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Could Germany go the way of Austria? Could the party of the far right be invited to form a government? What was previously deemed impossible, then revised down to improbable, is now possible. There are two scenarios in which this could happen.
Fast forward to Germany’s general election day on 23 February and the following assumptions: Germany’s Christian Democrats (CDU) win, reasonably comfortably, at around their present poll rating of 30%. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) comes second, with an impressive vote share of between 20% and 25%. Nevertheless, it is excluded from coalition negotiations thanks to the “firewall” established several years ago by the mainstream parties to keep extreme groupings at bay.
The CDU leader and probably next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, will be required to open talks with either the Social Democrats (SPD) or the Greens. Both parties of the centre left, however, are predicted to suffer a drubbing, seeing their vote share cut to the mid-teens.
Coalition negotiations in Germany have traditionally been carried out in an atmosphere of gravity, but also civility. Coalitions are one of the cornerstones of the postwar federal republic. They are built into the system at every level, requiring consensus-building, compromise and goodwill.
That is now largely absent. The deliberative politeness of German politics – which some outsiders have in the past wrongly dismissed as dullness – has been swept away by the onrush of populism and the near-panic that the rise of the far right has engendered. The outgoing coalition, known as the “traffic light” because of the colours of the three parties involved, disintegrated in acrimony.
Previous governments, for sure, have had arguments, but never so openly or with such vitriol as characterised the spats between Scholz, his finance minister, Christian Lindner, of the free-market Free Democrats (FDP), and the Greens’ economics minister, Robert Habeck. By the end, the protagonists could barely stomach being in the same room as one another.
The rancour has carried over into the start of the election campaign. The mainstream parties are emphasising their differences with one another on issues ranging from borrowing and spending, to climate and welfare payments. The CDU and SPD are each trying to sound tougher than the other on immigration.
Fair enough. That’s what parties are supposed to do in election campaigns. Yet what is different this time is the tone. Some of the key players are employing methods – such as making personal attacks or exaggerated claims against one another – that are rare in the political culture. These parties know they will have to form a coalition and cooperate – not least to keep out the AfD – but in this new accusatory climate that will be difficult.
This is exactly what has happened in Austria: three parties, from centre right, liberal centre and centre left, promised to build an alliance, come what may. Their talks collapsed on 4 January. They failed on the basis of the narcissism of small differences.
Faced with political crisis, the president (a Green and a man with impressive democratic credentials) had to resort to asking Herbert Kickl, the leader of the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ), a man who borrows Hitler’s terminology for the role of chancellor, Volkskanzler, to try to form a coalition with the mainstream Conservatives. Those talks continue, but Austria could soon have its first government led by the far right since the second world war.
The pressure is intense, therefore, on Germany’s parties to prevent such a calamity, and the impression I have from speaking to strategists in the mainstream parties is that they are sufficiently alarmed and galvanised by developments in Austria to rally together.
Which is where the longer term scenario comes in. It is eminently possible that the electoral arithmetic will require Merz to bring both the SPD and Greens into government. Let’s assume that the talks go smoothly, ministries are divided up without acrimony and a coalition treaty is agreed. All’s well that ends well, except …
Assuming Lindner’s ailing FDP fails to meet the 5% minimum to get into the Bundestag (a threshold originally designed to keep out the extremists), the following would happen: all the mainstream parties would be in government, while the excluded populist parties – the AfD and probably the smaller far-left-meets-far-right Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) – would make up the entire opposition.
Given how quickly pendulums swing against governing parties in present-day politics, it is not far-fetched to conclude that the AfD could be in pole position in four to five years’ time when the next general election is called.
As the past six months in the UK have shown, it does not take long for a government, even one with an enormous majority, to fall out of favour. Whether public dissatisfaction with Keir Starmer’s Labour administration is real or concocted, whether it is recoverable or not, a clear path has emerged for Reform UK to grab power at the next election. The same applies across Europe. One electoral term now provides ample opportunity for opposition parties to see their popularity surge and for governing parties to collapse as they grapple with deep-seated problems that require more than one term to fix.
Back to Austria: in the 2019 general election, the FPÖ, a party founded by former Nazis in the 1950s, was in a similar position as the AfD is now, trailing the centre right by a significant margin. At the most recent election in September, the FPÖ won an unprecedented victory.
Reinforcing this increasing uncertainty is the nagging suspicion that maybe the opinion polls – which have a strong record of accuracy in Germany – may be understating the AfD’s position. They have gained a couple of percentage points since late November when Scholz collapsed his own government and called for early elections, but it seems surprising, given the outrage caused by the terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, that their share has not risen further. Or that this has not been reflected by pollsters.
The AfD has become, in any case, part of the political furniture. Not only does the AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, appear on chatshows hosted by Elon Musk, one recent report showed that at local level, the party is integrated into much of civic life – particularly in the former German Democratic Republic.
The populists will not go away. The post-election challenge for Merz and the rest is to form a government that functions cohesively and tackles Germany’s economic and social challenges at speed. If they fail, what until recently was deemed unconscionable will come horrifyingly into view.
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John Kampfner is the author of In Search of Berlin, Blair’s Wars and Why the Germans Do It Better
