The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party received 43.8 percent of the vote in the regional election of the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt last weekend, putting it in position to potentially lead the next state government. That would mark a historical event, as no far-right party has led a state government since World War II; it also marks a constitutional challenge to postwar Germany’s commitment to liberal democracy.
What exactly was the AfD’s policy program for the state? Is identity politics more central to its appeal than material policies? And what can progressives learn from the AfD’s success?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: States in Germany have a lot of power to determine policies across a number of major domains, from security to education to culture. What exactly is the AfD’s proposed policy program for the state?
Adam Tooze: It’s worth saying that the AfD has many faces, and your question points us to the most respectable face of the AfD. And you only have to go on Twitter or YouTube or your favorite social media channel to see videos of AfD and Saxony-Anhalt which show it as a party of skinhead thugs, of people blaring out openly racist rap songs, using the N-word. It’s a dirty party. The people elected to parliament include well-known far-right activists, porn producers, people with criminal records. It’s playing in the dirty end of German society.
But then if you look online and you look at its party program, it’s extraordinary. I mean, it’s really night-and-day contrast. So, if you look online and want to take the time reading their program, I would describe it as deeply dry conservative in terms of the old distinctions within British politics. This is a dry conservative version of German history and German politics. It’s not populist. It’s not plebeian. It’s not MAGA. It isn’t the crazy stuff that was coming out of Homeland Security in the U.S. with super macho powered-up images of men defending the nation against alien invaders. The language is there, but the iconography, the style is very, very different. And it reminds me of the tone—I can’t help thinking of conservative high school teachers that I knew as a kid in West Germany—sort of a lecture about restoring the core values of German national culture.
So the argument is basically that the establishment parties are selling Germany out through climate policy, through migration policy, through a policy that rejects Germany’s own history, through migration, which is, of course, welcoming, above all, Muslim men who undermine the basic cultural values of German society. It’s very multilayered. They’ve had some intellectuals at work on this program. If you dig into the AfD podcast, YouTube scene, you’ll see there are people talking about [Italian philosopher Antonio] Gramsci and hegemony.
And then they have a program for their first hundred days in office, which is really pure culture war. It is immediate deportations as soon as we can get them organized. It is cutting funding for public broadcasting because they’re systematically biased against us. It is reevaluating the priorities of Saxony-Anhalt’s government. So part of Saxony-Anhalt’s claim to fame is it was home to one part of the Bauhaus modernist movement of Weimar Germany. And they want to replace a state-level program which was called Think Modern, Modern Denken, by a program called Deutschdenken, Think German, which will involve raising the German flag outside schools and other public buildings. Which in the U.S. would be completely normal, in Germany really isn’t.
And then it also includes things like a truth commission on the COVID era, which panders to another of the slightly more bonkers and unsavory elements of the AfD constituency, which is COVID skepticism. So it’s a very weird amalgam of different policies, very little that actually amounts to anything serious on the socioeconomic side.
CA: Saxony-Anhalt is a classic left-behind region of former East Germany, and there has been a lot of talk about the AfD’s promises of material benefits to the region, including cutting fees for daycare centers to benefit families. But is it fair to say the party’s identitarian platform, its rejection of Germany’s liberal consensus with its commitment to protecting minorities, is more central to its success?
AT: There’s a real paradox here, which is that the data are quite unambiguous that AfD voting—and this is true of far-right parties across Europe in the current moment—AfD voting is associated with self-identified working-class status and people who self-identify as having financial difficulties, and it tends to correlate with areas of low income. So within Saxony-Anhalt itself, the fancy parts of cities like Halle voted solidly for the Green party, which is the main cultural antagonist of the AfD. Forget the established parties, SPD [Social Democratic Party], CDU [Christian Democratic Union], it’s the Greens that they’re really after, the true kind of upper-middle-class, educated, ecologically minded party they’re fighting against. And so there is a really strong association between various types of measure of social disadvantage and AfD voting.
And when you poll people who voted AfD, they’ll tell you they have the economic worries. But when you ask them why they voted AfD, not what their general view of problems is in the world but why they specifically voted the party, they don’t mention redistribution as their main reasons, right? They mention dealing with foreigners, dealing with criminality, and establishing security, sicherheit, which in Germany really doesn’t have the connotation of social security in the United States. So they vote for the party because they think it’s going to deliver a crackdown on foreigners and restore some sort of sense of national pride and is basically going to put two fingers up to the establishment that they identify as having sold them out.
And if you look at the AfD’s program, no one with two brain cells who had any idea of what was going on at all would vote for the AfD instrumentally so as to obtain from the AfD concrete material benefits, because the AfD is more austere, more committed to the debt break, more committed to slashing public spending, more committed to reducing government debt than any party in the political spectrum. So it’s to the right of the autobahn liberal FDP that caused so much trouble in the previous government in Germany, they’re to the right of the CDU. And if you were wanting to vote for a party that would do redistribution, that would promise you targeted welfare programs or even general welfare programs, of course there are Die Linke and the SPD, who stand for that kind of policy.
So it just doesn’t seem to me that you can construct a plausible hypothesis that this vote for the AfD is motivated instrumentally by the expectation that increasing the AfD’s power, certainly if you think of them being in government, is going to deliver outcomes. You might say the voters are playing five-dimensional chess in which they vote for the AfD as a protest vote and then expect the conventional parties to respond by playing the welfare social security card. But I just think that’s an implausible construction of what’s going on here.
So it’s a very complicated, messy kind of conjuncture. Which is, after all, not entirely unfamiliar from the United States as well. I mean, we see similar patterns in the U.S. And one way of reading this is perspective. In other words, this isn’t just about current misery. It’s about anxiety about the future. And those fears about the future are projected onto foreigners. And the AfD’s promise to deal with that “problem” then becomes your kind of substitute for a social policy. But I’m just finding it very difficult to reconcile the data and what we’re seeing with any simple interpretation that way.
CA: The AfD’s rejection of the pieties of the existing liberal political system—the basic idea of treating everyone equally—seems to succeed at stirring up the emotions of many voters. What kind of lessons could progressives learn from this? Does the left have the capacity to create emotional politics of this kind without rejecting the system they are a part of—and if not, does that imply that progressive forces, by being cooperative during crises to help preserve and maintain the existing system, are ultimately harming themselves by cutting off their ability to create this kind of emotional politics?
AT: This has always been the argument, after all, of anyone from the true left wing, that collaborationist management, co-management of the system ultimately leaves you unable to address the profound grievances of populations of voters of classes that feel, quite rightly, that they are systematically victimized by the existing system. And that’s one of the reasons some people say that the idea of holding the AfD out of power is misguided, because the easiest way to contaminate them, too, with the opprobrium of running the system is to give them a chance to try and run it.
But thinking about this logic, I realized something from New York City that I hadn’t really fully understood before. If you think about the way that the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has emerged as this highly charismatic figure, representative of a different kind of politics, he does this laser-sharp focus on cost-of-living issues, rental costs, childcare, public transport, but then he combines it with a powerful non-establishment value statement, which is above all anchored in his open speech and frank speech about Gaza. And I hadn’t really quite thought through the logic of that in electoral terms, but thinking about what the AfD does, and the way in which they almost welcome their stigmatization by the mainstream, because it helps to establish their plausibility, their credibility, it’s a commitment device. If you’re willing to speak in a racist way and get labeled a racist, you have a kind of authenticity.
And I think something quite similar is in play right now in the American left around Gaza. If you are willing to take on the Democratic Party establishment on this issue and challenge America’s alignment with Israel and especially Israel’s current government and to speak frankly about the violence and the horror being inflicted on the Palestinian population, and you’re willing to make the knocks for doing that, it establishes this bona fides that nothing else really can, right? You can offer cheap childcare as much as you like, but it’s the combination of the two things, especially of course in demographics and electorates like that of New York, which is massively diverse, where you’re actually speaking to populations for whom this really means something, which is true also of the AfD’s appeal to bio-Deutsch white Germans in East Germany. This gives you this element of credibility. And people like [former Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn had it in the U.K. And it’s clearly explosive, it’s potentially dangerous, it can backfire. And of course, in the case of the AfD, it is absolutely obnoxious. But just analytically speaking, it gives a second dimension or a third dimension to your politics that is quite crucial.
