Last night johnnygunn published the diary Sobering Election News from Germany about the success of the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) in this past weekend’s elections in three of the sixteen federal states: Sachsen-Anhalt, where it got 24.2% of the popular vote, the second-best showing in the election; Baden-Württemberg (15.1%, third-best); and Rheinland-Pfalz (12.6%, third-best). Since the AfD is even less familiar to Americans than the Front National in France and the UKIP in the U.K., I thought that an introduction to it might be useful.
The AfD was founded as a public party in April 2013, when it held its first convention. In the September 2013 federal election the party won 4.7% of the vote, not enough to meet the 5% threshold for entry into the Bundestag (roughly equivalent to the U.S. House of Representatives or the British House of Commons). In the 2014 European Parliament it got 7.1% of the German vote, enough for seven seats (out of a total of 751, 96 of which are for Germany). Later in the same year the party won seats in the parliaments of three states, all in the former East Germany: Sachsen, Thüringen, and Brandenburg. In February 2015 the AfD won its first seats in a western German state (Hamburg), and three months later it won representation in Bremen as well. Although still very much a minor party, it was clearly enjoying a rapid growth in popularity, especially in the east.
It was also experiencing severe growing pains, accompanied by a great deal of infighting. The original impetus for its founding was opposition to the government’s policies concerning the eurozone crisis; the initial supporters included a large number of economists, among them Bernd Lucke, one of the party’s first speakers. They weren’t opposed to the EU as such, but they did want to dissolve the Eurozone and put an end to economic bailouts. The entrepreneur Frauke Petry was also elected speaker at the first party convention, and her concerns were quite different: she was more interested in the refugee crisis and the perils of Islamization, and in strengthening ties with Russia. Both factions were socially conservative; for example, both opposed gay marriage. The two main factions coalesced around Lucke and Petry, respectively, and at a party congress in July 2015 Petry’s faction won a decisive victory. Lucke and several AfD members of the European Parliament promptly resigned from the party.
Under Frauke Petry’s leadership the party has moved far to the right. For example, in a newspaper interview she said that police were required to prevent illegal border crossings by refugees, ‘even making use of firearms if necessary. That’s the law.’ Beatrix von Storch, a vice president of the AfD who represents the party in the European Parliament, took this a bit further in a Facebook post in late January. She said that ‘if you don’t honor the HALT at the border, the enforcement officers in the border service can employ firearms even against people’. When asked for clarification, she would not exclude women and children, though shortly thereafter she did exempt children.
It has been noted that the AfD has moved far enough to the right to put the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany, NPD) in a bit of a bind. The NPD is usually described as a neo-Nazi party and is classified as a ‘threat to the constitutional order’ by the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), and supporting it has not generally been considered socially acceptable. Now it is trying to use the growing acceptance of the AfD to argue that ‘concerned citizens’ should not be afraid to vote for extreme right-wing parties and candidates, including the NPD, an argument that collapses if the NPD is a lot more radical than the AfD. However, the NPD can’t really justify its existence if it doesn’t show itself to be significantly more radical than the AfD. My own impression is that at this point there is still a significant difference overall between the two parties, but also a very sizable overlap.
At the end of April the AfD will hold a party congress and set its official program. The German non-partisan, non-profit investigative journalism newsroom CORRECT!V got its hands on a draft and made it available online as a PDF. It runs to about 70 pages, but I’ve hit some of the high low spots below. Before I get to that, though, it’s worth noting that according to SPIEGEL ONLINE, internal e-mails of the party leadership have come to light that indicate that the draft program, while very much in keeping with the sentiments of party supporters, is designed partly to draw the attention of the press. In one of them Beatrix von Storch writes that ‘Islam is really the program’s most controversial topic’ and the one most suitable for ‘external communication’: ‘Asylum and the euro are old hat and bring nothing new’, but ‘The press will swoop on our rejection of political Islam as on no other topic in the program’. (This sounds rather like Trump’s approach to the press.)
Here are some of the more distressing points of the draft program.
Climate:
- They are climate deniers. ‘The climate changes as long as the earth exists. The politics of climate protection rest on useless computer models of the IPCC. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but rather an indispensable component of all life.’
- Along with this they want to do away with the German Renewable Energies Act, which has actually been quite successful.
Crime:
- Although the German crime rate has been sinking since the early 1990s, the AfD claims that internal security is decreasing and wants to give the police and legal system more possibilities for intervention — i.e., more monitoring and surveillance. This is ironic, in view of the party’s call for the people to be ‘free citizens, not subjects’.
- They want to reduce the age of criminal responsibility to twelve. They also want to make it much easier to hold suspects in investigative custody.
- ‘Untreatable alcoholics and drug addicts, as well as mentally ill offenders who pose substantial dangers to the public are to be placed in preventive detention, not in psychiatric hospitals.’
Religion:
- ‘The AfD unconditionally pledges itself to freedom of belief, conscience, and worship. It demands, however, that law, human rights, and our values set limits on the exercise of religion.’ Of course the payoff comes in the next sentence: ‘The AfD emphatically opposes an Islamic religious practice that is directed against the liberal-democratic basic order, our laws, and the Judeo-Christian and humanistic foundations of our culture.’ Elsewhere in the document they demand a general prohibition against wearing the burqa and niqab in public, and against the wearing of the head scarf by students, teachers, and public servants in general. They opposes both the minaret (as a symbol of Islamic power) and the muezzin’s call (because it proclaims that there is no god but the Islamic Allah). ‘Minaret and muezzin’s call are in conflict with a tolerant coexistence of religions that the Christian churches practise in the modern world.’
- They want to prohibit male circumcision (except in cases of medical necessity). This is probably aimed primarily at Muslims, but it doesn’t seem to bother them that it also affects Jews.
Economy:
- They want to minimize governmental interference in the economy. ‘For competition creates the freedom to develop and define oneself, to be able to acquire private ownership of goods and means of production, to make independent contracts for one’s own good and the general benefit, to be able to choose between different vendors, proposals, or employers, to exploit profitable opportunities, but also to be responsible for a possible failure.’ In particular, they want the absolute minimum possible governmental interference with monopolies.
Society:
- ‘Our society: tradition, marriage, and family.’ They are very much in favor of the traditional family, with traditional gender roles. ‘It is important to us to protect evolved traditions and established institutions. In particular, marriage and family are nuclei of civil society that ensure the social coherence that has evolved over generations, and as such in our opinion they rightly enjoy special protection by the state.’
- Gender research (in scare quotes) is unscientific and should be eliminated. ‘Gender ideology marginalizes natural differences between the sexes thereby works against traditional moral values and specific sex roles in the family.’
- ‘We oppose the promotion of homosexuality and transsexuality in the classroom as decidedly as we do the ideological interference through ‘’gender mainstreaming’’. The traditional picture of the family must not be destroyed thereby. In school our children must not be made the plaything of the sexual proclivities of a mere minority.’
- They want at the very least to make abortion more difficult by requiring an emphasis on its possible negative consequences.
- They want to reduce the social safety net. ‘Social insurance is intended for emergencies, must not become overextended, and should not and cannot replace the family as the nucleus of social solidarity.’
Immigration and Refugees:
- They want to close the borders. They say that ‘the current policies on asylum are leading to a colonization, as inexorable as it is rapid, of Europe and especially Germany by people from other cultures and parts of the world’. Refugee centres under UN or EU mandate should be set up in African and Near Eastern transit nations and outside the eastern border of the EU; all applications for asylum would be required to come from these centres; applicants already in Europe would be required to remove to one of them.
- They are ‘committed to the German core culture’, which in their view is fed by three sources: its Christian heritage, the scientific-humanistic tradition, and Roman law. They view the ‘ideology of multiculturalism’ as a ‘serious threat to social harmony and to the survival of the nation as a cultural unity’, because it ignores history to ‘put imported cultural currents on an equal footing with the homegrown culture and thereby profoundly relativizes the values’ of the latter.
- More generally, they are nationalistic. Among the things that ‘strengthen the cohesion of our liberal state’ are patriotism and love of country. They want to strengthen the armed forces and reintroduce compulsory military service (but only for men, of course).
It is only fair to note that they do have some good points:
- In view of the increase in resistant strains of bacteria, they want to minimize the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry.
- They want strong protection of privacy, both from business and from the government. In particular ‘Governmental Trojan software is a breach of the law’.
- They are for consumer protection.
- They want as much as possible to shift the mass transport of heavy goods from the roads to the rails and waterways.
- They reject free trade agreements that are arrived at without transparency and a balanced protection of the interests of the parties concerned and encroach unduly on national law.