One of the biggest takeaways from the federal election in Germany is that the nation’s culture of guilt about the Holocaust has not been able to act as a bulwark against populism after all.
The 2013-born far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has been gathering steam since 2015 for its sharp anti-Euro, anti-Merkel, and anti-refugee rhetoric, has performed much better than expected. It rode the wave of unhappiness following Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome refugees in 2015, and finished with an astonishing 13.3% of the vote in Sunday’s election to Bundestag. With the refugee crisis being the defining issue this election, it is clear that the party’s strong stance against integration helped it attract votes, although, surprisingly, as the Financial Times showed, in districts where support for the AfD is strongest, the share of population with a migration background is low.
It is pertinent that the AfD did well in the former East Germany. A poll this month found that 86% of Germans thought their current economic situation as “good”; the country’s unemployment rate of 3.7% is the lowest since October 1980. Unemployment is higher in East Germany, and living standards lower, compared to the wealthier West.
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But did the AfD do well because of support for it or simply because people were tired of Ms. Merkel? While polls again show that 60% voted for the AfD because they were disappointed with other parties, the party believes otherwise. In June, Petr Bystron, Chairman of the AfD-Landesverband Bayern, told me that the lines between the ideologies of parties have blurred over the years (Ms. Merkel has often been accused of simply following public opinion while making decisions). “You can’t tell one party from another,” he said. “The AfD now is where the CDU was earlier — centre-right. We are liberal conservatives. We are the only alternative here.”
Ghosts of the past
Whether the only alternative or not, this is a development that Germans have been dreading. When the AfD’s head in eastern Thuringia, Björn Höcke, called Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial a “monument of shame” early this year, his statement rattled everyone. In the Dachau concentration camp in south Germany, months after the statement, Bernhard W. Schoner, a guide, explained to me why he has been tirelessly retelling the story of the Nazis for two decades. “My job is very important,” he stressed, “because the younger generation tends to forget.” For Barbara Ploch, 66, being a German could only be a matter of “half-pride” – the pride stemming from the fact that Germany welcomes refugees and the shame relating to the past. “But I like that it is an open society now,” she said. But the AfD’s Alexander Gauland seems upset precisely by that. After the results, he announced: “We will chase them down… Angela Merkel and whoever else... and we will take our country back.”
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Confusion now prevails in the AfD with Frauke Petry, the most well known face of the party, quitting what she calls an “anarchist party” with no credible plan to govern. Whether the party will be united and coherent in Parliament, or become fragmented given the early cracks, remains to be seen. But for a fractured Germany, the hope is that it is not revisited by the trauma of its past.