The far-right AfD won the elections in the East German state of Thuringia. This wasn’t a surprise: it was a result of the fact that the center-left government has largely adopted the AfD’s program.
Nathaniel Flakin
September 4, 2024
LEFT VOICE
On Sunday, the AfD won the elections in the East German state of Thuringia with 32.8 percent of votes — the first electoral victory by a far-right party in Germany since 1933. In the neighboring state of Saxony, the AfD was a close second with 30.6 percent, just one point behind the conservative CDU.
The three center-left parties that make up the German government — SPD, Greens, and FDP — suffered terrible losses, with all together winning just 10.4 percent in Thuringia and 13.3 percent in Saxony. Die Linke was the biggest loser. Once the “people’s party” of the former East Germany, the reformist Left Party is now on the verge of disappearing. In Thuringia, Die Linke has gone from the biggest party to fourth place, losing more than half its votes, while in Saxony it fell below the 5 percent threshold. The big winner, besides the AfD, was the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which was running for the first time since Wagenknecht split from Die Linke, and got 15.8 percent in Thuringia and 11.8 percent in Saxony.
In Thuringia in particular, the AfD under the leadership of Björn Höcke has close connections to violent Nazis. Earlier this year, millions of people took to the streets of Germany to protest against the AfD’s secret plans for “remigration” or mass deportations. Now, the AfD is putting that very slogan on posters and got almost a third of votes. Disturbingly, in Saxony, voters aged 18-24 chose the Far Right at a similar rate as the general population. This has led to a growing confidence among full-fledged Nazi groups like Freie Sachsen (Free Saxons) or Der III. Weg (The Third Way), who in recent weeks have mobilized against Pride demonstrations.
All other parties have ruled out forming a coalition government with the AfD — a policy called the “Brandmauer,” or firewall — but this will make forming a majority government extremely difficult in either state. Thuringia will need either a four-party coalition or a minority government — both almost unprecedented models in the Federal Republic. At the national level, too, the governing coalition will become even more unstable, although at this point early elections seem unlikely.
“AfD wirkt!”
At a roundtable discussion on public TV on election night, the AfD’s parliamentary secretary Bernd Baumann declared that “AfD wirkt!”, meaning the AfD is effective, because “the BSW and the CDU have adopted our central demands regarding immigration.” This is true: Every party has adopted the AfD’s program. Not only have the conservative CDU and the “left conservative” BSW been joining the AfD in calling for more deportations — the national government, the self-described “progress coalition” of SPD, Greens, and FDP, also wants to deport people.
The last year in Germany has seen a racist frenzy, with the social democratic chancellor Olaf Scholz declaring on a magazine cover: “we have to deport people more often and faster.” Anti-immigrant agitation reached a fever pitch just a week before the election after August 26, when a Syrian refugee in the West German town of Solingen killed three people with a knife at a public festival, after declaring allegiance to the Islamic State.
There were two further knife attacks in other cities in the following days. Yet since both were carried out by white Germans, they drew almost zero media attention. In fact, a state interior minister assured people that the latter attacks were different, since they were caused by mental illness — as if the Syrian refugee was acting perfectly rationally while committing murder!
All parties are now calling for changes to asylum law and even to the constitution. At a memorial service for the victims of the Solingen attack, Germany’s Federal President said that reducing migration “must be a priority in the coming years.”
The government intends to stop all payments for asylum seekers who enter Germany through other Schengen countries (i.e., almost all of them), offering them nothing more than “bed-bread-soap.” Germany’s Constitutional Court has already said this would violate Article I of Germany’s Law about the inviolability of human dignity. Yet such constitutional and humanitarian niceties are being sacrificed to the demands of performative cruelty. Not to be outdone, Friedrich Merz of the CDU wants to reject all asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan, while Markus Söder of the CSU wants to strike the right to asylum from the constitution entirely.
Just ten years ago, calls to deport “criminal foreigners” were limited to the neo-Nazi party NPD on the fringes of German politics. Today, even the Green Party wants to spend billions of additional euros to ramp up the deportation machine.
The endless appeals to vote for “democratic parties” and to oppose “extremism” were ineffective because all self-described democrats took up all the AfD’s extremist proposals. How bad can the AfD be, many voters will have wondered, if the other parties have adopted all their racist proposals?
Just a few days before people went to the polls, Scholz’s government managed to deport 28 people to Afghanistan. They claimed these were all violent criminals, but at least one seems to have been convicted of nothing but drug possession. Since the Federal Republic of Germany does not recognize the Taliban government, the flight was mediated via Qatar — it’s not clear if Berlin paid money to Kabul. This is in direct violation of a German law that prohibits deportations to countries where torture, executions, or other forms of inhumane treatment can take place.
Yet as the racist competition continues, laws become irrelevant. The interior ministry, run by social democrats, worked hard to complete the deportations before the election. This was nothing but election campaigning for the AfD!
This isn’t a result of political incompetence, however, nor is it a response to a rightward shift in public opinion. All parties in Germany are in basic agreement about the need for rearmament, and this can only be financed by impoverishing the working class. The constant racist The unending racist campaign is intended to distract the population from the growing class war from above. The AfD is benefitting because they made racism their core competency long ago.
Two Terrible Lefts
Sahra Wagenknecht’s party, the BSW, now has a clear path to joining one or even two state governments. The international press still has a habit of calling Wagenknecht “far left,” and while she was a hardcore Stalinist several decades ago, she has long made her peace with capitalism. Starting in 2017, she has argued that the Left needs to oppose immigration, whereas the socialist movement has always fought for open borders.
Her hypothesis was that anti-immigrant positions would help the Left win back voters from the AfD. Yet statistics show that most BSW voters come from the SPD, Die Linke, or the CDU, with only a small portion coming from the AfD. Wagenknecht is primarily speaking to voters who seem themselves as centrists, but want permission to voice right-wing positions on immigrations, trans rights, vaccines, and other right-wing culture war topics.
The BSW is nothing like a left party. It has less than 1,000 members, and it is entirely focussed on one personality. Even though Wagenknecht was not running for office, her face was on every poster, whereas the actual candidates are almost completely unknown. The BSW leadership is made up of millionaire capitalists and career politicians from the SPD and Die Linke. Its program says very little about workers’ rights, and instead focusses on strengthening small and medium-sized enterprises. It is no surprise that the BSW is open to a coalition with the CDU, which in principle rejects coalitions with left-wing parties.
For BSW voters, the number one issue was the war in Ukraine. The push for war against Russia, which has been led by the United States and supported by German imperialism, has been a catastrophe for working-class and poor people in Germany. The EU’s boycott of Russian natural gas, followed by the terrorist attack against the Nord Stream II pipeline (presumably orchestrated by the CIA and carried out by Ukrainian forces), led to a spike in energy prices. Scholz’s proclamation of a “Zeitenwende” (changing of the times) with 100 billion euros of additional funding for the military has led to austerity, with spending cuts across the board. It is extremely progressive that many people in Germany’s economically suffering East have no interest in tightening their belts to pay for a third imperialist war against Russia. The East has a number of energy-intensive medium-sized businesses, which is one reason this region has seen particular opposition to the war. (The history of anti-immigrant sentiment in a region with few immigrants goes back to the devastating reintroduction of capitalism in the 1990s.)
Instead of ever more weapons shipments, Wagenknecht has been calling for “peace” in Ukraine via a diplomatic solution. This has earned her bizarre accusations of her being a Kremlin agent, despite her constant criticism of the right-wing Putin government. Without seconding these bourgeois denunciations in any way, it is important to emphasize that Wagenknecht is neither a pacifist nor a socialist opponent of imperialist war. Instead, she advocates militarization at home or abroad — she simply wants German imperialism to act independently of the United States. She is a German nationalist who aims to free the German bourgeoisie from several generations of subservience to U.S. imperialism — which would require good relations with Russian capitalism. This is nothing leftists can support.
That leaves Die Linke, for whom these elections represent yet another big leap towards collapse. The two party co-chairs had preemptively announced their intention to resign. One of them, Janine Wissler (a renegade from Trotskyism), tried to console supporters on election night by saying she did not regret the split with Wagenknecht: Despite the catastrophic results, the party had stuck to its principles.
If only this were true! On paper, Die Linke might defend “open borders,” but in practice, they still lead the government of Thuringia. Bodo Ramelow, the state’s prime minister and Die Linke’s most popular figure, deports people every single day. The party has been part of numerous state governments carrying out neoliberal and racist policies. Over the last year, Die Linke has also slowly abandoned their formal anti-war positions. They have been almost totally silent on the ongoing genocide, while some prominent Die Linke politicians have vocally supported the war and called for state repression against pro-Palestine solidarity. The party has also largely lined up behind the German government and NATO on the question of Ukraine.
This is why Die Linke is nowhere perceived as a fundamental opposition to the political establishment, but rather as its left wing. Voters who were fed up were most likely to turn to the AfD or the BSW.
Looking at Die Linke and the BSW, I can’t help quoting Lenin: “in our opinion, they are both worse.”
For an Alternative
There is no way to stop the Right by supporting the “democratic center” — while that very center is carrying out the Far Right’s policies. What is needed are mass mobilizations: on the streets, and particularly in workplaces, schools, and universities. Germany’s Far Right, despite its huge parliamentary representation, has little mobilization power, often bringing less than 10,000 people to what are billed as national demonstrations. Opponents of the AfD, in contrast, can bring millions to the streets. The problem with the demonstrations at the beginning of this year, however, was that they were only opposed to the AfD, and had no answer to a government that was itself introducing new racist laws. Antifascists need to create a left-wing political alternative.
The group Marx21, a post-Trotskyist network inside Die Linke, which recently went through a three-way split, had a very small victory on election day. Focussing all their energies on one district in the Saxon city of Leipzig, they were able to get one of their members, Nam Duy Nguyen, elected to the Saxon parliament.
This is, at most, a pyrrhic victory. Nguyen will be a single voice in a tiny, decimated, and very right-wing Die Linke parliamentary group. During the election campaign, Nguyen generally avoided all mention of Ukraine or Gaza, in order to avoid antagonizing his party, instead focussing on bread-and-butter social issues. For a large sector of voters, however, the Ukraine war was a decisive question. Marx21 won a seat, but will not be able to use it as a tribune of fundamental opposition — instead, they have tied themselves further to the government socialists’ sinking ship.
This is why socialists in Germany need to fight to build an independent political force: a revolutionary-socialist front based on the political independence of the working class. This is what Klasse Gegen Klasse, the sister group of Left Voice in Germany, has been campaigning for. It is clearly not enough to “stand against the Far Right” when they are perceived by a broad swath of the population as the main alternative to a despised neoliberal government. Socialists in Germany need to make sure that the revolutionary Left becomes visible as a voice of irreconcilable opposition to both the Scholz government and to its critics from the Far Right.
Nathaniel Flakin
Nathaniel is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.
On Sunday, the AfD won the elections in the East German state of Thuringia with 32.8 percent of votes — the first electoral victory by a far-right party in Germany since 1933. In the neighboring state of Saxony, the AfD was a close second with 30.6 percent, just one point behind the conservative CDU.
The three center-left parties that make up the German government — SPD, Greens, and FDP — suffered terrible losses, with all together winning just 10.4 percent in Thuringia and 13.3 percent in Saxony. Die Linke was the biggest loser. Once the “people’s party” of the former East Germany, the reformist Left Party is now on the verge of disappearing. In Thuringia, Die Linke has gone from the biggest party to fourth place, losing more than half its votes, while in Saxony it fell below the 5 percent threshold. The big winner, besides the AfD, was the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which was running for the first time since Wagenknecht split from Die Linke, and got 15.8 percent in Thuringia and 11.8 percent in Saxony.
In Thuringia in particular, the AfD under the leadership of Björn Höcke has close connections to violent Nazis. Earlier this year, millions of people took to the streets of Germany to protest against the AfD’s secret plans for “remigration” or mass deportations. Now, the AfD is putting that very slogan on posters and got almost a third of votes. Disturbingly, in Saxony, voters aged 18-24 chose the Far Right at a similar rate as the general population. This has led to a growing confidence among full-fledged Nazi groups like Freie Sachsen (Free Saxons) or Der III. Weg (The Third Way), who in recent weeks have mobilized against Pride demonstrations.
All other parties have ruled out forming a coalition government with the AfD — a policy called the “Brandmauer,” or firewall — but this will make forming a majority government extremely difficult in either state. Thuringia will need either a four-party coalition or a minority government — both almost unprecedented models in the Federal Republic. At the national level, too, the governing coalition will become even more unstable, although at this point early elections seem unlikely.
“AfD wirkt!”
At a roundtable discussion on public TV on election night, the AfD’s parliamentary secretary Bernd Baumann declared that “AfD wirkt!”, meaning the AfD is effective, because “the BSW and the CDU have adopted our central demands regarding immigration.” This is true: Every party has adopted the AfD’s program. Not only have the conservative CDU and the “left conservative” BSW been joining the AfD in calling for more deportations — the national government, the self-described “progress coalition” of SPD, Greens, and FDP, also wants to deport people.
The last year in Germany has seen a racist frenzy, with the social democratic chancellor Olaf Scholz declaring on a magazine cover: “we have to deport people more often and faster.” Anti-immigrant agitation reached a fever pitch just a week before the election after August 26, when a Syrian refugee in the West German town of Solingen killed three people with a knife at a public festival, after declaring allegiance to the Islamic State.
There were two further knife attacks in other cities in the following days. Yet since both were carried out by white Germans, they drew almost zero media attention. In fact, a state interior minister assured people that the latter attacks were different, since they were caused by mental illness — as if the Syrian refugee was acting perfectly rationally while committing murder!
All parties are now calling for changes to asylum law and even to the constitution. At a memorial service for the victims of the Solingen attack, Germany’s Federal President said that reducing migration “must be a priority in the coming years.”
The government intends to stop all payments for asylum seekers who enter Germany through other Schengen countries (i.e., almost all of them), offering them nothing more than “bed-bread-soap.” Germany’s Constitutional Court has already said this would violate Article I of Germany’s Law about the inviolability of human dignity. Yet such constitutional and humanitarian niceties are being sacrificed to the demands of performative cruelty. Not to be outdone, Friedrich Merz of the CDU wants to reject all asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan, while Markus Söder of the CSU wants to strike the right to asylum from the constitution entirely.
Just ten years ago, calls to deport “criminal foreigners” were limited to the neo-Nazi party NPD on the fringes of German politics. Today, even the Green Party wants to spend billions of additional euros to ramp up the deportation machine.
The endless appeals to vote for “democratic parties” and to oppose “extremism” were ineffective because all self-described democrats took up all the AfD’s extremist proposals. How bad can the AfD be, many voters will have wondered, if the other parties have adopted all their racist proposals?
Just a few days before people went to the polls, Scholz’s government managed to deport 28 people to Afghanistan. They claimed these were all violent criminals, but at least one seems to have been convicted of nothing but drug possession. Since the Federal Republic of Germany does not recognize the Taliban government, the flight was mediated via Qatar — it’s not clear if Berlin paid money to Kabul. This is in direct violation of a German law that prohibits deportations to countries where torture, executions, or other forms of inhumane treatment can take place.
Yet as the racist competition continues, laws become irrelevant. The interior ministry, run by social democrats, worked hard to complete the deportations before the election. This was nothing but election campaigning for the AfD!
This isn’t a result of political incompetence, however, nor is it a response to a rightward shift in public opinion. All parties in Germany are in basic agreement about the need for rearmament, and this can only be financed by impoverishing the working class. The constant racist The unending racist campaign is intended to distract the population from the growing class war from above. The AfD is benefitting because they made racism their core competency long ago.
Two Terrible Lefts
Sahra Wagenknecht’s party, the BSW, now has a clear path to joining one or even two state governments. The international press still has a habit of calling Wagenknecht “far left,” and while she was a hardcore Stalinist several decades ago, she has long made her peace with capitalism. Starting in 2017, she has argued that the Left needs to oppose immigration, whereas the socialist movement has always fought for open borders.
Her hypothesis was that anti-immigrant positions would help the Left win back voters from the AfD. Yet statistics show that most BSW voters come from the SPD, Die Linke, or the CDU, with only a small portion coming from the AfD. Wagenknecht is primarily speaking to voters who seem themselves as centrists, but want permission to voice right-wing positions on immigrations, trans rights, vaccines, and other right-wing culture war topics.
The BSW is nothing like a left party. It has less than 1,000 members, and it is entirely focussed on one personality. Even though Wagenknecht was not running for office, her face was on every poster, whereas the actual candidates are almost completely unknown. The BSW leadership is made up of millionaire capitalists and career politicians from the SPD and Die Linke. Its program says very little about workers’ rights, and instead focusses on strengthening small and medium-sized enterprises. It is no surprise that the BSW is open to a coalition with the CDU, which in principle rejects coalitions with left-wing parties.
For BSW voters, the number one issue was the war in Ukraine. The push for war against Russia, which has been led by the United States and supported by German imperialism, has been a catastrophe for working-class and poor people in Germany. The EU’s boycott of Russian natural gas, followed by the terrorist attack against the Nord Stream II pipeline (presumably orchestrated by the CIA and carried out by Ukrainian forces), led to a spike in energy prices. Scholz’s proclamation of a “Zeitenwende” (changing of the times) with 100 billion euros of additional funding for the military has led to austerity, with spending cuts across the board. It is extremely progressive that many people in Germany’s economically suffering East have no interest in tightening their belts to pay for a third imperialist war against Russia. The East has a number of energy-intensive medium-sized businesses, which is one reason this region has seen particular opposition to the war. (The history of anti-immigrant sentiment in a region with few immigrants goes back to the devastating reintroduction of capitalism in the 1990s.)
Instead of ever more weapons shipments, Wagenknecht has been calling for “peace” in Ukraine via a diplomatic solution. This has earned her bizarre accusations of her being a Kremlin agent, despite her constant criticism of the right-wing Putin government. Without seconding these bourgeois denunciations in any way, it is important to emphasize that Wagenknecht is neither a pacifist nor a socialist opponent of imperialist war. Instead, she advocates militarization at home or abroad — she simply wants German imperialism to act independently of the United States. She is a German nationalist who aims to free the German bourgeoisie from several generations of subservience to U.S. imperialism — which would require good relations with Russian capitalism. This is nothing leftists can support.
That leaves Die Linke, for whom these elections represent yet another big leap towards collapse. The two party co-chairs had preemptively announced their intention to resign. One of them, Janine Wissler (a renegade from Trotskyism), tried to console supporters on election night by saying she did not regret the split with Wagenknecht: Despite the catastrophic results, the party had stuck to its principles.
If only this were true! On paper, Die Linke might defend “open borders,” but in practice, they still lead the government of Thuringia. Bodo Ramelow, the state’s prime minister and Die Linke’s most popular figure, deports people every single day. The party has been part of numerous state governments carrying out neoliberal and racist policies. Over the last year, Die Linke has also slowly abandoned their formal anti-war positions. They have been almost totally silent on the ongoing genocide, while some prominent Die Linke politicians have vocally supported the war and called for state repression against pro-Palestine solidarity. The party has also largely lined up behind the German government and NATO on the question of Ukraine.
This is why Die Linke is nowhere perceived as a fundamental opposition to the political establishment, but rather as its left wing. Voters who were fed up were most likely to turn to the AfD or the BSW.
Looking at Die Linke and the BSW, I can’t help quoting Lenin: “in our opinion, they are both worse.”
For an Alternative
There is no way to stop the Right by supporting the “democratic center” — while that very center is carrying out the Far Right’s policies. What is needed are mass mobilizations: on the streets, and particularly in workplaces, schools, and universities. Germany’s Far Right, despite its huge parliamentary representation, has little mobilization power, often bringing less than 10,000 people to what are billed as national demonstrations. Opponents of the AfD, in contrast, can bring millions to the streets. The problem with the demonstrations at the beginning of this year, however, was that they were only opposed to the AfD, and had no answer to a government that was itself introducing new racist laws. Antifascists need to create a left-wing political alternative.
The group Marx21, a post-Trotskyist network inside Die Linke, which recently went through a three-way split, had a very small victory on election day. Focussing all their energies on one district in the Saxon city of Leipzig, they were able to get one of their members, Nam Duy Nguyen, elected to the Saxon parliament.
This is, at most, a pyrrhic victory. Nguyen will be a single voice in a tiny, decimated, and very right-wing Die Linke parliamentary group. During the election campaign, Nguyen generally avoided all mention of Ukraine or Gaza, in order to avoid antagonizing his party, instead focussing on bread-and-butter social issues. For a large sector of voters, however, the Ukraine war was a decisive question. Marx21 won a seat, but will not be able to use it as a tribune of fundamental opposition — instead, they have tied themselves further to the government socialists’ sinking ship.
This is why socialists in Germany need to fight to build an independent political force: a revolutionary-socialist front based on the political independence of the working class. This is what Klasse Gegen Klasse, the sister group of Left Voice in Germany, has been campaigning for. It is clearly not enough to “stand against the Far Right” when they are perceived by a broad swath of the population as the main alternative to a despised neoliberal government. Socialists in Germany need to make sure that the revolutionary Left becomes visible as a voice of irreconcilable opposition to both the Scholz government and to its critics from the Far Right.
Nathaniel Flakin
Nathaniel is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.
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