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Proving Victorious, Germany's AfD Is Poised to Alter the Nation's Future
Written by Piotr Mateusz Kukula
Edited by Rebecca Oxtot and Francesca Howard
The German government is headed in a much different direction following a significant AfD victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. On the 6th of September, the right-wing party Alternative for Germany(AfD) won a historic plurality of seats in the region, securing a near-majority by leaning heavily into former non-voters and making pivotal inroads into gaining voters from other parties. This included the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and center-left Social Democratic Party (SDP), which lost crucial seats to the insurgents. To many, these victories are a sign that Germany is on the cusp of a right-wing government resembling the leadership of the much-feared and despised Hitler from World War II.
Since 1945, no populist right-wing party has achieved such a resounding victory in a German state parliament. Consequently, many fear that the party’s anit-immigration stance, assisted by rhetoric favoring ethnic Germans over newer citizens, sound entirely too familiar to the words and actions of the former Fascist regime. The sheer numbers of the victories only underscore the political earthquake - the AfD succeeded in yielding 43.8% of the final vote, securing 39 out of the 83 seats in the state parliament, just three shy of an outright majority with much leeway to form coalitions with other critically aligned parties. Despite the scores of democracy advocates and international organizations warning about the consequences of the AfD’s political victories, the right-wing movement in Germany continues to grow.
The AfD ultimately advocates for bringing back national sovereignty, re-evaluating immigration control and reform, and changing the so-called ‘cultural’ aspect of Germany. All these are to be achieved through legislative maneuvers in their grand attempt to disrupt the establishment of the current government and media that they claim has been able to keep them out of power and deny much-needed change for the majority of the populace. To achieve this, the AfD has put a relatively consistent platform that intends to reshape Germany’s domestic and foreign policy. Immigration is the number one priority, and as put by the party’s leader herself, Alice Wiedel, a hardline “reimigration” policy consisting of immediate deportations of immigrants present in the country illegally, eliminating subsidies for migrants as well as closing the border within “100 days”.
Wiedel and many other top AfD officials claim that the current establishment, in addition to the grand scope of influence by the European Union, has formed a society that prioritizes non-Germans, adds up wasteful spending and denies the efficiency of social programs to native Germans, further adding that “everyone is warmly welcome who contributes positively to our society, who wants to work here, who is qualified, who pays taxes, and who abides by the law.” These nationalistic stances extend to education, where the party pledges to restructure the school curriculum to de-emphasize Germany’s World War II involvement. particularly postwar culture and argues in favor of reintroducing traditional national pride, which includes restricting content in school curriculum which emphasizes “liberal” and “radical LGBTQ+” topics.
As part of their “reimigration” agenda, Wiedel and other key AfD officials call for a massive overhaul of the current refugee system. They argue for much stricter screening and temporary placement of refuge children in specialized classrooms to emphasize that they are in the country solely for temporary reasons and are not a part of the broader culture or a member of the general community. Green policies are another target of the AfD agenda, which they promise to dismantle effectively in return for conventional fuels such as nuclear power, gas and oil. They claim these fuels will cost less in the long-term with their goal to stabilize relations with Russia and strip war-refugee benefits from Ukrainians. Long-story short, an AfD will pose a different test on the German government - can a right-wing populist government effectively govern and deliver on the promises they make? And can they effectively unify the country unlike other right populist governments that won around the world, one notable example being Donald Trump and the GOP in the United States in the 2024 United States Presidential Election.
Since their victory, the party has already been the subject of much debate regarding the state of their prospective MPs. As The Guardian reports, some of the “members-elect were revealed to have a range of questionable backgrounds, including criminal records, Stasi pasts and connections to far-right networks.” One was even confirmed to be a former pornography photographer, despite falsely claiming not to have ever been one. Furthermore, many claim that the AfD is fundamentally hypocritical, given the personal life of their co-leader Alice Wiedel. Wiedel is currently in a recognized civil union with another woman whose ethnic background stems from the Asian country of Sri Lanka, which deeply counters her public policy ideology to restore a traditionalist family-oriented agenda and reduce immigration’s influx into Germany. However, at the moment these contradictions appear to mean very little to voters who increasingly support the AfD in state elections. In Berlin and the northeast state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommernpolling has suggested similar successful trends for the AfD, which may cement their grip on the German government. The day-to-day nature of the party’s governance is yet to be seen, but for the first time in nearly a century, Deutschland is headed in a truly different direction.
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