GERMAN regional elections amplify a message we’ve heard loud and clear from Britain and France already this summer: the far right is a rising danger.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD’s) first place in Thuringia (it came a close second in Saxony) is especially alarming given the Nazi-channelling antics of its serially offensive leader in the state, Bjorn Hocke.
And there are reasons to particularly fear German fascism beyond its ties of inheritance to the most monstrous regime in history.
Its far right is particularly violent — Germany recorded 1,270 acts of right-wing extremist violence in 2023, a 13 per cent rise in just a year.
It has access to weapons. The 2022 abortive coup plot linked to Heinrich, Prince Reuss (royalty’s affinity to fascism is not mere history, as evidenced by Spanish grandee and legitimist heir to the French throne Louis-Alphonse de Bourbon’s links to Spain’s Vox party) prompted police raids that seized hundreds of guns, knives and explosives.
At least until recently it had a base in the military: in 2020, Germany’s Defence Ministry had to dissolve a company of the elite KSK, Germany’s equivalent to the SAS, after a scandal broke involving dinners featuring Nazi music and Hitler salutes, and fears that the special forces unit had become “partially independent of the chain of command.”
The AfD has no direct ties to those found guilty in these outrages. But a mass electoral base for a ferociously anti-immigrant party emboldens the street fighters, as we’ve seen on the streets of Britain.
How to handle an advancing and aggressive far right is an urgent question across Europe.
The AfD are desperate to break the taboo against coalitions with them: Hocke proclaims it is ready to govern, adding that voters for the traditional right party, the Christian Democrats, want to see co-operation.
Parallels with Britain and France are obvious: the boundary between Conservatism and Reform UK is porous, as the case of Lee Anderson shows.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to appoint a prime minister from the left despite their first place in the election is also leading some in that direction: former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s demand for “a government of the right” could, mathematically, only be delivered by co-operation with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
The context of the far right’s advance is the extreme unpopularity of the status quo in all three countries.
The parties of Germany’s governing coalition, the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, were humiliated in both Thuringia and Saxony, barely polling double figures between them. In Britain, Reform’s rise and the far-right riots accompany a bizarre election in which support for the main parties fell to its lowest-ever ebb, with the winner coasting to victory despite losing half a million votes.
Macron wants to keep the policies the electorate has emphatically rejected in place, using the far right as a scarecrow to split the left and browbeat its least radical section into backing the status quo. This can only work to the advantage of Le Pen.
That’s true for Germany and Britain too. Doubling down on policies that condemn public services and living standards to decline, while reinforcing far-right propaganda by ratcheting up hostility to immigrants and Muslims (the latter particularly in the form of political suppression of the Palestine solidarity movement) is the current playbook of both Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz, as it has been of Macron. The right is everywhere stronger.
Our answer must be entirely different: sweeping aside the far right’s lies by pointing to the real culprits for the dispossession of our working classes, a political elite that privatises our assets, drives down wages and shreds our social security system to inflate corporate profit.
The left across Europe needs a combative and confident anti-racist movement that is independent of, and opposed to, the discredited politicians preaching permanent austerity.
