The Current - What’s behind the rise of a far-right party in Germany?

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is expected to make big gains in Germany’s election this weekend, in what could be the biggest result for a far-right party in that country since the Nazis. Journalist Richard Walker explains the rise of the AfD, and what's at stake in this election.

1942, Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. But what no one would know for decades, he was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable be true? I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's personally, Toy Soldier. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, it's Matt here. Thanks for listening to The Current wherever you're getting this podcast.

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For the first time since the Nazi era, a far-right party is expected to get a large share of the vote in Germany's national election on Sunday. The AFD or Alternative for Germany is polling at around 20%. Its anti-immigration anti-Europe platform is divisive, attracting some young voters in particular and angering others. At a recent AFD rally, counter-protesters turned up, decrying the party's message. It's not my Syrian refugees whose fault it is that my wages are short or that it's crime. It's not refugees.

To put all the fault on crime, it's not refugees. To put all the fault on migrants, that's just wrong. We have to... This propaganda... That protester was interrupted by an AFD supporter who has his own fears for the country. I'm worried about that we're heading directly in a situation of civil war. Society is so divided into two parties, I would say, and there's so much hate and so much violence.

I've never seen a situation like this before. Germany is the European Union's most populous and richest country. What happens there has widespread implications for Europe at a pivotal moment. And so, to help us understand the rise of the AFD and what's at stake more broadly in this German election, we're joined by Rich Walker. He is the chief international editor for the German international news broadcaster DW News.

He is in Berlin. Richard, hello. Hi, good morning, Matt. Does that, it's good to have you here. Does that dynamic that you just heard between protestor and counter protestor, does that sound familiar right now in Germany? Good morning, Matt. It's good to have you here. Does that dynamic that you just heard between protestor and counter-protestor, does that sound familiar right now in Germany?

Yeah, so I went to cover the annual conference of the AFD party last year. And yeah, that was very much the kind of vibe that you had. So outside on the streets, you had really a lot of people, several tens of thousands of people protesting against the party. on the streets, you had really a lot of people, several tens of thousands of people protesting against the party. And on the inside, you had the members of the AFD kind of taking that almost like a badge of honor, sort of saying that, look, you know, the people who are really anti-democratic

are the ones out on the street. All we're doing here is to gather to talk about our party program. We're a legitimate party. And we're under attack from the left. So yeah, you definitely do have a kind of, slightly kind of febrile atmosphere around the AFD whenever it has these kinds of big events. And now, as you mentioned in the intro there, this party is about to go into an election where they're gonna get what will be far and away

their strongest result ever. What is the pitch that the AFD is making? I mean, we heard that supporter saying he's worried about a civil war in Germany. Yeah, so, I mean, the AfD, its kind of pitch has changed over time. So it was founded just over a decade ago, and it was during the era when, if you remember, Europe was going through this crisis in the wake of the financial crisis. This kind of morphed into a debt crisis in various member states of the EU, centered around the functioning of the euro,

the single currency. And in Germany, this movement started bubbling up that the euro, the shared currency that Germany had joined, giving up its old kind of illustrious Deutsche Mark, the previous currency, that this had been a mistake and that Germany should go back to having its own currency and that having being part of the euro was kind of dragging it into having to help out countries like

Greece with large amounts of debt. So that was the kind of defining issue at the beginning. But it was later on when you had this large wave of migration coming into Germany as a result of the war primarily in Syria, but also in Afghanistan. And Angela Merkel, you remember the Chancellor of Germany for so long, the big decision that she made to allow a million plus refugees to enter Germany. She was really proud of that. I mean, she said, we can do this, right?

Yeah. She said, we can do this, right? Yeah, she said, we can do this. And there really was a kind of a buzz of almost a thrill in Germany, I think, about this country with its historical legacy of the crimes of the Holocaust, you know, making such a huge humanitarian gesture. But of course, not everybody liked it. And this kind of fed into the strength of the AFD.

And the AFD started to kind of become almost primarily an anti-migration party. But it's kind of, it's had some ebbs and flows, you know. Interestingly, I mean, during the pandemic, it was one of the voices, it was kind of the loudest voice in the system that was critical of lockdowns, that was skeptical about vaccinations, but it didn't really manage to profit from that. So it was interesting, you know, the election in 2021 sort of pandemic period actually slipped slightly,

but since then it's pretty much doubled its support to, you know, the polling average looks like 20, perhaps even 21%. Who's it appealing to, do you think? So I think it's a range of people. I mean, there's certainly always been a hard, but small core of pretty extreme right wing voters in Germany.

And you saw this in earlier decades, they would be supporting, for instance, the NPD, which was a pretty openly neo-Nazi party and other sort of similar incarnations in the, in the, of that in the past. But those parties never really broke the 2% or so mark in Western German politics. So, so what the AFD has done is it's kind of, it, you know, it will have some of those tendencies within it, some supporters will be really pretty well, sort of a far right extremist.

But it's also brought in people who feel that the center right party, the CDU, the party that used to be of Angela Merkel, that that has moved too much to the center through steps, such as what we just talked about with Angela Merkel opening to large amounts of refugees, also to the European policy of the Merkel government. Merkel was very much a center-right politician with the emphasis on the center.

I think the AFD is essentially being able to carve out a space which has taken the right wing of that of her party and combined it with a core of more kind of really far to the right people. You mentioned the historical legacy of the Holocaust, and this is important in part because of an undercurrent that is running through this election, an undercurrent that has been tapped into by Elon Musk, close ally of US President Donald Trump. He spoke via video call to an AFD rally recently. Have a listen to this.

I'm very excited for the AFD. I think you are really the best hope for Germany. You know, it's okay to be proud to be German. This is a very important principle. I think there's like frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that. Past guilt. A former leader of the AFD dismissed the Nazi era as a, this is his words, a speck of bird poop in German history. The current leader has talked about a guilt cult in Germany. What is the AFD's message about the Holocaust

and what is it tapping into, do you think? Yeah, so they're trying to walk a line. You know, so I was just earlier this year when it was the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and of the liberation of Auschwitz. And there's Holocaust Memorial Day, which is always a very important day in Germany

where the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi era are remembered. And that takes place in the Bundestag, in the parliament, and you have all of the members of parliament taking part in the ceremony there. And the AFD members are there and they applaud all of the appropriate moments. So it's not like they do a major boycott or anything like that. But they do go in a bit of a direction like we heard from Elon Musk. So for instance, in their latest party programme, they say that German history needs to be remembered in its entirety and it shouldn't

only just focus on the darkest moments. So trying to say that the implication being maybe we've overdone it now and it's time to move on. Alice Vidal, you may remember that she also did a Twitter space or an X space with Elon Musk, who's got a lot of attention. In that, she described Hitler as a communist, which is certainly a very ahistorical thing to say, but it was also, you know, kind of a little bit of a, you know, a signal to think that, you know, you don't associate us with Hitler and the crimes of the Nazis. That's really nothing to do with us. So again, a sort of, yeah, an attempt to shift away from one of the absolutely kind of prime, you know, reasons for being of the German

state in its modern form at all, that it does atone for the Holocaust, that that was a crime of such historical proportions that it's nothing that you can ever move on from. It is unlikely that, I mean, whichever party wins on Sunday, that the AFD will be part of government. The other parties are saying that they're creating a firewall against on Sunday, that the AFD will be part of government. The other parties are saying that they're creating a firewall against the parties, that they're not going to work with the AFD, they wouldn't form a coalition with them. And yet the AFD is now musing about joining this Patriots for Europe group. This would include far-right parties in France, in Italy, in Hungary as well.

If you take a look at this moment, just finally before I let you go, in Europe in particular, what is at stake when it comes to this election? This is a German election, but the ramifications could go well beyond that. Yeah, I mean, Germany, if you kind of look at politics in European countries as a cycle, you know that Germany was relatively late to develop such a significant political force on the far right, if you compare

to France, where what's called now the National Rally with the Front National beforehand has been around for a long time. But of course, given Germany's historical legacy, I think there's a particular attention that is paid to it. Now, these European parties have not always had an easy time in trying to work with each other. If you look in the European Parliament where they're all representative, where they're all represented, they don't always fit into the same groupings because of course if you say my country first, well you know you may have the same spirit as the nationalist in the next door country but your interests may be opposed you know and also the AFD because of these various instances and you referred to that

one just there where it's appeared to downplay Nazi history. Richard Walker is the chief international editor for the German international news broadcaster DW. We were talking about the German elections, which take place on Sunday. You'll hear the full results, of course, on CBC News. We reached Richard in Berlin.