Why is the Left losing elections ~ and popular support ~ across Europe? According to some, the common denominator is that parties of the European Left, hard and soft, are both unwilling and incapable of building social coalitions that offer convincing alternative solutions to voters’ problems. Elections in the recent past in Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Finland suggest the dominant issues for voters are the cost of living, security (foreign and domestic), migration, national identity, and the environment. Elections in these countries saw right-wing parties either winning outright or surging ahead. In fact, it started with France’s far-right leader Ms Marine Le Pen winning an unprecedented 41.5 per cent of the popular vote in last year’s presidential runoff while in Rome in the second half of 2022, Ms Giorgia Meloni’s so-called post-fascist Brothers of Italy swept to power. But it is perhaps Germany, which has resisted the far-right agenda most tenaciously in Europe after the horrors of Nazism, which now offers a peek into the future as the country is in the midst of a right-wing surge. Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right party, is enjoying a massive uptick in support.

A recent opinion poll by broadcaster ARD found that 18 per cent of voters backed the AfD ~ its highest rating since the party was founded in 2013. This level of support puts the AfD on par with the Social Democrats, the mainstream left-of-centre party in Germany. The findings of the ARD poll have sent the German political class into a tizzy and the ruling coalition into a huddle; the latter, comprising the SDP, the liberal FDP and the Greens, has seen its popular support collapse. Meanwhile, a YouGov survey has revealed that 20 per cent of Germans would vote for the AfD if an election was to be held now, while support for the SDP had dropped to 19 per cent. The Greens and FDP managed just 18 per cent between them. Germany’s mainstream political parties are pointing fingers at each other over where the blame for the AfD’s rapidly rising popularity graph lies. Mr Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right opposition party CDU/CSU, has accused the governing coalition and particularly the Greens with their radical agenda of being responsible for the AfD gaining traction. A fact that is often elided in discussing the rise of the supremacist Right in contemporary Europe is that it is the mainstream centre-right which loses the most support when the far-right gains ground. Not only do these parties lose votes, but there is pressure on them to take less centrist and more hardline stands on major issues because of the pressure from the right flank. When it comes to the AfD, however, there is cause for worry across the ideological spectrum. A Cologne court ruled last year that the AfD was a threat to democracy and granted permission for it to be monitored by Germany’s security services. Earlier this year, its youth organisation was officially categorised as an extremist group. And less than three months ago, a local leader of the AfD was charged for intentionally using a Nazi stormtrooper slogan at a campaign rally (punishable by up to three years in prison

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