German Democracy’s Uncertain Future
Friedrich Merz must take the concerns of ordinary citizens seriously—particularly on immigration and Islam. He must prove that such concerns can be addressed without veering into extremism.
While undeniably historic, the results of Germany’s recent general elections were hardly unexpected. For months, polls forecasted major gains for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and steep losses for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), while Chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) maintained a comfortable lead. Since Merz has firmly ruled out a coalition with the nationalist AfD and has other options to form a majority government, the political centre appears to be holding—but for how long?
Many outside observers have described Merz’s exclusion of the AfD—which doubled its voter share from 10.4 percent in 2021 to 20.8 percent—as undemocratic. Writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for instance, posted on X: “Why won’t the CDU respect the mandate given to the AfD by millions of Germans and form a majority government with them?” The short answer is that as the strongest party, the CDU must build a stable coalition with one or more parliamentary parties with which it shares common ground. The AfD, which includes confirmed extremists, has not positioned itself as one of them. Voices like Hirsi Ali’s fail to distinguish between the importance of addressing pressing issues that have been neglected and supporting a populist political party that exploits them to gain power for itself.
Germany has serious problems with Islamism as a consequence of failed multiculturalist immigration policies. A series of fatal jihadist stabbings and car rammings, which escalated in the lead-up to the elections, has deeply shaken the country in recent years. In hindsight, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s response to the 2015 refugee crisis, “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do it”), sounds almost cynical. Unsurprisingly, internal security and immigration were key issues driving voters, who turned out in force—82.5 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, the highest turnout for a general election since 1987.
In addition to the frequent terrorist attacks, the blatant displays of antisemitism and open calls for a caliphate among immigrants following Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023 forced German officials to confront past failures and adopt a tougher stance on Islamism. This was imperative, given Germany’s special relationship with Israel and the Jewish people in light of the Nazi Holocaust. Many mainstream politicians vowed to curb immigration and crack down on Islamist activity. But by the time they did so, the AfD had already monopolised the issue and was steadily gaining ground—first in Eastern Germany, then nationwide.
John Lloyd
Acute awareness of Germany’s Nazi past has also made many deeply wary of the AfD’s rise—for good reason. Björn Höcke, a leading figure in the party’s influential ethnonationalist wing and head of its Thuringia chapter, has called for “nothing less than a 180-degree shift in our remembrance culture” regarding the Nazi era, and has promoted crude racial theories. “Evolution has given Africa and Europe two distinct reproductive strategies,” Höcke argues. While Africans prioritise maximum population growth, Europeans, he claims, adapt to the carrying capacity of their environment. Höcke, who has been fined for using the Nazi slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (“Everything for Germany”), further asserts, “As long as we are willing to take in [Africa’s] surplus population, there will be no change in the reproductive behaviour of Africans.”
Having failed to oust Höcke for damaging the party’s image, on election night AfD frontrunner Alice Weidel celebrated alongside the court-confirmed fascist—“a true National Socialist,” as former party spokesperson Frauke Petry has called him. Weidel raised further concerns by delivering a blistering speech at a recent party convention in which she endorsed forced mass “remigration,” a concept linked to the ethnonationalist Identitarian movement. It is little wonder that some 80 percent of German voters rejected the AfD. Many did so out of concern for their country’s democratic future—a sentiment that fuelled mass protests across Germany ahead of the elections—200,000 people joined the rally in Munich alone—and likely contributed to the high voter turnout.
Elon Musk, whose endorsement of the AfD appears to have had little impact on German voters if polls are to be believed, fundamentally misread this sentiment when he claimed that “too much focus on past guilt” prevents Germans from looking forward. Likewise, Sky News host James Macpherson’s assertion that the AfD’s electoral gains prove that “Germans simply want their country back” ignores the broader context. The vast majority of Germans have no desire to see the AfD anywhere near the levers of power.
But Germany is a deeply divided society. The fact that the federal states where the AfD secured a staggering 32 percent of the vote align perfectly with the former German Democratic Republic (GDR)—except for East Berlin, where only one district went to the AfD—speaks volumes. Thirty-five years after reunification, Eastern Germany still lags behind the West socioeconomically, with 14 percent lower wages. Frustrated by what they see as Western democracy’s failure to deliver prosperity, many in the East place their hopes in what they perceive as a viable alternative.
The East–West divide, however, runs deeper than socioeconomics. Four decades of authoritarian communism have left a lasting imprint. The GDR regime portrayed itself as inherently anti-fascist, depicting the liberal capitalist West as the true successor to Nazi Germany—effectively absolving its own citizens of historical responsibility.
When the Berlin Wall—euphemistically called the “anti-fascist barrier” in GDR jargon—fell, neo-Nazi groups in the new federal states exploited the political vacuum and widespread lack of historical awareness, laying the groundwork for an extremist subculture that later infiltrated the formerly liberal-conservative AfD. In Saxony, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) even won seats in parliament in 2004. Twenty years later, the AfD officially aligned with the neo-Nazi party, now rebranded as “Die Heimat” (“The Homeland”), in Brandenburg.
Brian Stewart
Depending on how you break down the German election data, further divisions also emerge. While those over 45 mostly voted conservative—and the SPD was the runner-up among voters over 60—voters aged 18–24 overwhelmingly backed the extremes: 25 percent of them voted for Die Linke (“The Left”), while 21 percent chose the AfD. In the 2021 general elections, this age group primarily supported the Greens and the libertarian Free Democratic Party (FDP), both of which joined Olaf Scholz in his now hugely unpopular coalition government.
Another key factor behind this shift was undoubtedly the AfD’s and Die Linke’s significantly expanded social media presence of recent years. Die Linke also gained momentum from Friedrich Merz’s failed attempt to pass a new immigration bill in parliament with AfD support just weeks before the election, which was widely seen as breaking a political taboo—and, in particular, from party leader Heidi Reichinnek’s impassioned parliamentary speech condemning him, which quickly went viral:
Just two days after commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz—after honouring all those murdered and tortured—you align yourself with the successors of this ideology. … The firewall in this country is still us—and we will take to the streets, and we will go to the ballot box. … And to the people out there I say: Don’t give up. Fight back. Resist fascism in this country. To the barricades!
A speech like this was bound to galvanise young voters—many of whom seem indifferent to or unaware of the history of the party they support. Die Linke, formerly the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), is not just the ideological but the direct successor to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED)—the Orwellian East German regime that shot and killed many of those who tried to flee its supposed workers’ paradise. Overall, Die Linke nearly doubled its share of the vote compared to 2021, rising from 4.9 to 8.8 percent.
We also see stark sex-based divisions among voters aged 18–24. Die Linke secured the support of 34 percent of young women, but just 14 percent of young men. Conversely, 25 percent of young men backed the AfD, while only 15 percent of young women did. While well-documented sex differences in personality may help explain broader voting patterns, they do not account for the meteoric rise of these radical parties among young voters. These voters may not explicitly support fascism or communism, but they demonstrate a high tolerance for their ideological elements—an unsettling sign for the future of liberal democracy in Germany.
What explains this trend? Quillette’s Claire Lehmann has suggested, “The fact that young men and women aren’t forming relationships also means they’re not spending time deradicalising one another.” While insightful, this may underestimate just how polarised these groups have become. The young women voting for Die Linke and the young men voting for the AfD aren’t even in the same dating pool.
What’s clear is that the ideological gap between men and women under thirty has been widening, with women becoming more progressive and men more conservative. Given the way in which contemporary feminism and online manosphere movements have increasingly pitted men and women against each other, perhaps it is inevitable so many of them have gravitated toward parties that reinforce those narratives.
While Die Linke remains a relatively small political party, the AfD could easily govern as a junior coalition partner. Some argue that we should let them. The reasoning goes that if the party is put to the test and fails, it will lose its voter appeal. The problem with this theory is that the experiment has already been run in Austria, where I’m from.
The AfD’s counterpart and role model, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), has been in government as a junior partner three times since the year 2000. Each time, leading party officials ended up in court or embroiled in major scandals—yet each time, the party came back stronger. In 2019, a secretly recorded video incriminating then-FPÖ-leader and Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache caused the collapse of the coalition government with the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). After an initial nosedive, the FPÖ, now under Herbert Kickl’s leadership, rebounded and, for the first time in its 68-year history, won the 2024 general elections with nearly thirty percent of the vote. Unable to form a coalition, Kickl did not become Chancellor. Yet the FPÖ’s resurgence underscores the fact that scandals and governance failures don’t necessarily weaken populist parties in the long run.
While the AfD is a relatively new party, founded in 2013, the FPÖ emerged from the Federation of Independents (VdU), a party established in 1956 with the aim of reintegrating former Nazis into democratic politics. Like the AfD, the FPÖ initially positioned itself as broadly libertarian. However, in 1986, Jörg Haider staged an internal coup, bringing the party’s nationalist wing to power.
Haider, who died in a car crash in 2008, repeatedly courted controversy through his refusal to distance himself from Nazism. Speaking at a gathering of Waffen-SS veterans in 1995, he remarked, “It’s reassuring to know that there are still decent people in this world, with strong character, who stand by their convictions even in the face of strong opposition and have remained true to their beliefs to this day.” Similarly, in 2010, Herbert Kickl said that the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS, should not be collectively judged guilty.
Statements like these typically blend conviction with provocation, serving as dog-whistles for neo-Nazis while allowing their speakers to maintain plausible deniability. The AfD has taken a page out of this playbook. In 2024, Maximilian Krah stated, “There were also decent SS men. I will never say that anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal.” The SS, an organisation whose members were not conscripted, controlled the Nazi concentration camp system and committed unspeakable war crimes. Following the elections, Krah and Matthias Helferich—who once described himself as “the friendly face of National Socialism”—have both been appointed to the German parliament for the AfD, a move the Auschwitz Committee has condemned as “cynical arrogance.”
In these turbulent times—with the ever-volatile Donald Trump in the White House and the aggressor Vladimir Putin on Europe’s doorstep—Germany needs stability, not experiments with radicals and extremists aligned with Trump and Putin. Friedrich Merz now has the chance to form a stable government and take the concerns of ordinary citizens seriously—particularly on immigration and Islam. He must rise to the occasion, proving that such concerns can be addressed without veering into extremism. If he fails, disillusionment will deepen, and the forces he seeks to contain will only grow stronger.
