Is Germany ready for the new AfD?

How the party wants to break its isolation and what this will do to German politics

Party strategist Beatrix von Storch has come up with a new plan for to break the firewall against the AfD. Depicted here in 2017. Img: Mutter Erde, CC BY-SA 4.0

After its stunning success as a protest party, Germany’s far-right AfD or Alternative für Deutschland, has arrived at a crossroads with a stark choice: cooperate with the establishment or remain on the outside looking in.

At the last general election in February, the AfD doubled its vote share, coming in second with the support of one in five Germans. High as those figures are, they don’t come close to an outright majority. In Germany’s complex electoral system, parties almost always need a coalition partner to rule, and the other parties have ruled out working with the AfD.

Beatrix von Storch, the deputy parliamentary leader of the AfD, has a plan she hopes will “pave the way to the chancellery” by driving a wedge between the current coalition parties, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right CDU/CSU and the centre-left SPD. Von Storch aims to “drive the SPD to the left,” leaving Merz’s election-winning conservatives with no other option than to look right for a new coalition partner.

In a strategy paper she presented at a party conference earlier this month, von Storch proposed provoking greater polarisation “comparable to the situation in the USA." The aim is to “create a situation in which the political gulf no longer runs between the AfD and the other political movements, but one where a right-wing-conservative camp and a radicalising left-wing camp oppose one another.”

In other words, the AfD wants to break its isolation by forcing Merz’s conservatives onto its side. To do that, it wants to escalate the culture wars, forcing everyone to take clearer positions on issues like family and immigration and economic policy. Von Storch hopes this hollows out the centre ground, ensuring that the other parties, especially Merz’s coalition partners in the SPD, move so far to the left that it becomes impossible for a conservative party underpinned by a Christian world view to cooperate with them.

This strategy has enormous potential. Only last week, a US-style clash over the nomination of a judge for the country’s highest court sparked conflict between the ruling parties. Many suspect media outlets close to the AfD whipped up the campaign against the SPD-backed candidate Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf. She holds more liberal views on abortion than the bar set by current German law. Based on this and other left-leaning views — such as a 50-50 gender quota in electoral lists — many conservatives refused to support her candidacy, and the vote was cancelled, something the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier feared had “damaged” the coalition.

It’s certainly an incident that highlights the inherent conflicts of a centrist coalition. The German conservatives only have left-wing parties to work with. If this is seen to pull them left, it will alienate core voters. All the AfD has to do is publicly remind Merz that he doesn’t have to compromise with left-wingers. Together, the AfD and conservatives have a majority in parliament.

In theory, that’s a powerful plan. There is only one problem. The AfD is notoriously divided and ill-disciplined. To make a coalition palatable to the conservative CDU/CSU and its voters, the party has agreed on a code of conduct so that its politicians “present in a united and moderate way.” Controversial terms like “remigration” - the mass deportation of foreigners -- were taken out of the program.

Even party leaders are finding it difficult to stick to the new norms. At the very conference where the rules were introduced, Co-leader Alice Weidel compared the SPD’s decision to try to work toward a party ban of the AfD with Adolf Hitler’s policy of banning other parties. “We had the same thing in 1933,” she fumed. She also jeered at Chancellor Merz loudly and repeatedly during a July 9 budget speech in parliament. According to the transcript, there were 70 interruptions from the AfD seats, and the president of the Bundestag even threatened to remove Weidel from the session. “I don’t see the slightest reason why we should become more moderate,” she told a German interviewer on Sunday.

Yet, Weidel doesn’t even represent the AfD’s most extreme wing. An openly gay woman with a background in economics, she has been called a “fig leaf” of respectability. Further to the right are figures like Björn Höcke, the leader of the powerful AfD chapter in the state of Thuringia. He has been found guilty of using the Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany.” Weidel once tried to kick him out of the party for his extremism.

It is unlikely that the AfD will adopt Von Storch’s new strategy as a unified front. There are too many warring factions, too many loose cannons and too many extremists among its ranks. AfD co-founder and former leader Alexander Gauland once fittingly described his party as an “unruly rabble.” Strategic thinking is not in the DNA of the AfD, a party that was founded in 2013 to disrupt rather than rule.

Nonetheless, German politicians should be wary. This marks a new stage in the evolution of a party that pollsters say could reach up to a third of the electorate. The contradictions that the AfD has identified in the ruling coalition are vulnerable to being exploited. Merz and his partners must think about strategies to defend their fragile alliance. One thing is certain: it will come under attack from a new AfD, one armed with a plan and fueled by ambition.

This article first appeared in Bloomberg.