GERMANY

'It looks like the Social Democratic party has actually won in Brandenburg'


Issued on: 22/09/2024 -

'It looks like the Social Democratic party has actually won in Brandenburg", said FRANCE 24's correspondent in Germany, Nick Holdsworth. "Exit polls have come out showing either 32 or 31% for the SPD (that's the Socialists) and either 29% or 30% for AFD (the far-right party) which has been labeled "extremist" by some of the states in Germany," said Holdsworth.

Another warning from Germany: AfD fascists almost win Brandenburg election

It comes after the AfD won 33 percent in the Thuringia and about 31 percent in Saxony at the beginning of this month

By Yuri Prasad
Sunday 22 September 2024

SOCIALIST WORKER  Issue

A protest against the AfD in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in January (Picture: Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

The far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party almost won another state election on Sunday.

It lost the Brandenburg election in east Germany by the narrowest of margins. The party polled 29.2 percent to the Labour-type SPD’s 31.8 percent in an election where 2.5 million people were eligible to vote and turnout was high.

The AfD was desperate to win the state which surrounds the capital Berlin—and its vote rose by 6.4 percentage points.

The SPD has controlled Brandenburg since German reunification in 1990. SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz lives in the state, as does his Green Party foreign minister Annalena Baerbock. If the SPD had lost, as many predicted it would, it would have created a crisis in the ruling coalition.

The fascists hoped to add the state to Thuringia, which they captured in regional elections at the beginning of this month. The AfD also narrowly failed to win in Saxony at the same time.

The mainstream will doubtless draw a huge sigh of relief—but this is no time for its backslapping.

The AfD is a vicious, racist party that demands that the state deports “criminal” migrants and those descended from them.

That means it wants even those “migrants” who are German citizens shipped out of the country if they are convicted of a crime.

The party is capitalising on the economic crisis and the racist crisis around immigration that all mainstream parties are fuelling.

At the core of the AfD lie organised Nazis that want to recreate the politics of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

AfD senior figures met with open Nazis and members of the far right Identitarian movement last year. They discussed removing people “with a foreign background”. Immediately afterwards hundreds of thousands of anti-fascists joined demonstrations.

But the Nazis find that mainstream parties are quick to embrace their racist policies.

Hans-Christoph Berndt was the party’s lead candidate in Brandenburg. At a far right demonstration in 2016, he said, “What woman can still move freely when a group of dark-haired, young men appears or could appear in the distance?”

Back then “official politicians” expressed their outrage at Berndt’s racism. But today they echo many of his “concerns” about immigration. Conservative CDU head Friedrich Merz—leader of the country’s main opposition party—has called for a freeze on the admission of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan.

In this election, the SPD managed to use the threat of the Nazis to corral its vote, which rose 5 percentage points on the last election.

But its Green party partners only narrowly scraped into the state parliament with just 5 percent of the vote, down by 2.6 percentage points.

Die Linke, the left party, saw its vote drop from 7.6 percent to just 3.1 percent.


‘We must not normalise the AfD’—interview with German anti-fascist

But the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which combines left wing economic policies with right wing and racist dogma, took 12 percent.

Wagenknecht is a former leader of the Die Linke party, who broke from it last year. She said it had abandoned its traditional voters and instead focused on supporting the identity politics of “bizarre minorities”.

She says that voters’ worries about immigration are “legitimate”, and her party will champion them.

BSW policies include raising the minimum wage and pensions—but also stopping net zero climate protection measures and toughening asylum laws.

Wagenknecht also tapped into growing weariness at Germany’s leading role in the West’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. She wants to end the flow of German arms to the conflict. The contradictory politics of the BSW can only benefit the Nazis.

Echoing and reinforcing myths about migrants is the AfD’s main selling point. The more parties line up to agree with its policies, the further the debate shifts to the right.

Germany has in recent months seen major eruptions of anti-racism, with big demonstrations in most towns and cities.

It is vital that this movement now rises to the growing challenge of both the racist far right—and the mainstream parties so eager to adopt its policies.