An election had become necessary after a coalition government, led by a hapless Social Democrat, failed to agree on a major funding issue and collapsed. During a heated election campaign in which the far right played a bigger-than-ever role, the left mobilised its supporters to attend rallies where speakers warned of the dangers of fascism. But they couldn’t dissuade voters from flocking to the far right and making its party the second-largest in parliament. A mere three years later, the conservatives joined a government led by the far right’s leader, who liked to be called Führer by his supporters.
I’m talking, of course, about the German elections of 1930, which saw Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party increase its previous vote by more than fifteen points. The Reichstag he came to dominate is where the newly elected Bundestag will convene in late March for its inaugural session.
Other than that, the parallels between the elections in September 1930 and February 2025 can seem far-fetched. Yet Sunday’s record results for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD — which won 20.8 per cent of the vote, 2.5 points more than the Nazi party ninety-five years earlier — have ensured that what happened in the early 1930s has been in the minds of many.
Close to two million people have joined public rallies against the far right since the beginning of 2025. Even more so than during the 1930 election campaign, the wooing of votes was accompanied by loud protests against the party of the far right, which has long been accused of having much in common with Weimar Germany’s Nazis.
The morning after this month’s election, Beatrix von Storch, deputy leader of the AfD’s parliamentary party in the Bundestag, was interviewed on German radio. She generally strikes me as one of the far right’s more repulsive figures, particularly because of her views about migrants, but this time she had a point. The AfD had been identified as a right-wing extremist party, she told the interviewer, because of its demands to close Germany’s borders and to “deport all illegals.” “But now,” she went on, “suddenly everybody is of the view that this is exactly what this country needs.” Since the Christian Democrats had recognised that what the AfD wants is “just normal common sense,” Storch concluded, the labelling of the AfD as extremist was no longer tenable.
Over the past few years, the Verfassungsschutz — the domestic intelligence organisation whose full name rather clumsily translates as Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution — has investigated whether or not the AfD is extremist. It has focused on statements made by the party’s leaders, including Storch, about migrants, that run counter to the Constitution’s articles 1(1) (“Human dignity shall be inviolable”) and 3(3) (“No person shall be favoured or disfavoured because of sex, parentage, race, language, homeland and origin, faith or religious or political opinions”).
Misleading claims by the AfD that articles 1 and 3 apply only to German citizens have attracted comparatively little public attention; instead, the media have highlighted isolated instances in which AfD politicians have trivialised the crimes of Nazi Germany. Former AfD leader Alexander Gauland’s 2018 remark that the Nazi past was “just a piece of bird shit in a successful German history spanning more than a thousand years” is among the remarks frequently cited as evidence.
The AfD has always vehemently rejected the suggestion that it bears any similarities to the Nazi party – usually by saying that, unlike Hitler’s Nazis, it is not extremist. Lately, AfD leader Alice Weidel has introduced a new argument. In her conversation with Elon Musk, broadcast live in January on X, she said: “The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right and conservative. He was exactly the opposite. He wasn’t a conservative… He was a communist, socialist guy.”
Such a ludicrous rewriting of history aside, Storch and the Verfassungsschutz are right: it’s the disdain for the human dignity of others that ought to disqualify the AfD. Storch’s claim that the Christian Democrats have adopted some of the AfD’s views on migrants is also correct; but her assumption that such views are no longer problematic because they are shared by mainstream politicians is wrong.
How have AfD politicians been able to claim that they and the leaders of the Christian Democrats are now singing from the same hymn sheet? Since 2014, the AfD has obsessively vilified asylum seekers and demanded that Germany seal its borders. In 2015, only a minority of Christian Democrats (including Friedrich Merz, the man likely to lead the incoming German government) criticised chancellor Angela Merkel for inviting Syrian refugees to seek protection in Germany.
By the time Merkel left office, the view that she had been too generous and too naive was shared by the majority of her party. But it wasn’t until 2023 that demands to turn away asylum seekers and immediately deport all those whose protection claims had been unsuccessful won overwhelming public support. By the time the election was called late last year, most Germans considered migration and asylum to be by far the most pressing issue to be dealt with by the next government.
Anti-refugee sentiment had increased after knife attacks in Mannheim on 31 May 2024 and in Solingen on 23 August 2024. Four people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time died. The perpetrators: a Syrian man and an Afghan man who had both been asylum seekers and identified as Islamists.
Then, on 20 December 2024, a psychiatrist originally from Saudi Arabia killed six people when he drove a car into a Christmas market in the East German city of Magdeburg. The fact that he had renounced Islam and sympathised with the far right was largely lost in the ensuing media hype.
A month later, on 22 January, a young man from Afghanistan attacked a group of children in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, killing a young girl (of Moroccan descent) and a man who tried to stop him. The perpetrator had been in Germany since 2022, had unsuccessfully applied for asylum and, in accordance with the Dublin regulations, had been scheduled to be removed to Bulgaria, where he had first entered the European Union. He was evidently suffering from a mental illness and since the murders has been kept at a psychiatric hospital.
By the time of the Aschaffenburg murders, the election campaign was in full swing and already dominated by issues of asylum and migration. Friedrich Merz had earlier said he didn’t want the campaign to focus on these issues — for good reason. Olaf Scholz’s government was deeply unpopular not least because of a rise in the costs of living and the country’s economic performance, and Merz no doubt hoped to focus on the perception that he would manage the struggling German economy more competently than Scholz and his deputy, treasurer Robert Habeck of the Greens.
Merz had also categorically ruled out relying on the votes of AfD members of parliament in the Bundestag. Yet that’s precisely what he did a week after the Aschaffenburg murders. On 29 January, Christian Democrats tabled a resolution demanding that anybody attempting to “illegally” enter Germany be pushed back and that all people required to leave the country be imprisoned. Social Democrats, Greens and the left-wing Linke and its offshoot, the socially conservative Alliance Sarah Wagenknecht, rejected the motion. It was passed with the votes of the Free Democrats and the AfD, although it was critical of the AfD’s demand for the “remigration” of all non-citizens.
When the tally of votes was announced, the AfD members of parliament cheered while the Christian Democrats fell silent, as if they could not quite believe what they had done. Merz and his party had always maintained that they would respect the Brandmauer, the proverbial firewall designed to isolate the AfD. Now they had taken to it with a wrecking ball. And the timing couldn’t have been worse, with the vote coming two days after the Bundestag had commemorated the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Greens and Social Democrats were outraged, but they too had demanded Germany admit fewer asylum seekers and deport more of those whose claims had been unsuccessful. They had argued for a tough new Common European Asylum System providing for the internment of asylum seekers, including children, at the European Union’s external borders. Greens and Social Democrats had made little attempt to explain to the public why it made no sense to blame “criminal foreigners” for all Germany’s woes, and why a million Syrians who had been accommodated in Germany since 2014 couldn’t possibly be held responsible for the murders committed by just one of them.
With both the Greens and the Social Democrats not wanting to rule out joining a Merz-led government, their outrage also lacked credibility. By contrast, the Linke could claim to have always defended the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. It fell to the left-wing party’s new co-leader, Heidi Reichinnek, to give a passionate impromptu speech after the controversial vote had been taken, which she concluded by proclaiming: “We are the Brandmauer!… To the barricades!” When the speech was posted on TikTok, it attracted millions of clicks.
Protests erupted all over Germany. On 8 February, 250,000 people rallied in Munich alone. A Holocaust survivor, ninety-nine-year-old Albrecht Weinberg, decided to return the order of merit he had received from the German government. Michel Friedman, a former vice-president of the Council of Jews in Germany and a high-profile Christian Democrat, left his party. Even Angela Merkel, who had hardly ever commented on current affairs since departing politics in 2021, chided Merz.
What motivated Merz? Two explanations have been put forward. According to the first, his decision to introduce the resolution — even if it meant that it could be passed only with support of the far right — was testament to his temperament. He is considered impulsive and thin-skinned, so maybe he was so troubled by the Aschaffenburg murders that he felt compelled to act decisively.
This explanation has a weakness: Two days after the controversial vote, and with full knowledge of its reverberations, the Christian Democrats tabled a bill in parliament that was designed to legislate some of the measures they had demanded in their resolution. Promoting the bill, Merz referred to “daily pack rapes” allegedly committed by asylum seekers in Germany. This time, a sufficient number of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats decided not to follow him, and the bill was voted down despite unanimous support from the AfD.
According to the other explanation, Merz was trying to bolster the Christian Democrats’ vote at the expense of the far right. If that’s true, he failed. Despite the shockwaves generated by the vote, the polls hardly changed. There were only two discernible consequences on election day: a greater proportion of the electorate cast their vote than at any election since 1987; and the Linke, whose vote had been expected to remain well below the 5 per cent threshold, scored an astonishing 8.8 per cent.
As expected, the Christian Democrats won the election, albeit with the second-lowest vote in their history. As expected, the AfD came second, 7.8 points behind the Christian Democrats. As also expected, the three parties that had formed the outgoing government lost heavily: the Social Democrats recorded their worst-ever result and the Free Democrats did not even clear the 5 per cent hurdle to be represented in the Bundestag. The Greens, who had expected to perform much better than in 2021, went from 14.7 to 11.6 per cent. The Alliance Sarah Wagenknecht, which had done well at the European elections and at three state elections last year, missed the 5 per cent threshold by a mere 13,435 votes.
Even more so than in previous elections, the results were extremely uneven. A map depicting which candidates won each of the 299 electorates is predominantly black (Christian Democrat) in the West and predominantly blue (AfD) in the East. In the former communist East Germany, excluding East Berlin, AfD candidates won forty-five out of forty-eight electorates. Of the remainder, two went to the Linke and one, the electorate of Potsdam near Berlin, to the Social Democrats’ Scholz. In West Germany (including West Berlin), on the other hand, not a single AfD candidate came first. Of the six electorates in East Berlin, an AfD candidate succeeded in one, three went to the Linke and two to the Greens.
In Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, an electorate in inner-city Berlin, the Linke candidate scored 34.7 per cent, only four points ahead of the Greens candidate, while the AfD remained well below 10 per cent. In Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in the southeast of Saxony, the AfD candidate won 49.1 per cent of the vote, two-and-a-half times the combined results of the Social Democrats, Greens and Linke; his previous claim to fame is that in 2020 he was suspended from the police force for organising a demonstration against the government’s Covid-19 measures at a time when such public gatherings were prohibited.
Significantly more men than women voted for the AfD, and significantly more women than men voted for the Linke. The Linke did particularly well among young voters; pensioners were more likely to vote for Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, with more than two-thirds of those over the age of seventy casting their votes for either of them. The Greens appealed to tertiary-educated voters, the AfD did not. None of these differences came as a surprise.
It could be argued that the AfD’s doubling of its vote should not have been unexpected either. After all, the far right has been doing well pretty much throughout the global North. Think of the election of Donald Trump, the far right’s success at the 2024 European elections and last year’s federal elections in Austria, where the far-right Freedom Party topped the polls. From the perspective of its neighbours, such as the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium and Slovakia, to name but a few, the AfD’s 10.4 per cent at the 2021 federal elections was an outlier, and Germany has finally caught up. But global trends are no more than that: trends — as the Spaniards learned when their Socialist-led government was re-elected in 2023 and the far-right party Vox lost rather than gained votes.
The most recent edition of the magazine Spiegel features a fictive statement published by the leaders of the Christian Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens. “Governing in these adverse times is hard work with no guarantee of success, fame or public gratitude,” Spiegel journalist Stefan Kuzmany lets them say. After carefully considering all risks and opportunities, the party leaders agree that irrespective of the outcome of the elections, Scholz ought to continue in his thankless role.
Given Friedrich Merz’s unbridled ambition, which was thwarted first by Angela Merkel, then by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and in 2021 by Armin Laschet, nothing will stop him now. But he ought to consider the fate of his predecessor. When Scholz was elected in December 2021 he had just pulled off an unlikely victory and led a government that seemed enthusiastic and competent. His government failed largely because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which hit the Germany economy hard, but also because of the Free Democrats’ destructive intransigence. He may have had an inkling of the latter, but could not have anticipated the former.
This time around, at least five major challenges lie ahead. All of them are daunting. The first has to do with Germans’ current disenchantment with the political process. Never before has an incoming chancellor been as unpopular as Merz is now, and never before has a new government faced an electorate as sceptical, if not outright hostile. But there is no money in the kitty to fund tax cuts or other measures that could win over a disenchanted public.
Second, the German economy is in recession. It needs to be kick-started, which will only be possible if the new government agrees to borrow large amounts of money, which Merz has always ruled out. If he changes his mind, or if his coalition partner, the Social Democrats, forces his hand, he will need to convince parliament to change the Constitution. Articles 109 and 115, introduced by the Merkel government in 2009, stipulate a fiscal rule, the Schuldenbremse, that limits the budget deficit to 0.35 per cent of GDP. A change of the Constitution would require a two-thirds majority, and therefore a deal either with the AfD or with the Greens and the Linke (which would agree only if the borrowed funds were not used to fund defence spending). In his desperation, Merz has even been exploring the option of changing the Constitution before the newly elected parliament sits for the first time.
Then there is climate change, which did not feature in the election campaign but will need to be tackled urgently. If Germany is to benefit from the global roll-out of carbon-neutral technologies, it will need to not only transform its economy but lead by example. It will also need to invest heavily in research and development — at a time when the economy is struggling and leading companies are considering moving parts of their business abroad.
The biggest challenge will be posed by the American president. For the past seventy-five years, the Federal Republic prospered because it relied on the transatlantic partnership with the United States. Germany got away with a comparatively low defence budget, and with not having to take a leadership role, except within Europe (and then only in concert with France). That has changed. Ukraine, Germany’s neighbours and countries such as Canada will expect the world’s third-largest economy to marshall the opposition to Trump’s United States and to Russia and China. How it can do that is anybody’s guess.
Finally, Merz has promised to solve all problems to do with asylum and migration. His likely coalition partner may have other ideas: the Social Democrats have already said they won’t agree to measures that contravene European law and the German constitution. The AfD is likely to table legislation designed to implement the Christian Democrats’ election manifesto (which, when it comes to the question of asylum, bears some uncanny resemblance to the AfD’s manifesto). What would Merz do in that case? Blackmail the Social Democrats by threatening to vote with the AfD? And would he thereby be able to keep the AfD in check? Bavaria’s premier Markus Söder may have had a point when he said a couple of days ago that the incoming government would be “democracy’s last bullet.”
The day before Sunday’s German election I joined a protest rally against the far right in Hamburg. The mood was initially subdued: far fewer than the expected tens of thousands of people had turned up, and it was a typical gloomy February afternoon. None of us would have voted for the AfD anyway, and even the 40,000-strong crowd that did eventually gather wouldn’t have persuaded a single person to cast their vote not for the far right but for a democratic party.
Upon my return home, I cheered myself up by retrieving an election poster (below) I’ve kept since 1972. It shows two men on a Harley Davidson: Willy Brandt, the Social Democratic chancellor, and his deputy, Walter Scheel of the Free Democrats. Next to them stands a frustrated Franz Josef Strauß, then the leader of the Christian Democrats’ Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and the Social Democrats’ reactionary bête noire.
The 1972 campaign could hardly have been more different from the one in the winter of 2024–25. Brandt stood for a brighter future and a more democratic Federal Republic willing to bridge the Cold War divide and establish civil relations with the Soviet Union, Poland and the German Democratic Republic. Like many others of my generation, I wore a “Willy wählen” (vote Willy) button. Our optimism was not curbed by the fact that elsewhere the world seemed to be stuck in an earlier age. The United States, then under Richard Nixon, was still fighting a war in Vietnam. Georges Pompidou, Edward Heath and Giulio Andreotti, all conservatives, were at the helm in France, Britain and Italy.
It would be wrong to assume that we were unaware of the problems besetting the world. After all, this was in the midst of the Cold War. Germany spent 3 per cent of its GDP on defence — one-and-a-half times as much as now. Earlier in 1972 the Club of Rome had published The Limits of Growth, which predicted that the world was about to deplete its available natural resources; it had become an immediate bestseller and was widely discussed, particularly among young people. But there was still hope, in spades.
Only four parties were serious contenders at that election: the Christian Democrats; their Bavarian sister party; the Social Democrats; and the Free Democrats. The latter two had been in a coalition since 1969, but the government had lost its majority when some of its own defected in protest against Brandt’s policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, which had won him the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1971. More than 91 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot because the choice was clear: in favour or against the government’s foreign policy, a vote for the left or a vote for the right.
During the 2024–25 campaign, with Free Democrats, Greens and Social Democrats all offering themselves as future coalition partners of the Christian Democrats and all agreeing that Germany needed to “control and curtail” the admission of people seeking Germany’s protection, the old left–right divide was no longer so evident. Neither the electorate nor the major parties seemed overly interested in a vision for the future, while there was broad agreement that the recent past, especially under Scholz, was deeply unsatisfactory.
Many of the political views held by Strauß and other right-wing conservatives in 1972 align with those espoused by Storch and her colleagues today. But unlike Strauß’s Christian Social Union, the AfD is intent on destroying parliamentary democracy, subverting the rule of law and heavily qualifying the Constitution’s Article 1(1): “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” As happened in the early 1930s, other parties may underestimate the far right’s resolve and let themselves be tempted to rely on its support.
Friedrich Merz dismissed the recent demonstrations against the far right. For him, it seems, anti-fascism is as objectionable as fascism. Like many in his party, he seems to think that the Linke is to the left what the AfD is to the right. In fact, the Christian Democrats have committed to never form an alliance with either.
Willy Brandt would have known better. He may even have appreciated Reichinnek’s call “To the barricades!” Brandt witnessed not just how the Nazis dismantled the Weimar republic but also how right-wing conservatives aided and abetted them. He belonged to a small socialist party to the left of the Social Democrats and was forced into exile as soon as Hitler came to power. When he returned to Germany after the war, initially as a journalist working for a Norwegian newspaper, he rejected the notion that all Germans were guilty but insisted that they all bore responsibility for the crimes of Nazi Germany.
Responsibility is an appropriate response to being implicated in past injustices. It is also a stance that is often called for in response to current or impending wrongs. On a square in the inner-city Hamburg suburb of Ottensen, somebody put up a banner (below) the morning after the election. Reading “Bleibt solidarisch,” it encourages passers-by to keep extending their solidarity to others.
Letting the AfD dictate the political agenda, as Free Democrats, Greens, Social Democrats and, in particular, Merz’s Christian Democrats have done, has been irresponsible. The shrill demands for more deportations and pushbacks at the border have helped to normalise racism and the view that non-Germans could be blamed for everything: from higher incidents of sexualised violence to a lack of childcare places. Racist speech has in turn engendered an increase in physical violence against foreigners and people who look like they might be foreigners.
A return to the early 1930s is not yet on the cards, but it pays to be vigilant. A return to the optimism of 1972 (or 2015, for that matter) isn’t likely either, at least not anytime soon. In the meantime, responsible political leaders and civil society may want to try hanging on to what they have. For that, the injunction “Bleibt solidarisch” is a good starting point. •
