Germany’s Shift to the Right
The recent success of Alternative for Germany has alarmed many. But the Left can fight against the climate of despair.
Germany’s spring regional elections had even mainstream and bourgeois commentators talking about the “great moving right show” in German politics. The reading is not wrong: the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) finished third in Baden-Württemberg (with roughly 15 percent of the vote) and Rhineland-Palatinate (12 percent) and second in Saxony-Anhalt, an eastern region of the former German Democratic Republic (24 percent).
But the story is a bit more complicated. The election results mark two separate, yet intertwined shifts to the right in German politics, of which the AfD is merely the most visible manifestation.
The Best Laid Plans
Both rightward shifts started in the early 2000s, when Gerhard Schröder and his Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) led the country. Under Schröder, the SPD moved further and further to the right, beyond the Third Way policies it had implemented during the first term of its “red-green” government in 1998–2002.
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