FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
BERLIN — The dam has given way twice in less than a month. The first in Sonneberg, a picturesque center in Thuringia, until then famous only for the production of teddy bears, where the AfD candidate, Robert Sesselmann, was elected mayor of an important district council with almost 53% of the vote. The second last week in Raguhn-Jessnitz, a village of 10,000 inhabitants in Saxony-Anhalt, which has chosen a mayor of the far-right nationalist party. In both cases, the attempt by all the other political forces to block her way, by converging their votes on the alternative candidate, was useless.
Small in their size, Alternative für Deutschland’s two electoral victories already have a huge impact on German politics. Not only because they give it concrete administrative powers for the first time, in Sonneberg also that of welcoming migrants or not, but also because they signal something much deeper. National polls say that, if voted on Sunday, the AfD would have 21% of the votes, second only to the CDU-CSU (down, with an advantage of only 5 points) and ahead of the chancellor’s party, the SPD, accredited on 19 %. Furthermore, in Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony, the Eastern Länder where regional parliaments will be renewed next year, the party is given first place, around 30%.
In the diverse and shifting landscape of the far right in Europe, AfD is a case apart. Firstly, because we are in Germany, where every ultra-nationalist regurgitation evokes the ghosts of history: “A dangerous choice”, defined the vote in Thuringia Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Jewish community of Munich. Secondly because, while elsewhere we are witnessing real or presumed turning points in a moderate sense, in the Federal Republic success in the polls coincides with a disturbing radicalization, made up of xenophobia, anti-Islamic hatred and not so veiled encroachments on anti-Semitism. A name for all, that of the former history teacher Björn Hocke, leader of Thuringia and true center of internal power, who regularly draws on the vocabulary of the Nazi SA in his speeches. To the point that, as is already the case for AfD in his Land, he is also personally targeted by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which wants to put him under surveillance as a potential danger to democracy.
The rise of AfD literally throws the German political class into panic, which reiterates without exception its total rejection of any alliance or agreement, but is unable to go further. The Süddeutsche Zeitung speaks of “despair” and “capitulation”. Democratic parties blame each other for what is happening. The idea of outlawing Alternative für Deutschland, relaunched by some exponents of the Cdu and the Greens, betrays a total absence of proposals and projects to offer to voters, apparently seduced by its illusory and dangerous recipes, but which in reality express above all protest and concern.
In fact, the traffic light coalition led by Olaf Scholz is in the dock for the success of AfD, torn internally and protagonist of unpopular and bizarre decisions in terms of energy saving, such as the one that would have forced all German families within a short time to replace water heaters with expensive heat pumps. Amended in the running, the law was yesterday declared unconstitutional by the Karlsruhe Court, because it was too hasty and not adequately discussed in the Bundestag. To further fuel fears and insecurity, the return of inflation, the eternal German obsession; the contraction of the economy already technically in recession and the increase in the number of immigrants to levels not seen since 2015. “We have aggravated people’s anxieties”, admits the leader of the SPD Lars Klingbeil.
The fact that the AfD’s extremist populism soars above all in the eastern regions is yet another confirmation of the deep fault that divides Germany more than 30 years after reunification. “The people of the East – says Klaus Dörre, who teaches Economic Sociology at the University of Jena – feel three times undervalued: as economic subjects, as Ossies and as people”. It is on the insecurity, anger and sense of social exclusion triggered by the war in Ukraine and its economic consequences, that AfD has bet its cards in the Land of the former Gdr. “I think – says Bodo Ramelow, premier of Thuringia and sole governor of Linke – that we need to redefine the spirit of German unity, bringing East Germans with us, instead of fueling the impression that we gossip or worse, laugh at them” .
2023-07-06 20:33:24
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