Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany party won its best ever results this weekend. We hear why an anti-immigrant, fascist-curious party is surging in the land that gave birth to Nazism. This episode was produced by Travis Larchuk with help from Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Victoria Chamberlin, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A poster of Alice Weidel, who co-leads the Alternative for Germany (AfD), behind a "Make Duisburg great again" cap. Photo by LOUIS VAN BOXEL-WOOLF/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What were the election results in Germany?
Germans went to the polls this weekend and how it was the biggest election turnout in a generation. More than eight in 10 eligible voters cast a ballot. Friedrich Merz, a conservative from the CDU party, is on track to be chancellor. He said today it's time for traditional Democratic parties to start getting things done.
The world won't wait for us. It won't wait for long drawn out coalition negotiations. We must be capable of acting again quickly so that we can do the right thing in Germany.
The party that came in second place, the Alternative for Germany, or AFD, is from the far right fringe. So it is perhaps inevitable that America's unelected vice president, Elon Musk, has spoken in support of the AFD. But so has America's elected vice president, J.D. Vance. Coming up on Today Explained, the transatlantic alliance no one wants.
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Chapter 2: Who is Friedrich Merz and what are his plans?
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This is Today Explained.
Noelle King here with Nina Haase. Nina is chief political correspondent for Deutsche Welle. That's Germany's international broadcaster. All right, so Nina, big election in Germany this weekend. What's the headline today?
The headline is that the Conservatives... swept the Social Democrats out of the Chancellery and we will see a new German government in a couple of weeks time that is going to be led by the Conservatives in a coalition probably with the Social Democrats and that is still going to be a pro-European, a centrist government facing lots and lots of challenges. Also the
headline underneath is that for the very first time in a national poll, a far-right party, the AfD, managed to get one in five German voters to vote for them. Who is the new chancellor? The new chancellor is a man called Friedrich Merz. He's a grandfather. He is not an unknown figure. He entered politics in the 1990s, and he was then
swept out of political power by a certain Angela Merkel from his same party. He then re-entered politics when Angela Merkel left, and he has decided to shape the Conservatives in a way that He sees fit to deal with the current challenges. He was always a fierce critic of Angela Merkel's open-door policy.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the Alternative for Germany party?
Our heart is big, but our ability is limited. I wish someone had said that in 2015 or 16. This can't happen again.
So he's adopted a much more hard-line stance on immigration, for example, and that has been one of the key issues for him in this election campaign.
What were the other issues that led the Conservatives to do so well this time?
The other issues were that Germans showed a lot of desire for change, big change. The current government had started out on a progressive, on a liberal agenda, and then Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So they had to make a lot of... Very tough decisions. They had to try and keep the country together at very, very challenging times. So we had a lot of political infighting.
And the conservatives at the time were the biggest opposition power. So they used that to their advantage. to essentially say this government is overwhelmed and we're going to be the ones dealing with all the desire for change that Germans are expressing. They want more clarity when it comes to immigration. They want the German economy to get going again.
Germany's economy is very sluggish at the moment. And these were the core topics that the conservatives focused on and won.
All right. So immigration, the economy, Ukraine, that sounds familiar. This party that came in second, the AFD, tell me about it. Where does it come from?
The AFD is called Alternative for Germany. That's the name that they've given themselves. They're a fairly young party. They were founded just over 10 years ago. They started off on a platform that was EU skeptic, that wanted to get out of the Euro, the common currency that we have here in Europe. And over the years, they have radicalized.
Over the past decade, Germany has faced a wave of far-right violence and plots against Jews, Muslims, immigrants and politicians. At the same time, support has soared for the far-right party, the AfD, Alternative for Deutschland.
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Chapter 4: How has the AfD evolved over the years?
They have gone from being an economy-focused, financial policy-focused party to being an anti-immigrant, pro-Russia, pro-China party. And that is something where lots of people here in Germany are saying this would shake up the fundamental pillars of of the liberal democratic system that we have here in this country. They are under observation by Germany's intelligence agencies.
The top court here in Germany has ruled that the far-right alternative for Germany party is a potential threat to democracy.
Journalists gathered evidence that AFD members and neo-Nazis met in secret to discuss what far-right thinkers call a re-migration project. In other words, a plan to expel millions of people.
They have people in their ranks that have very close ties to the Kremlin. They have a leading figure in the east of the country who is a history teacher, but says that Germany needs to move on and stop this whining about this short period of time when this thing called the Holocaust happens.
He criticised Berlin's Holocaust memorial, arguing that Germany should reverse the way it remembered its past.
Prosecutors said his use of the phrase, everything for Germany, to a crowd of AfD supporters was illegal, effectively repeating the slogan of Adolf Hitler's stormtroopers.
And that is, of course, something that has made a lot of alarm bells ring here in Germany, given our history, where many people feel reminded of just how quickly populism can lead to real life fascism. Having said all that, the AFD say of themselves that they are libertarian conservative. They got a big push in this election campaign by Elon Musk.
I'm very excited for the IFD and I think you're really the best hope for Germany.
He held an hour-long chat with their co-leader Alice Weidel and gave them a lot of visibility on his own platforms.
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Chapter 5: What does the AfD's rise mean for German politics?
I can, yes.
Perfect, perfect.
So they have definitely benefited from that. They've also managed to be very present in market squares. So they're very visible. They're very good at describing problems. They haven't offered many workable solutions when you look at the details in their programs. But what they've also done is they've convinced a lot of working class people to vote for them instead of the social democrats. Wow.
What does their second place finish mean? Does this mean that they now help write German law, that the Conservative Party, that one has to deal with them on a regular basis? Like how much power do they have coming in where they did?
They're now the second strongest political group in the parliament. And that means that they have certain privileges when it comes to politics. appointing the chairpeople of the committees, for example. So traditionally, the biggest opposition group, which is in this case the AFD, they lead the budget committee, so they can influence the agenda of committee meetings.
then the AFD also gets a lot of time to address Parliament as the second biggest group in Parliament, so shaping the debate in Parliament. We'll hear a lot more from them. And last not least, we have a system here in this country where you have a blocking minority for certain fundamental changes to our basic law. And the AFD alone cannot do that at the moment.
But if, for example, the current government wanted to make fundamental changes to the constitution to allow for more spending in support of Ukraine, then they would have to change the constitution because that is currently a part of our constitution. And the AFD, together with the far left, Die Linke, that also made it into Bundestag, can now block that.
Your new chancellor, Mr. Merz, has already spoken this morning. What is he saying about working with these parties, primarily the AFD?
The AFD is not going to get into government. I think that is a very important message to send also to listeners in the US, that it's considered way too far right by all the other democratic parties, and the conservatives have therefore ruled out collaborating with them. That is known as the firewall here, that the firewall still stands because of our country's history.
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Chapter 6: What challenges will the new government face?
What do these results mean for Germany over the next year or two?
The results mean that Friedrich Merz will have to enter coalition negotiations very quickly with the Social Democrats and very quickly come to a good deal with them so that he can form a stable government. He has a lot of challenges ahead of him.
This is really the last warning to the political parties of the Democratic Center in Germany to come to joint solutions.
So he said he needs to get the government together and in a stable way so that Germany can answer and give proper solutions to all these issues. geopolitical challenges that we're facing because at the moment the feeling is that liberal democracy in Europe is under threat from Russia.
We're considered to be in a hybrid war with Russia and also increasingly from the United States new administration.
Nina Haase of Deutsche Welle. Vice President J.D. Vance shocked Germans earlier this month in Munich when he suggested that their posture toward the AFD violates the principles of free speech. What's he talking about? Stay tuned.
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Chapter 7: How does the AfD's position affect coalition dynamics?
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Today Explained.
My name is Constanze Stelzenmüller, and I apologize. That's the name I was born with.
It's beautiful.
And I direct the Center on the U.S. and Europe at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
Constanze, Germany has gone so far as to talk about banning the far-right AFD, which banning a political party is a really serious thing in a democracy. And I want to get a sense of why so many Germans are so concerned about the AFD. Is it something that this group is doing or is it something that they're saying? Both of those things. OK, go ahead.
So, I mean, at the risk of stating the obvious, Germany has very special rules for for prohibiting parties, and for hate speech because of its history, because of national socialism that was in power in Germany between 1933 and 1945, and that led to the Holocaust and to World War II.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of these election results for the future?
They ally themselves with parties in the rest of Europe and also in the European Parliament that are overtly neo-Nazi. As for prosecuting hate speech, for the longest time after 1949, throughout the Cold War and much of the decades after reunification in 1990, There were always hard right movements. There were always neo-Nazi movements, but they were socially and politically fringe.
So it has only been the rise of the AfD in the past decade that has led to the broadening of the spectrum of what is sayable in Germany, what is socially and politically possible. And therefore, there has literally been more hate speech in the public domain that has received the attention of of not just other political competitors, but also the courts.
I will just say this, that the American constitutional order has always privileged freedom of speech in ways that the Germans after 1949 felt that they could not do because of the horrific experience that they had just gone through. You have never had a Holocaust. You have never started a world war. We did.
And we felt that it was necessary to prescribe statements that declared allegiance to an ideology that had not just been toxic, but literally murderous.
Earlier this month, Vice President J.D. Vance got on stage at the Munich Security Conference, and he talked about laws throughout Europe that he says restrict free speech.
I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be, quote, hateful content.
And then he talked specifically about Germany.
where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of, quote, combating misogyny on the internet.
Here he says he believes that allowing citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger.
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