Four (sort of) German states

It’s not hard to see why mainstream politicians, faced with a threat from the far right (or for that matter the far left), might shift to adopt some of their rival’s policies or rhetoric. The move promises to blunt their appeal by removing their grievance; it makes intuitive sense, and it does have some apparent successes on record. Recall, for example, how John Howard’s shift to the right on immigration in his second term seemed to halt the rise of One Nation.

But the risks are considerable and the failures rather more numerous than the successes. As I said yesterday in relation to France, it tends to add to the far right’s credibility: “by, for example, extolling the virtues of being ‘tough on immigrants’, mainstream leaders just give their voters permission to vote for the extremists who have been saying the same thing longer and more loudly.”

This year the strategy has been given a fair test in central Europe, and the results have been disastrous. Two weeks ago Klaus Neumann, an expert in German refugee questions, reviewed the record in a long piece at Inside Story. Here’s how he puts it:

As in the early 1990s, we are witnessing a rapid radicalisation of the discourse about refugees. As in the early 1990s, that discourse is not the exclusive domain of the far right but is also employed by centre-right and centre-left politicians. As in the early 1990s, the vilification of asylum seekers has been morphing into a vilification of people who are visibly different, regardless of their legal status. As in the early 1990s, racist talking begets racist violence, bringing an increase in attacks on asylum seekers and their homes. …

A more credible explanation of why four out of five Germans want to restrict immigration is that this is also what the vast majority of opinion makers — in politics and in the media — are saying. They in turn claim that the only way of halting the rise of the AfD [Alternative for Germany, the far-right party] is to take on board those far-right demands that seem to enjoy popular support.

Yet studies by social scientists have shown that moderate parties that borrow such policies only strengthen the far right.

The depressing story can be told in four elections in the last two months, in three eastern German states and in Austria. First, on 1 September, the states of Saxony and Thuringia went to the polls. The outgoing government in Saxony was a grand coalition between centre-right, centre-left and Greens; all three lost ground slightly, falling from a total of 68 seats (out of 120) to 58, and the centre-right CDU only narrowly remained the largest party, with 31.9% to AfD’s 30.6%.

In order to command a majority, and assuming they won’t deal with AfD (an option they have all, to their credit, rejected), the incumbents will need to take in one of two far-left parties: either the Left (Die Linke), which has six seats, or newcomer the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), an anti-immigrant and pro-Russia breakaway, which won 15.

That might seem bad enough, but Thuringia was much worse.* There, in unmistakable shades of the 1930s, AfD and BSW won a majority between them, AfD topping the poll with 32.8% and 32 of the 88 seats, and BSW third on 15.8% and 15. The Left’s vote more than halved to 13.1%, and the four mainstream parties – centre-right, centre-left, Greens and Liberals – could manage only 34.0% of the vote between them (down 6.1%), with the latter two dropping out of the state parliament altogether.

Both there and in Saxony the BSW has ruled out co-operation with AfD and expressed a preference for coalition with the centre-right and centre-left, but getting to that point is not going to be easy.

Then three weeks later there was a third state election, in Brandenburg. This time the Social Democrats, who led the outgoing government, managed to increase their vote, going to 30.9% (up 4.7%) and 32 of the 88 seats (up seven). But the government lost its majority because the Greens lost two-thirds of their vote and fell below the 5% threshold (as also did the Left). Centre-left and centre-right now have exactly half the seats between them, as also do AfD plus BSW, with 30 and 14 respectively.

Finally, on 29 September, came Austria, which would also have become a German state in 1919 if the Allies had not vetoed the idea. Its outgoing government was a coalition between the centre-right People’s Party and the Greens, who between them held 97 of the 183 seats in parliament. They both lost ground badly: the centre-right dropped 11.2% and 20 seats to finish with 51, and the Greens lost 5.7% and ten seats to finish with 16.

Nonetheless, no majority can be formed against them. AfD’s counterpart, the far-right Freedom Party, topped the poll with 28.8% and won 57 seats, but the rest went to the centre-left and the liberal NEOS, with 41 and 18 seats respectively. So the People’s Party holds the balance of power between the far right and the left-and-centre parties; it has indicated a willingness to form a coalition with the Freedom Party (as it has done before), but only if its extremist leader, Herbert Kickl, is excluded.

Clearly there are differences in the four results; none of them is quite so bad as some of the media coverage would suggest, and judgement should to some extent be suspended until the new governments are all in place. But there is already enough data to show that pandering to the extremes, and especially to anti-immigrant forces, is not enough to prevent their rise.

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* See my reports here, here and here for the background in the already-disturbing 2019 Thuringian election and its aftermath.