AfD local election win: watershed moment for far-right in Germany?

Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has caused shock across the political spectrum by winning an election for the first time in the party’s 10-year history.

In what public broadcaster ARD described as a “watershed moment”, AfD candidate Robert Sesselmann claimed 52.8% of the vote in Sunday’s district council run-off election in Sonneberg, in the eastern state of Thuringia. Sesselmann’s victory over incumbent district administrator Jürgen Köpper, of the center-right Christian Democrat Party (CDU), “comes amid a broader rise of the AfD in national polls”, said Politico’s politics reporter Hans von der Burchard.

Alice Weidel, the AfD’s national leader, told the Financial Times that the Sonneberg victory was a “milestone”. Winning “direct decision-making powers” would enable her party to “put a stop” to “the whole nightmare” of Sonneberg accepting refugees, Weidel said.

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‘Threats from outside and within’

A survey last week by broadcaster ARD suggested that around 19% of voters would back the AfD in federal elections – putting the party ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, on 17%, and the other two members of the ruling coalition, the Greens (15%) and the Free Democratic Party (6%). Only the CDU had a higher level of support, at 29%.

The AfD “seems to be scoring points among voters on two political stances in particular: opposing immigration and climate protection”, said Deutsche Welle.

The party has long claimed that “there is a threat to German culture”, political analyst Johannes Hillje told taz newspaper, and that “this came from the outside, through migrants”. But, he added, “now the narrative is that this threat is also coming from within, through the transformation of society to climate neutrality – a central project of the centre-left coalition in Berlin and the Green Party”.

Since the government unveiled plans to phase out gas- and oil-fired boilers and move to renewable heat pumps, discontent has “reached a new peak in Sonneberg and in many other towns and cities in Germany”, said the FT.

“The cheek of it, it’s just unbelievable,” an AfD voter reportedly said. “I don’t need a new boiler, mine works very well, thank you, and they can’t force me to replace it.”

‘Lack of trust in established parties’

The election result in Sonneberg has triggered a “frantic search for explanations” and a blame game between Germany’s other parties, said historian Katja Hoyer in The Spectator. That close to one in five people seem willing to vote for “a relatively new party which contains many far-right extremists shows their lack of trust in the established political spectrum”, she wrote, and “in its willingness to solve the big issues of the day”.

The “overall mood in Germany is increasingly grim”, said Ronald G. Asch, former chair of early modern history at the Iniversity of Freiburg. “However crude its rhetoric may be”, he wrote for The Critic, the AfD is good at “giving a voice to this discontent”.

And the spread of such discontent means the German political system is likely to become “even more unstable over the next couple of years”, Asch added. German politicians may “learn the hard way that telling fairy tales to voters such as ‘the Euro and European integration policies will make you ever more prosperous’ will only take you so far”.