the worrying rise of the extreme right

Hhistorical. The adjective is not an exaggeration to describe the results of the two regional elections held on Sunday 1^is September, in eastern Germany. For the first time since the Second World War, the extreme right came out on top in a state, Thuringia, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party reached almost 33% of the vote. In the neighbouring region of Saxony, it also exceeded 30% and narrowly missed out on first place, narrowly retained by the Christian Democrats (CDU).

This breakthrough is not a surprise. It has precedents: it was after its success in the Thuringian elections in 1929 that the Nazi party NSDAP won a ministry at the regional level for the first time, four years before Hitler became chancellor. Almost a century later, the AfD has little chance of participating in future governments in Saxony and Thuringia, as the other parties have warned that they will not form a coalition with it. But it will have a blocking minority, which will allow it to influence certain key appointments.

For the three-party government of Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), Sunday’s results are a disaster. Together, the SPD, the Greens and the liberal FDP barely have more than 10%. The pitiful image of the ruling coalition in Berlin, torn by its internal contradictions and accused of failing to deliver on the high cost of living, illegal immigration and insecurity, has been heavily punished.

Excesses

On Sunday, its weaknesses largely benefited the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, a movement founded seven months ago by a former leader of the left-wing party Die Linke, which claims to be progressive on social issues and conservative on societal subjects, and which demands – like the AfD – a halt to arms deliveries to Ukraine and a rapprochement with Russia.

Saxony and Thuringia together have only 6 million inhabitants, or 7% of the German population. However, this should not diminish the significance of what happened on Sunday. First, because the extreme right – as the 2023 elections in Bavaria and Hesse have shown – is also on the rise in western Germany. Second, because the AfD federations in Saxony and Thuringia are among the most radical in the country. Their strongman, Björn Höcke, has just been convicted twice for publicly using the slogan of Hitler’s SA, and his party is now “put under surveillance” by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the service responsible for domestic intelligence. Despite these excesses, he won over a third of the voters.

That such a party, founded only eleven years ago, should obtain such scores in a country like Germany is more than worrying. Because of its past, its demographic weight and its economic power at the heart of a European continent plagued by the rise of extremism, Germany, which will elect its next chancellor in a year, has a major responsibility.

Its political leaders on the right and left, but also its economic and intellectual elites, cannot afford to allow a group to prosper any further, whose racist and nationalist worldview undermines the foundations of the democratic and liberal order on which the country was rebuilt after the catastrophe of the Third World War.^e Reich.