Germany’s Not-So-Stable Firewall Against the Far Right
In Germany, a toxic national debate on Muslims and immigration has fueled the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. Polling second place ahead of February’s federal elections, mainstream parties are increasingly playing into its rhetoric.
Friedrich Merz, Federal chairman of the Christian Democratic Union and candidate for chancellor, speaks at the annual business reception in the Rheingoldhalle in Mainz, Germany. (Boris Roessler / Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
If the German political class generally pays limited attention to Austrian politics, its southern neighbor’s convulsed start to the year has forced them to ask what it means for Germany. After Chancellor Karl Nehammer from Austria’s center-right People’s Party (ÖVP) announced his resignation, his party signaled its openness to forming a government with — and led by — the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ).
Even in the run-up to last September’s Austrian federal elections, Nehammer had not ruled out working with the FPÖ. The two parties have governed together in the past, most recently in 2019, albeit with the far-right party as the junior force. Still, Nehammer had at least promised the conservatives would not accept the FPÖ’s leader Herbert Kickl (who they labeled a “security risk”) as chancellor. Now Kickl looks closer to power than ever.
For a while, it seemed the conservatives would maintain their promise. This would have allowed them to retain the chancellorship despite the FPÖ pushing them into second place in vote totals. But then came the collapse of the negotiations to form a coalition between the conservatives, the Social Democrats, and the neoliberal NEOS. Now talks between the FPÖ and the ÖVP suggest that Kickl is halfway into the federal chancellery in Vienna.
This news from Austria reaches Germany just ahead of its own February 23 federal elections. The center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), together with its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU), is comfortably leading polls, with around 30 percent of voting intention. It is followed by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), now polling above 20 percent — and poised to double its support compared to the 2021 contest, even as it has radicalized politically.
In early 2024, the AfD distanced itself from some mid-ranking figures who had attended a conference on “remigration,” namely the forced deportation of asylum seekers, migrants, and descendants of migrants from German soil. Yet on January 12, the concept (defined in somewhat less crude terms) was incorporated into the party’s election program. The AfD’s chancellor candidate Alice Weidel has stepped up her rhetoric during the current campaign, most recently when she compared protesters against an AfD event in Hamburg to members of the Nazi paramilitaries of the Sturmabteilung (SA).
This party is often cast as a uniquely disreputable outsider. Indeed, the CDU leader and likely future chancellor Friedrich Merz said as much when recently asked about the lessons of Austria. He insisted that a similar pact of center right and far right, through coalition agreements with the AfD, would never be an option as long as he remained leader. Anything else would be “selling the soul” of the CDU.
On the face of it, this stance represents an exception to the general trend among European center-right parties. In Italy, the late Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia is the junior partner in a government led by far-right Giorgia Meloni. In Spain, the People’s Party (PP) established regional-level coalitions with the far-right Vox after regional contests in May 2023. This would likely have become a national deal had the two parties not fallen six seats short of a majority in the July 2023 general election. Meanwhile, in France, the Gaullist center right split ahead of the June 2024 parliamentary elections, with erstwhile party president Éric Ciotti leading a faction to ally with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
Still today, none of these scenarios is expected to play out in Germany, at least with the outcome of February’s elections. So is the Brandmauer (firewall) against the AfD built on solid foundations, with the German far right politically isolated? Not quite.
The Missing Bricks in the Wall
At times, the CDU has declared an anathema against unpalatable allies. In 2018, it established that it “rejects coalitions and similar forms of cooperation” with both the left-wing Die Linke and the AfD. Yet two years later, there were signs of such a pact, as the votes of the CDU and the AfD contributed to making Thomas Kemmerich, from the neoliberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), president of the state of Thuringia. After Kemmerich’s election became a scandal of national proportions and he had to resign, the CDU established clearer guidelines: “There is no cooperation with the AfD — neither in direct nor indirect form.”
In 2023, Merz — already as leader of the CDU — said in an interview that the Brandmauer applied to state and national politics, but not to the municipal level. Merz’s statement sparked criticism within the CDU, and he had to correct himself. But he was merely acknowledging a fait accompli. This is especially the case in eastern Germany, where the AfD and smaller, even more radical right-wing parties and voters’ associations are particularly strong.
Germany is greatly decentralized, with significant power held by the sixteen different states and multiple layers of more local representative institutions. If this complicates any research into patterns of municipal-level cooperation with the AfD, two recent studies have sought to do just this. Researchers at the Berlin Social Science Center examined cases of cooperation with the AfD in eastern Germany at the levels of government below the Land (regional state) level. The study established that 21 percent of the motions presented by the AfD between 2019 and 2024 received support from other major parties. The CDU participated in 62 percent of the instances of cooperation, followed by the FDP with 50 percent and the Social Democrats with 38 percent. The Greens and Die Linke were part of this cooperation on one out of every four occasions.
A study by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (RLS), a political foundation affiliated with Die Linke, analyzed similar cases. If marked by holes in the data, its findings are unequivocal and broadly in line with the Berlin Social Science Center’s research. Authors Steven Hummel and Anika Taschke find that (in order) the Greens, Die Linke, and the Social Democrats have the least cooperation with the AfD, whereas the CDU is responsible for over half of such instances of cooperation. If this is partly explained by the Christian Democrats’ strong presence in local government in eastern Germany, the same cannot be said of the hard-neoliberal FDP, the second most likely to cooperate with the AfD.
Cases of cooperation can be diverse, ranging from apparently apolitical issues like traffic regulations to CDU-AfD collaboration to prevent rejected asylum seekers from receiving language courses or other benefits, as in Bautzen, Saxony. The authors of the RLS study tell me that they expect a further weakening of the Brandmauer at the municipal level following last June’s local elections in eastern Germany, where the AfD achieved record-high results.
As Hummel and Taschske point out, the CDU remains an internally diverse party. Seven CDU MPs sponsored a resolution (which failed to secure a majority) asking the Federal Constitutional Court to rule whether the AfD should be forbidden. Yet local-level CDU politicians in eastern Germany, the authors observe, surely have a quite different perspective.
Thuringia and Saxony: Two Test Cases for the Brandmauer
Elections in the eastern German states of Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg in September 2024 left behind a complicated scenario for bypassing the AfD in these three parliaments in coming years. Even in Brandenburg, where the Social Democrats lead a majority government, the AfD controls over one third of seats, giving them veto power on judicial appointments or constitutional changes. The situation is particularly complicated in Thuringia, where the CDU-led government coalition has exactly half of the seats and the AfD enjoys a one-third minority, having won a state election for the first time last September 1.
The CDU already flouted its principle of double incompatibility with the AfD and Die Linke during the previous term, as it tolerated a minority government led by Die Linke while occasionally also seeking majorities with the AfD. It is unclear how the new CDU-led government will approach the AfD and Die Linke, now in opposition. Although the Thuringian government has put forward a consultation mechanism to negotiate majorities with Die Linke, there might be topics (such as migration) where both the AfD and Die Linke are against the government for opposed reasons.
In Saxony, the CDU leads a minority government with the Social Democrats after coalition negotiations with the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) collapsed. The BSW, founded by the namesake former Die Linke politician in early 2024, combines anti-immigration rhetoric with a center-left economic program and calls to resume economic ties with Russia. To find majorities in parliament without the AfD (which has only one seat fewer than the CDU), state president Michael Kretschmer will have to rely on the BSW or, less likely, on the Greens and Die Linke.
After the BSW broke off coalition negotiations, Kretschmer had a working meeting with Jörg Urban, the leader of the AfD in Saxony. The encounter coincided with the arrest of three party members, among them an AfD parliamentary assistant, for their activities in a neo-Nazi terrorist group suspected of planning an armed takeover of Saxony. Asked about the meeting with Urban, Kretschmer reaffirmed there would be no cooperation with the AfD but argued that talking to the party takes away its confected image of martyrdom. If the CDU does make any opening to the AfD to achieve majorities in Thuringia or Saxony, it will surely take place after February’s national elections. This way, the CDU would avoid the risk of losing some of its most moderate voters ahead of that contest.
A Policy Firewall?
Julia Klöckner, former minister of food and agriculture and a member of the CDU’s national board, hadn’t planned to bolster the arguments of those who claim the conservative party has become an AfD-lite. Yet she did just that when she posted on Instagram (before hitting delete some hours later) that “to get what you want, you do not have to vote for the AfD. For that, there is a democratic alternative: the CDU.” Her post could be seen as anomalous, were it not for the fact that it speaks to a broader dynamic. Likely next chancellor Merz is campaigning on the promise of massive pushbacks against migrants and asylum seekers at Germany’s borders and the stripping of German citizenship from dual citizens who commit criminal offenses.
At the recent AfD national congress, its chancellor candidate Weidel accused the CDU of having copied her party’s program on issues such as pushbacks at the borders. For once, she wasn’t far from the truth. Although the CDU is on the way back to leading the government after the Angela Merkel years, there are nerves in the party. Merz’s personal ratings are poor, and the CDU has experienced a moderate downward trend in the polls over the last two months. It has been unable to regain voters it once lost to AfD. Election Day surveys in last June’s European elections showed the CDU has largely grown at the expense of the Social Democrats, FDP, and the Greens (in that order) but continues to hemorrhage votes to the AfD.
Merz has arguably strengthened the far right with his inflammatory rhetoric and scorched-earth opposition tactics against Germany’s outgoing federal government coalition, which had from 2021 to 2024 united Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats with the Greens and the FDP. The paradigmatic example was the CDU’s complaint to the constitutional court against the government’s budget. Once the court aligned with the CDU, arguing that the ruling coalition had not complied with the draconian constitutional brake on governmental debt, the Scholz-led government adopted a new round of austerity, further diluting its social projects.
Disputes on how to square the budget led to the collapse of the government coalition in November and then to snap elections. Given its promises of massive cuts in social welfare and lower taxes for the rich, the CDU might soon be creating even more of a powder keg. Once Merz has to account for the decaying social state and the anti-incumbent bonus the CDU is currently enjoying is spent, support for the party is likely to dwindle.
Yet the AfD is waiting in the wings with even more radical proposals to slash welfare. Families with low incomes would earn even less under the AfD’s free-market economic policies and would be particularly affected by the trimming of the social state with proposals like cutting unemployment benefits, also shared by the CDU and the FDP.
Still, there are reasons to believe the CDU will not reach coalition agreements with the AfD in the midterm. For all their convergence on migration and economic policy, the two parties broadly differ on foreign policy issues. AfD election placards in Thuringia last September showed the Russian and German flags next to each other, whereas the CDU wants to strengthen Germany’s role within NATO. Moreover, the AfD’s desire to replace the European Union with a looser “community of interests” contrasts with the CDU’s self-definition as the German “Europe Party.”
More important, the CDU would likely be penalized at the polls if it were to reach coalition agreements with the AfD. In a recent survey that recorded 21 percent support for the AfD, only 23 percent of the polled voters wanted to see that party in government; 67 percent were against, and the rest were undecided. Among CDU voters, 77 percent would disapprove of an AfD government participation, above the national average. This is in fact rather unlike the Austrian situation, where the far right is more normalized, and almost half of voters wanted to see the FPÖ in government.
At least for now, a cost-benefit analysis suggests there is more to lose than win for the CDU if it were to reach out to the AfD, and Merz’s position on “firewalls” will continue to owe much to this electoral calculation. In early 2024, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets against the AfD under the slogan “We are the Brandmauer.” The firewall against the far right is far from defenseless. But continuing with the current policy mix can only weaken the forces that stand against the AfD.