The AfD when founded in 2013 had the reputation of being an old man’s club dissatisfied with Angela Merkel’s fiscal and foreign policies. Its founding members were those who advocated disengagement from the European Union (EU) in stark contrast to Merkel championing the cause of greater European integration. The AfD protested at the Euro as the EU’s sole currency and rejected the bailouts of EU member countries in the aftermath of the euro-zone debt crisis. Sixty0 fellow conservatives of Merkel voted against her proposal to support a bailout for Greece in 2015.

In the elections held that year, the AfD received a little over two million votes and no seats in the Bundestag. Merkel’s declaration on 31 August 2015 that ‘Germany is a strong country. …We have achieved so much ~ we can do it” and throwing open Europe’s doors to an unknown number of refugees and migrants was at odds with her admission in 2010 of the failure of multiculturalism. The priorities of AfD shifted with these new initiatives. With a record number of migrants, more than one million entering Germany from Syria and Afghanistan which Merkel described as a humanitarian emergency, the AfD viewed it as invasion of foreigners.

Advertisement

It became explicitly anti-Muslim as most of the migrants from Syria were Muslims. When Merkel stepped down in 2021, she was hailed for saving the European Union but many hold her responsible for having destabilized Germany and the politics of the continent. Gavin Mortimer points out that Merkel primarily is responsible for the resurgence of right wing and nationalist parties across Europe. “The AfD ~ as well as Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Giorgia Meloni ~ all owe a debt of gratitude to Angela Merkel”. In 2016, the AfD demanded a ban on “Islamic symbols of power” in Germany which included full body veils, public call for worship and minarets. It was criticised as racist and Islamophobic. In the 2017 federal elections it secured the backing of six million Germans and 94 seats in the Bundestag and emerged as the third largest party, with the strongest support in the east and the south. The conservative alliance between the CDU and CSU lost 65 seats from 2013, the worst showing in seven decades.

By 2024 the AfD began to rival the mainstream CDU and CSU and SPD with regard to popular support but its power is circumscribed as a result of the refusal of the national parties to form coalitions with it. But the AfD have won their first state election. The scepticism of a united Europe, Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump have led to serious questioning about Germany’s integrative policy that was followed since the Second World War. The AfD fears that Germany is losing its sovereignty and capacity for independent decision making and wants Germany to seek its rightful place in Europe and in the world. The quest is to carve out a policy pursued exclusively on national interest. The rise of AfD in Germany and similar ones in other nations of Europe indicate that the broadeners and Euro-sceptics are increasing their presence at the cost of Deepeners.

The EU as an economic powerhouse would continue but a United States of Europe is a distant dream. Prof. Klaus Hurrelmann, a renowned researcher on youth in Germany points out that the young feel the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats have failed and voted for the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia. The young want a government that tackles and solves problems. Many teenagers and young adults are pessimistic about the future. They are worried about social decline, war, not being able to buy a home, climate, energy, education, unemployment, immigration, prosperity and peace. The decision to do away with nuclear energy is being questioned. Other than realistic use of coal, the young want rapprochement with Russia for cheaper gas supply.

They also want to check reallocation of industries like Volkswagen not only to streamline infrastructure costs but to reduce soaring energy costs. Hurrelmann also notes the rise of right-wing extremist, nationalist and authoritarian positions among the young. A noted historian, Christina Morina, stresses the roots to the four decades of the communist rule which provided a counter narrative to national socialism. The communist variant proclaimed an order “to be truer and more representative of real people than democracy in the west. Western democracies are a sham perpetuating class rule protecting primarily the interests of the capitalists”. To counter this imperfect democracy, participatory democracy in the Swiss model is advocated to bring back the people to the centre of political decision making.

This is rediscovering an illusory golden past as during Communist rule the entire system was over-centralized practicing a subject participatory culture in which local activities were under total control of a highly centralized and bureaucratised order. This was one important reason that when Gorbachev simultaneously initiated perestroika and glasnost, the system collapsed like a pack of cards. What has made this situation more complex is the economic slowdown created by overconfidence and refusal to change its course in a situation when Europe is facing an identity crisis and insecurity with Trump’s return in the US and consolidation of right-wing forces in many Western democracies. It is ironic that the Anglosphere countries have proved to be more adaptable than Germany in moving towards accepting inevitable challenges coming from factors like AI.

In this background of an economic crisis leading to stagnation the political cleavage between western and eastern Germany is likely to widen rather than leading to the evolution of a common culture. However, Musk is exaggerating the importance of this phenomenon as it is still in the fringe and likely to remain confined to a small area of Germany and with a fear of a setback to the traditional stability of the country it is likely to be purely transitory rather than changing the entire political course. But the two cultures of Germany will continue to be a problem and in need of being addressed by accommodating its concerns.

SUSHILA RAMASWAMY and SUBRATA MUKHERJEE The writers are respectively retired Professors of Political Science, University of Delhi and Jesus and Mary College