Numbers and narratives help make sense of reality even if they partly construct it. They reveal social contradictions and help us understand the present and the future of the political process.
Germans affirmed the importance of the recently concluded national election by turning out to vote in large numbers. The voter turnout was 82.5 % which was the highest since unification in 1989. This means that more than four in every five of Germany’s 59.2 million voters came out to vote. The democratic upsurge revealed through electoral participation is obviously a healthy sign, except that it does point to some troubling trends.
Beneath the national aggregate lies the historical changeover of the politics. The results show a resurrection of a formidable political and ideological wall between the former East and the West, which the unification had intended to do away with. The former East Germany – a communist state – has turned to extreme and hard right-wing politics led by Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) which has got almost close to 40% of votes in all five states of the former East.
It does not mean that they have not improved their tally in the former West states, just that, and for now, not to the same extent. The leading figures of the AfD have been convicted of using Nazi slogans. The party is officially classified as a suspected far-right extremist organisation under observation after court rulings in Cologne (2022) and Münster (2024) and is confirmed right-wing extremist in four German states of Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, and Brandenburg. Nevertheless, the popular mandate for them has increased impressively and hence alarmingly. Nationwide, AfD has bagged 20.8 % of votes – double from the last election of 2021 – which means that one of five German voters has stamped their acceptability on the ideologies of this party.
Since World War II, the lid of national guilt and responsibility – and commitment to not repeat a past of extremism, violence, and hatred – had become one significant characteristic of German political psyche. Over the years, the lid has come off in many ways. The simmering discontent caused due to both economic and social contexts has allowed people to make new political choices beyond the historical weight of taboo. This is a global feature with various strands of it being observed in many countries of Europe, and in North America and India. Hatred is not a script hidden underneath the charm of diplomatic words and opaqueness of bureaucratic practices. Hatred of the other or a soft pandering to it under the brand of jingoistic nationalism is the politics and the policy of many ruling formations.
One variant of that lid, the so-called Brandmauer – firewall – is the term that has so far defined political untouchability of extremist views in Germany. This means that no political party has so far agreed to work or intends to work with the AfD. The ideological popularity of the AfD and the social acceptability of their ideas, however, has put a question mark on the longevity of Brandmauer. In fact, the firewall was breached, if not demolished, very recently by the incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz in accepting the AfD’s support for pushing through his political agenda.
Two non-binding motions on strict immigration and deportation rules on the one hand and better equipping of the security authorities on the other were passed with the support of the AfD in the German parliament. A subsequent draft law was nonetheless narrowly defeated by 11 votes. After the formation of a coalition government in a few months’ time, if the firewall remains intact, then the AfD will become the main opposition party in the parliament. The electoral boycott may hold – for now, but what will be the nature of the political boycott directed towards the main opposition party will be a thing to watch.
Media and other expert analysts are repeatedly using the term ‘political fringe’ to define this one take-away of this election, which is the increase in the extreme right-wing support base. Examples from various nations, particularly India, may be a useful reminder that the term ‘fringe’ deceives rather than reveals the social and political shift. What seems to be an aberration operating at the marginal scale of the so-called fringe can actually become the bedrock of a rather tectonic shift in the social and political thinking of the nation. Power does not necessarily justify fringe; in contrast, fringe may constitute power.
The left-liberal eco-system may find it difficult to digest when the AfD leaders and followers emphasise that they are ‘the normal people’. But there is some truth in that: normalisation of extreme views will happen and has been happening globally through the participation of normal people. Economic distress usually leads to growth in conservative populism, but the recent results are not to be taken lightly as manifestations of uncertainty and dissatisfaction alone, which will necessarily tide over once the economic situation improves. A collective social shift in views based upon reassessment of culture, tradition, history, values, and invented notions of puritanical belonging that prioritises the claim and domination of one community, ethnicity, race, or religion can become deep-seated.
To make sense of all this again through numbers, the conservative centre-right formation of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) have managed to get 28.6 % of the votes, which is their second worst performance since World War II. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) with its 16.4 % share of votes has given its worst post-war performance in this election. It is too early to confidently predict a trend of the declining importance of the mainstream political parties setting in, but the conservative right-centre formation’s more than flirtatious approach towards the extremism’s fuelled narrative on the issue of immigration surely allows us to observe a trend: together, across the ‘firewall’, they exhibit a gradual mainstreaming of exclusionary and discriminatory visions of the society. With this election, Germany may have begun on a career path of divided society and divisive politics in which India and North America currently can be described as the frontrunners.
In India, the Hindutva politics is the driving force of this exclusionary idea. In North America, anti-immigrant white supremacist ideas have got social and political validity. Germany must tread cautiously what political discourse it eventually and robustly wants to put in place on the question of immigration. In the popular German discourse, the term is used not only for new people coming into the country but also for those who have lived for generations and are of ‘migration background’. The economic reality of the country points to the necessity of hundreds of thousands of migrants joining the workforce in the near future. But the political discourse has vitiated the social reality in which the migrant is fast becoming a dehumanised entity. There is a growing gap between economic reality on the one hand and the dominant voices of social and political orders on the other.
Migrants need to be primarily seen as contributors to the economic process rather than being bracketed with criminality in a default manner. Cultural and national jingoism around this issue of authentic insider versus criminal outsider have the power to blunt critical discussions on government’s economic policies, which must be resisted.
‘Remigration’ became the buzzword in this German election, a term popularised by the AfD. What is required is a Re-imagination of the political discourse in which the migrant is not turned into the scapegoat for everything that supposedly is going wrong with the country. For example, the failure of German giants such as Volkswagen to timely update their technology is not because of the presence of the migrants. Rather than mainstreaming the migrant into the mould of a homogenous ‘national culture’ by deploying hatred-filled and dehumanising discourses, efforts must be directed towards redefining the national culture as plural, diverse, and integrative.
Nitin Sinha is a senior research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin.
