Germany’s far-right wave: another brick in the wall

Germany’s eighty-year “never again” appeared to turn overnight into “maybe yes.” In Saxony-Anhalt, the far-right, ethnonationalist and neo-fascist wave surpassed 40%, a result the article presents as another deep wound for Germany and the European Union.

Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD candidate for premier of the region, declared: “We have made history.” The article responds that fascism consists, essentially, of refusing to settle for ordinary politics and seeking to make history at every turn.

It identifies three forces behind the result. Germany’s existential crisis, it argues, fell asleep at the wheel under Angela Merkel and her successors. A romanticized nostalgia for East Germany has endured, while the West continues to look down on the eastern regions. Migration remains necessary for a country facing clear demographic decline, the article says, but the issue has become toxic across Europe.

The vote, in this reading, can no longer be dismissed as a protest. It confirms the strength of the far-right surge at the start of an autumn already marked by a hybrid war with Russia and a failed referendum in Iceland. Elections are approaching in Finland, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Spain and France, as well as in eight more German states. If the wave does not recede, the article warns, the European Union will become unrecognizable.

Germany’s political firewall once worked in Germany, France and Belgium, but that was when ethnonationalist parties remained more contained. With vote shares above 40%, the article argues, firewalls have stopped containing the far right and begun legitimizing post-fascism. The center-right and center-left are trapped: the former is adopting the far right’s frames, while the latter has all but disappeared.

The result also exposes what the article calls Germany’s national failure. The country weathered the Great Recession and imposed spending cuts and harsh reforms on southern Europe, but carried out no comparable reform at home. Merkel’s Germany relied on the United States for defense, cheap Russian energy and car sales to China, while clinging to an outdated obsession with trade surpluses and rigid fiscal rules. Germany, the article concludes, has again become Europe’s sick man.

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We have made history.