfully tried to remove the vote on the legislative package, which they said infringed on asylum seekers' rights and had been rushed through parliament, from the agenda.

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UnHerd: The far-Right’s appeal to resentful Germans

This was once the beating heart of East German industry, and it is here that the far-Right has enjoyed particular success in recent times. Support for the AfD in East Germany is on average more than double that in the West. In this week’s elections to the European Parliament, the AfD was the biggest force in Saxony, winning a quarter (25.3%) of the vote. The party also finished first in Brandenburg.

As with populist successes elsewhere, the reasons for the AfD’s rise are multifaceted. There is the decline of industry and resultant male resentment. There is the gap between the attitudes of younger city-dwellers and older voters toward multiculturalism and immigration. And there is a tired political establishment – in this case Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany – that has been in power for nearly a decade and a half. [...]

The difference in attitudes to immigration between East and West is significant. According to a recent survey, 66% of respondents in the former East German states are not satisfied that their immigration concerns are being addressed, compared to 46% in the former West German states. There are fewer foreign-born citizens in the East than in the West, yet anger about immigration runs deeper. According to data collected by victim counselling centres, five people in the east fall victim to far-right violence every day. In Saxony, 317 attacks were recorded in 2018, up from 229 in 2017. [...]

There are other factors at play in the party’s growth. The economy, for example. But often these are connected with immigration as low-skilled workers compete with immigrants for jobs. Though the AfD did well in areas with strong economic growth, support across Germany was typically stronger in areas with low household income. Those living in the former GDR are statistically several percentage points more likely to be living in poverty than those living in the west of Germany.

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Deutsche Welle: German parliament rows over UN Migration Compact

"Millions of people from crisis-stricken regions around the world are being encouraged to get on the road," said AfD leader Alexander Gauland. "Leftist dreamers and globalist elites want to secretly turn our country from a nation state into a settlement area."

Though the motion was swiftly rejected once the debate was over, the AfD considered it a victory to get it on the agenda at all, since the German government is under no obligation to ask for the parliament's approval to ratify the non-legally binding compact. [...]

"It should have been the task of the government long ago to explain the migration compact factually and publicly. You were silent for too long, and that allowed these conspiracy theories to start in the first place," said Stamp, a member of the opposition Free Democratic Party (FDP).

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Politico: 950 attacks on Muslims recorded in Germany last year

The figures were released by the interior ministry in response to an inquiry made by the far-left Die Linke party, the paper reported Saturday. The government did not previously collect data on anti-Muslim attacks, and therefore has no point of comparison to 2016 data.

According to the data, 33 people were injured in the attacks, which were predominantly perpetrated by far-right extremists. The report also recorded 60 cases vandalism against mosques and Islamic centers, some of which were defaced with Nazi grafitti. [...]

“There is a big blind spot, because the authorities — police and prosecutors — are not yet sensitized, and therefore many cases do not appear in the statistics,” Mazyek told the paper.

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Jacobin Magazine: No Corbyn in Sight

And indeed, the conference vote ended up being remarkably close, with only 56 percent of the assembled delegates endorsing the negotiations for a new “GroKo” — the German media’s awkward abbreviation for “große Koalition,” a grand coalition between the country’s two main parties, the CDU and SPD. But fifty-six percent is still fifty-six percent. Formal talks to assemble a grand coalition — the third in sixteen years — will soon be underway. [...]

An uninspired character, Schulz did his best on Sunday to play the part of the passionate statesman forced to join the government out of a sense of national duty, while at the same time insisting that he and his team had wrung substantial concessions from Merkel. The initial agreement between the SPD and CDU, which forms the basis of coalition negotiations, includes several noteworthy, arguably “Social Democratic” reforms. [...]

Schulz and company want their supporters to believe that these concessions are the result of hard bargaining, but the fact is, after two decades of neoliberal convergence, very little difference remains between the two major parties. As Oliver Nachtwey argued in the lead up to last year’s elections, Merkel largely abandoned fiscally conservative policies after taking government, and has since presided over a stable spending and social welfare policy that has even seen her overturn the most extreme of the SPD’s neoliberal reforms of the early 2000s. Tweaking a few details to appease the Social Democrats probably didn’t take much work. [...]

At the same time, this will not be a grand coalition like any other. Last year’s elections not only delivered humiliatingly low results for both of the major parties, but also witnessed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s meteoric rise. With the SPD back in government, the AfD will now be the largest opposition party in parliament, posing the very real danger that further hollowing out of the political center will benefit not the Left, but the radical right.

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Deutsche Welle: Is Germany’s political left coming apart at the seams?

Arguably, the splintering of the German left began with the rise of the Green party in the early 1980s, but it became undeniable with the establishment of the Left Party in the mid-00s. The crux came in 2005 when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder engineered an early national election as a referendum on his Agenda 2010 reforms, which significantly cut Germany's social welfare system in the interest of growth and economic competitiveness. [...]

The weakening of the left in the Merkel era hasn't brought with it lasting gains on the political right. On the contrary, that era began in 2005 with more than 50 percent of voters casting ballots for one of the left- wing parties – SPD, PDS or Greens. The conservatives' success has been built on their relative cohesion. By contrast, because of the connection with communist East Germany, no SPD leader since 2005 has dared risk cooperating with the PDS/Left Party. [...]

Long gone are the days when the left was neatly aligned with the industrial working classes. The big-tent leftist movement so vaguely formulated by Lafontaine and Wagenknecht would have to bring together the interests of, for instance, blue-collar workers, the long-term unemployed, affluent environmentalists, human- and civil-rights activists, single parents and Germans from vastly different cultural backgrounds in the east and west.

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Political Critique: Corbyn can kick off a revolution among Europe’s political elites – an interview with Michael Hartmann

How many people make up the elite of a country? 

About 2000 people.

How accessible is the elite?

It really depends on which elite-branch and country we are talking about. For instance, in Germany, 75% of the chief economic officers who are part of the economic elite stem from the richest 4% of the population. Among German political elites, on the other hand, the figure drops down to 50%. In France the numbers are slightly different and rise to 90 and 60%, respectively. This implies, on the one hand, that the economic elite is more exclusive than the political one, generally speaking. On the other hand, it tells us that France has more “exclusive” features compared with Germany. [...]

We observed the last significant turn within elites when Thatcher took power in the UK. More specifically, at that time within the British Conservative Party the neoliberal paradigm gained traction. The transition was accompanied by a fully fledged shift in the composition of the Government’s staff. If, before Thatcher, the Labour government featured 30% of people stemming from the upper bourgeoisie, that same number reached the staggering proportion of 80%. From an ideological point of view, all other European countries subsequently followed that paradigm shift. [...]

Brexit is a symptom of the poor cohesion within the British economic elite. If compared to other economic elites in Europe, the former is the only one that has undergone a massive process of internationalisation. This dynamic created a gap between the economic elite and the conservative political ruling class. [...]

First of all, it makes no sense to talk about a crisis within Die Linke. Secondarily, the point is that the left has to live with a substantial mutation of its electorate. Leftist parties attract young people with high levels of education, not the victims of the economic system. This truth holds for anyone: Die Linke, Sanders in the US, or Corbyn in the UK. And it creates disruptions.

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Social Europe: Germany: What Happens Next?

The key question now is: What happens next? After the social democrats have (wisely, I think) opted for a role in the opposition, there will be an extended period of bargaining on coalition formation, with only one majority option remaining on the table: the black-yellow-green “Jamaica”. That option is likely to fail. Differences among the participants cannot possibly be bridged in stable ways. After all, the Greens would at the very least have to win the support of the majority of their membership constituency, which is hard to imagine. The next option is the formation of a black-yellow minority government. That would be without precedent in Germany at the federal level. But it will be tried, as new elections are unlikely to yield an easier-to-handle result, perhaps a worse one. Moreover, there are creeping succession leadership crises in both the CDU and CSU (if not SPD), plus looming divorce issues between the two Christian “sister” parties regarding the continuation of a joint faction in the Bundestag. [...]

Also, a historical virtue of PDS/die Linke is a thing of the past. It consisted of its capacity to mask the legacies of East German xenophobic, authoritarian nativism by reframing it in terms of social justice issues. Now die Linke has lost 420,000 of its voters to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, which also mobilized nearly 1.5 million non-voters, making it the party with by far the greatest success in mobilizing this group relative to the number of votes it received). In spite of this massive loss to AfD, however, die Linke has been able to more than compensate for it by winning the support of 700,000 former social democratic and 330,000 former green voters.  

There is a clear East/West divide in Germany. The new Länder in the East provided almost twice the level of electoral support for AfD as that of the old Länder. In Saxony, AfD even overtook CDU by a narrow margin and came in first. The same divide worked in Berlin as well as in the EU in general: populists are in power in Hungary and Poland and (so far) nowhere in the West of Europe. [...]

One lesson we can draw from the 2017 campaign and its outcome is this: Centrism of grand coalition governments breeds anti-elite centrifugality and the further fragmentation of party system, with an unprecedented number of seven distinct parties now in the Bundestag. As one commentator observed: “Fighting extremism in Germany may demand less political centrism.” (Another one has joked: There are two right answers to the question: Are there still true social democrats in Germany? One answer is: No – all socialist projects have been abandoned by SPD. The other is: Yes – there are even two of them, namely both members of the grand coalition whose social and economic policies have become virtually indistinguishable.)

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Jacobin Magazine: Germany Is Not an Island

The other big story, and the precondition for the AfD’s surge, is the ongoing erosion of the political center. Germany has yet to witness a spectacular implosion of the center-left like in France or Greece, but the Social Democratic Party (SPD) ended the night with 20.5 percent, its worst postwar result and a humiliating defeat for its renewal candidate Martin Schulz. [...]

Though the German elections may seem relatively “normal” by contemporary European standards, a second peculiar fact stands out in the exit poll data: 84 percent of eligible voters described Germany’s economic situation as “good” — the highest number in decades. This makes sense given the country’s moderate but sustained economic growth and declining unemployment, particularly in light of conditions elsewhere in Europe. Although wages have stagnated for decades and job growth is concentrated primarily in precarious, low-wage employment, in the eyes of most German voters their country and economy now appear as an island of relative stability, making it understandable why many would be willing to “act satisfied and shut up,” as Oliver Nachtwey put it. [...]

This should come as little surprise, as the AfD stitches together a coalition between deeply conservative, former CDU voters repelled by Merkel’s shift towards the center on many social issues, and dissatisfied working-class and unemployed voters, where economic and social anxieties intermingle with racist and chauvinistic sentiments in a jumbled assortment of anti-establishment posturing. These constituencies, and other segments of the population who voted for the AfD, are united at the ballot box under a xenophobic, protectionist banner, despite the fact that the AfD’s economic program would be disastrous for many of its lower-income supporters if ever implemented. [...]

All qualifications aside, the AfD’s rise represents a true watershed in postwar German politics and a warning of what the future could bring. Germany is not an island surrounded by a crisis-prone Europe, but rather part and parcel of this crisis. Its centrifugal nature may have insulated the country from its most devastating economic effects and dramatic political shifts thus far, but as last Sunday demonstrated, nowhere in Europe is immune to the threat of right-populism today. Should present trends continue, a radical right-wing force will stabilize and consolidate itself as a permanent presence in German politics — whether in the form of the AfD or another, potentially more radical formation after it.

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Katoikos: Schulz’s original sin

“The initial enthusiasm around Martin Schulz’s candidacy was the result of two facts. He never took part in a grand coalition and he inspired a great hope,” commented SPD MEP Tiemo Wölken during a debate on the future of the French-German motor for the EU after the German elections, held at the European Parliamentary Association in Strasbourg on Wednesday 13 September.

“Schulz disappointed the hope he inspired. Europe and its future should have been more at the centre of his campaign. Who if not the former president of the European Parliament is the most legitimate person to talk about Europe?” continued Wölken.

Schulz missed a great opportunity when he chose not to champion openly for “red-red-green” – the name normally given to a coalition between the SPD, the Linke and the Greens. This platform is the only one capable of proposing an “alternative” vision to the one of Merkel’s CDU. And this time, more than in the past, the three parties’ programmes had enough similarities to converge around a common project.  [...]

In this regard, the SPD proposes the creation of an economic government for the eurozone, endowed with a budget financed by taxes on the financial markets, which “were saved with public money and have not even paid a part of the costs for this intervention”. This plan is much more ambitious than the monetary fund Merkel promised Emmanuel Macron.

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Jacobin Magazine: A Shift to the Right?

The campaign has been excruciatingly boring. Most observers take Angela Merkel’s victory as a foregone conclusion. The televised debate between the current chancellor and the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) lead candidate Martin Schulz on September 3 got mixed, but altogether negative, reviews, ranging from pure indifference to bewilderment and anger at the candidates’ painfully inoffensive style. This reaction is all the more remarkable given that German politics isn’t known for its confrontational style. [...]

The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) casts its shadow not only over Merkel and Schulz but also over the resurgent liberals of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). For example, approximately 47 percent of the Merkel-Schulz debate concerned migration and refugees. No AfD spokesperson participated, but the party’s presence nevertheless permeated the room. [...]

We should not take such equations lightly. In recent months, Germany has been rocked by a series of neo-fascist scandals, including the discovery of Nazi cells within the army. Furthermore, the trial of the National Socialist Underground group, responsible for deadly attacks on Turkish and Greek residents over several years, has produced a constant stream of evidence that demonstrates authorities’ chronic negligence in response to the threat of far-right terrorism. [...]

Unfortunately, the CDU isn’t the only party that has tried to weaken the AfD by attacking the Left. In recent months, the liberal — but fiscally much more neoliberal — FDP has experienced a remarkable resurgence after being kicked out of the Bundestag during the last elections. [...]

The SPD has also joined this race to the right. When Schulz announced his bid for the chancellorship, he appeared somewhat popular: more honest than Gerhard Schröder and less tainted with the legacy of the Agenda 2010 neoliberal reforms than the rest of his party. But this image soon began falling apart. Trying to appeal to both the bosses and the German workers, Schulz pleased no one. While talking about scaling back some elements of Agenda 2010 at the start of his campaign, a series of electoral defeats on the state level saw Schulz orienting himself towards the center and proclaiming Emmanuel Macron his role model. This was a hopeless move, and not only because this political space is already occupied by Angela Merkel. The SPD has problems beyond its candidate. Most importantly, it belonged to a coalition with the CDU between 2005 and 2009 and another from 2013 until the present, a history that prevents the party from assuming a plausible anti-establishment posture.

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Jacobin Magazine: Die Linke’s Identity Crisis

Well, what I meant by that was in the regional elections earlier this spring, large groups (by no means a majority, but 10-25 percent) of trade unionists and workers more generally voted for the AfD, citing general political dissatisfaction and migration as their main reasons for doing so. It’s worth noting that the party has performed significantly worse in elections since then. While Die Linke’s returns vary from state to state and some areas show more promise than others, in general the party appears to be losing ground among sections of the working class and dissatisfied protest voters more generally, particularly in less urban and economically marginalized regions. The process is not a foregone conclusion, and to what extent the AfD can duplicate the success of its European counterparts remains to be seen (Germany is still not, or at least not yet, France or Hungary), but I think it’s fair to say that the honeymoon years of 2005–2010 when Die Linke was the paramount opposition in parliament and able to attract the politically disenfranchised by default has ended. [...]

Firstly, the German left is divided over what exactly the problem is. For some parts of the radical left, Germany is a uniquely racist society that ostracizes and threatens all “Others” by its very nature. This sentiment leads to pretty stupid slogans at antiracist demonstrations like “The problem is called Germany,” which, similar to American anarcho-liberals blaming Trump’s hollow presidential victory exclusively on racist whites, might make sense as a gut reaction, but is simply not true and thus not very helpful for developing effective strategy. We need to understand that racism doesn’t grow in a vacuum, but rather within a complicated and dynamic socio-economic context that must be addressed equally as vigorously as racism itself if we want to drain the social swamp on which it thrives. [...]

Although there are individual immigrant personalities in the party and the Left, as a whole the movements remain painfully white for a country with so many millions of immigrants, large and established Turkish and Arab communities, etc. The same can be said of German society more generally, whose public image remains overwhelmingly white despite four decades of mass migration. I think a left that figured out how to overcome this — not overnight but through a long process, of course — would be better able to address the rise of the far right by combining real, organic antiracist organizing with an economically populist program to improve living standards for the broad majority, black and white alike. [...]

The party’s claim to improve social justice just by existing may even be true — it has certainly forced the political establishment to the left on several issues — but voters’ memory spans are short. They don’t see the introduction of a minimum wage in 2015 as a byproduct of Die Linke’s emergence in the mid-2000s, nor will most people be thinking about the strategic long game when they go to the ballot box. They will vote for Die Linke if they think they can shake things up in a political system they see as corrupt and out of touch, and they will punish the party if it throws away their vote by participating in a neoliberal government.

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Jacobin Magazine: After Tragedy and Farce: Martin Schulz

Schulz’s sudden arrival as a major national figure reflects an important change in SPD electoral strategy, as it attempts to replicate the personality-cult politics found in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom. Clearly looking for the meme magic they’ve watched galvanize the youth vote abroad, Schulz and company have imported North American campaign strategies in what can only be described as a case of combined and uneven development in the field of communications.

This scheme is made all the more remarkable by the fact that Schulz himself is not particularly remarkable. Unlike the Obamas or Trudeaus he’s trying to imitate, Schulz has neither youth nor charm. His impromptu remarks and impassioned yet vague paeans to social justice often come across as scripted. For the most part, he is a regular Third Way Social Democrat who perfectly illustrates modern German political culture’s “moratorium on charisma.”[...]

In 2003, he came to international attention in an incident that touched the highest levels of European Union politics: Schulz heckled then-Italian president Silvio Berlusconi during a speech in Strasbourg, raising potential conflicts of interest related to the Italian’s vast media empire. Visibly offended, Berlusconi retorted that Schulz would play a good Kapo (a concentration camp guard) in a Holocaust movie. The ensuing spat between the two governments ultimately prompted Berlusconi to personally apologize to then-German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Although little more than a historical footnote, the incident has come in handy for Schulz a decade later, deployed as evidence of his tough, yet decidedly liberal pro-European stance. [...]

As the SPD shifted to the center, it began to attract a different kind of member. The generation of politicians now running the party are not the local peace activists, union militants, or leftist students that once characterized it, but political opportunists who began their careers precisely when large chunks of the SPD’s left wing were abandoning the party for Die Linke. These new leaders were not trained in Brandt’s SPD or in the social movements but learned politics in student parliaments and party factions. Their strategy amounts to electoral logics and tactical alliances; unfortunately, Schulz shares this orientation.

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