They are coming

Za "Time" from Bonn

German The Christian Democrats (CDU) of Chancellor Friedrich Merz tried to make a point on social networks these days with a guerilla action. They made a brochure about Alternatives for Germany (AfD), replacing the word "alternative" with the word "decay". The brochure contains examples of why they consider the AfD an anti-democratic and anti-Semitic party that relativizes Nazi crimes. They sent that brochure to AfD MPs with a statement about leaving the party that they just had to sign.

The action did not go very well, judging by the reactions. "Instead of launching an offensive on political content or offering convincing solutions, the CDU relies on symbols and moral lessons," writes the magazine "Focus". "What helplessness! It shows not only that the CDU ceases to be a sovereign big party, but that, with such dwarfish moves, it will follow the SPD on the road to insignificance."

The latest polls say things have changed in Germany. Right-wing AfD can count on 29 percent of support, which is an increase of eight percent compared to the February 2025 elections. The Christian Democrats have the support of 22 percent of citizens (-6,5), the Social Democrats only 12 (-4,5), while in the opposition the Greens are making slight progress with 14 percent (+2,5) and the Left with 11 percent (+2).

photo: ap photo

YOUTH RIGHT AND LEFT

Right-wingers tend to do particularly well in the eastern provinces, which were once part of the GDR. In Mecklenburg, Western Pomerania, 36 percent of people support them, and in Saxony-Anhalt as many as 42 percent, which is on the border of an absolute majority. Those two provinces will vote in September.

Polls have been stable for weeks, so it is not a passing sensation but a trend. To add to the horror among the established parties, the demographics are increasingly favoring the AfD. For years, their voter's photo robot was a middle-aged man, a less affluent worker. In the last elections, that changed - as many as 21 percent of the youngest voters (aged 18 to 20) voted for the radical right. Only the Left did better than that with 25 percent.

It must have something to do with the new era of information, and not only with the "youth-madness" one. And a cursory look at TikTok shows why the far right and left are champions there. The Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats are the first choices of pensioners, and they are, in an increasingly aging country, the largest electorate. As many as 40 percent of voters are over sixty years old.

That support "out of habit" for the two parties that provided all the German post-war chancellors prevents, for now, their even sharper decline. Because, according to the Deutschlandtrend survey published monthly by the public service, only 13 percent of citizens are satisfied with the work of Friedrich Merz's government, another marriage of necessity between conservatives and social democrats. Mertz immediately became the least popular chancellor since these statistics were kept, and it seemed that it would be difficult for anyone to reach the unpopularity of the previous chancellor, the social democrat Olaf Scholz.

LOGIC "SANITARY CORDON"

Violent quarrels in the coalition could intensify if Mertz initiates the massive announced reforms this summer - the tax and pension system, healthcare and so on. Since the chancellor, formerly an employee of the large investment fund Blackrock, persistently refuses stronger taxation of billionaires and grand heirs, there is every chance that the reforms will not be liked by the majority of citizens.

Last year, before the elections, Merc was somewhat successful in promising a tougher policy towards migrants, but not much was achieved. He has indebted the country for a fantastic trillion euros - half for the army, half for infrastructure - despite promises to run the budget by the household. On the international stage and in major conflicts, Germany plays no role. It seems that everything is going smoothly for the AfD.

Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Zeder, leader of the Christian Social Union, says that curbing the AfD's popularity "appears to be more difficult than we all thought". He had hoped, he says, that "clear changes in migration policy would take their toll", but support for the AfD proved solid. "That party addresses problems that it would not be able to solve, but assigns responsibility for them to others".

Zeder and his party have historically been used to absolute majorities in Bavaria. Among other things, with the chalk that there must not be any democratic parties to the right of the Christian Democratic Union. That calculation failed miserably, as did the attempts of the Christian Democrats to "ride" the issue of migration.

The logic of the "sanitary cordon" around the AfD, established after the party appeared in 2013, then as a meeting place of conservative-liberal economists who demanded that Germany leave the euro and return the Deutsche Mark in the midst of the Greek debt crisis, also failed. Since then, the AfD is not seen in the mainstream as an ordinary, legitimate party, but as a "populist" threat. The fences and vows to never cooperate with the AfD – not even on passing a law, not even at the local level – only intensified as the AfD became more radical, changing leadership several times.

REFUGEES AS A GOLDEN COCK

For the right-wing, it was the refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016, especially after the initial euphoria in which Germany saw itself as a country with an open heart to people fleeing the hardships of war. Although Germany, due to the mentioned demographics, is directed towards immigrants, all kinds of problems - from the crime rate, to the rush to the scarce housing market - mean that migration policy still worries about 50 percent of Germans today.

More and more AfD politicians have accepted the concept of "remigration" to this day. Coined by right-wing gurus, the term is as stretchy as bubblegum. While the most extreme in closed meetings talk about the logic of blood and soil, the revocation of citizenship and the expulsion of "unassimilated" Auslanders, until then the story remains for the public that "remigration" simply means the expulsion of rejected asylum seekers who have no right to be in Germany.

AfD branches in four eastern provinces are officially considered "extreme right", which makes them a legitimate target of the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order. She can keep those branches under surveillance, wiretapping and infiltrating people. The service tried to classify the whole party as "extreme", but that will wait for the final decision of the courts.

Extremism researcher Gideon Boch points out that the flirtation with neo-Nazism did not, as previously thought, reduce support for the AfD, but rather the opposite. "We assume that the willingness to vote for the AfD is growing massively, and that the stigma associated with it has clearly melted away," Boč told the dpa agency.

photo: ap photo

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE

The party rejects such criticism. Over the years, they have learned to flirt with the baser passions of the electorate while at the same time presenting themselves as centrists and the party of the little people. The leading duet of the party are people who were created to signal the openness of the party.

Tino Hrupala (51), a painter by trade, is here for little people. Alice Weidel (47), doctor of economics, wealthy banker, is here to show a liberal face. While in Germany she represents the party program AfD, which opposes the right to marriage for homosexuals, Weidel's main address is in Switzerland, where her partner from Sri Lanka lives. Together they adopted two boys.

And then there is, for example, Björn Hecke, the first man of the AfD in the province of Thuringia and the leader of the so-called "Wing", an informal extreme faction in the party. According to a court decision, Heke is free to call himself a "fascist" because he advocates such views. While softer types in the party are eyeing a possible coalition with the Christian Democrats one day, Hecke is against it, arguing that the AfD is on the way to absolute power. "We stay away from the CDU, which de-Merkelized its own," he said recently, alluding to former Chancellor Angela Merkel, in whom he sees the cause of all evil - the shift of conservatives to the left and "opening the door" for migrants.

In addition to hunting for votes on the topic of migration, the right-wingers have also found a niche in their closeness to Vladimir Putin's Russia, which other parties are wary of, especially since the total invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Admittedly, there are different positions in the party, either real or feigned. While Alice Weidel criticizes Putin here and there, Hrupala advocates "getting closer" to Russia in order to "prevent a big war in Europe".

Ideas about banning the AfD are being heard again and again. The former leader of the Social Democrats, Saskia Esken, says that they should be banned "in time, before the next elections". "Never again should a fascist give a speech in the German parliament about the stupidity of democracy, like Goebbels in 1935. Never again!"

The procedure for the ban is initiated politically, but only the Federal Constitutional Court can give the final word. That is why it is necessary to prove that the party is planning to overthrow the libertarian and democratic order, and that, according to most experts, is not easy. In polls, the majority of citizens declare against the ban, while some indicate that the AfD is too big to be banned.

FUNNEL FOR THE DISSATISFIED

Observers still adhere to the theory that the AfD managed to position itself as an anti-systemic party that, with small people, fights against "those up there" from the elites. So the right-wingers come to him as a funnel for all kinds of discontent.

"It's like a cry from voters who want to put pressure on the established parties of the center," says political scientist Karl-Rudolf Korte. "People are no longer sure that politics can provide normal living conditions. What about housing, food, fuel?"

Korte mentions something that is surprisingly rare in analyzes of the rise of the right. Namely, Germany is not the country it used to be. This is not only evident from the poor condition of the infrastructure and the chronic delay of trains.

Since the pandemic, consumer prices have risen by as much as 24 percent. It's even worse for that little man - food prices have gone down by 40 percent, energy prices even more after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and the interruption of the flow of cheap Russian gas, while the prices of apartments have long been turned to obscene. After the American and Israeli attack on Iran, nowhere in Europe did the price of fuel rise as much as in Germany.

In car country, where Volkswagen is laying off workers for the first time since Adolf Hitler struck the foundations of the Wolfsburg factory, there is a growing sense that the drop in standards is not immediate.

Philosopher Richard David Precht, who has a popular podcast with television star Markus Lantz, says that the sunny decades passed from the 1950s, the era of guest workers and the economic miracle, until the first decade of the 2000s, when a series of crises followed - the euro, refugees, Trump, Brexit, the pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Iran.

"As long as there is a principled consensus that things are going well in the country, then a lot of political discussion is allowed because everyone wants the same thing and they don't want to completely change direction. But what about when we are in today's situation, when the majority of people with every right think that things are going badly? Then those in office have a big problem. Because this is about the foundations."

TECTONIC PLATE MOVEMENTS

Precht, to say the least, is not a fan of Friedrich Merz. But he thinks things go much further and deeper than Merc and Germany. The world is accelerating and being handed over to algorithms and artificial intelligence. No one asks the little people about it.

"No one is talking about the big revolutions that are taking place. About geopolitics, which is again raising the Asian tectonic plate and lowering the European one, which means that economically we will no longer play the role in the world that we did just a few years ago. So, the question is not how to return to the old way, but how to prevent the worst and have realistic expectations. And secondly, we need to explain to people that liberal democracies - created with the First Industrial Revolution, in theory offering everyone the chance to get an education and have a good life - are no longer they mean in the era of data capitalism", says Precht.

"We are experiencing a new feudalization of the global economy. And the strongest players here are the autocratic China and the equally autocratic-minded (American) giants of techno-feudalism. They think that liberal democracies should be swept to the dustbin of history," the philosopher believes.

This is the fertilizer on which the AfD thrives. But what if he succeeds and that on the wings of a little man whom everyone has left in the lurch? Cynics would say that the AfD hasn't disappointed voters yet because it hasn't had the chance. According to economists' calculations, the lower and middle classes would suffer even more precisely if the AfD's program regarding taxes and cuts in social benefits were implemented.

The AfD is close to ruling in at least one eastern province, and if the trend continues, then to make itself necessary for the federal government or at least to force the others into a too colorful and barren coalition and become even stronger in the opposition.

There are two schools of thought. The first one says that if the Alternative really takes over, it will pacify and move towards the center, especially if it is in a coalition with the Christian Democrats, while its support will fall because it is not all-powerful. Another says that the new thirties are waiting for Germany, in the "light" version, if there is such a thing.

The answer may come sooner than thought, as the question is whether the loose Merz government will push through a full mandate. Precht simply says that the next German chancellor could be called Alice Weidel.