Lawfare Daily: Far-Right Gains and a Political Reckoning in Germany

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“That the AFD would prefer to have a national security policy based on nationalism and dominance.”

I think is perfectly clear. And again, close to eyes with Russia and China. It's the LaFair podcast. I'm not only Orpatt, executive editor of LaFair, with Constance Estetsumular, director of the Center of the United States and Europe at the Brookings

Institution. The future of a stable, prosperous, and secure Europe rides on the ability of centrist forces to persuade their voters, not just in Germany, but across Europe. That they are the most capable and the most legitimate source of governance. Today, we're talking about what's going on in the German political scene.

We're a far-right party. The AFD is making a strong showing in state elections. We talk about what this party stands for, why its emergence is alarming the pro-democracy community. And what it all means for Germany, for Europe, for the United States, and for the future of Western democracies. So Constance, I've invited you on to talk about this false elections in Germany.

And that may seem a bit unusual to some of our listeners because we don't typically cover domestic politics in European countries. But one of the key features of these elections and following on the federal elections in February is the emergence of one particular far-right political party known as AFD, which just won a few days ago, almost 44% of the vote.

“So to get us started, can you just tell us what is AFD and what do they believe?”

So AFD stands for Alternative Fuodorjland, which is easily understood means alternative for Germany, and it originated in 2013 as an anti-European currency party. It was founded by a bunch of libertarian German professors who thought that the common European currency was destroying the German economy, the euro. And the name is actually a reference to one of Angola Merkel's favorite things, Angola Merkel was then the Chancellor of Germany in her third or fourth terms. And she would often say there is no alternative, and she said it so often that people started using the acronym TINA for the Merkel government's approach to politics.

Which was very much one based on sort of centralizing, triangulating, squeezing out other parties to the middle and saying we're the ones doing rational politics and policymaking based on expertise and there is no alternative.

And this party really never quite took off the ground for the first years of its founding, for the first five years.

It never sort of got more than four or barely five percent in elections, it didn't have a lot of personnel, and then comes the migration crisis in 2018. With an enormous inflow of Syrian refugees based on the violence in Syria in a civil war and persecution by the ruler of Syria aside, who was notoriously cruel, and this migration stream from Syria was joined by a lot of other refugees from Northern Africa and the Middle East. Many of whom were looking for employment, but also a chance of surviving outside of their own terribly difficult environments.

These streams sort of got to Europe more or less unobstructed, and there was a blockade at the German border in Austria that reached back through southern eastern Europe all the way to the Balkans. And Angela Murphy made the historic decision to open the borders to these refugees.

And the other thing I think to remember is that German society at the time applauded her for this. She was internationally applauded for it.

I remember vividly that friends of mine got together to house refugees to give language lessons and so on, but over time it became very clear that local governments especially, and civil society, were not capable of dealing with the sheer size and complexity of this inflow. And it created not just resentment, but a sense that somehow government institutions in a state that is, or in a country that is notoriously anxious about stability for all the obvious reasons, where somehow not functioning. And that is what gave the AFD its drive. That's the historical origin.

“It has since morphed into, I think the most clearly radical and extremist right wing party in Europe,”

so much so that other right wing parties have refused to associate themselves with it,

including the Rasom Lomonas, you know, led by Marine Le Pen in France, and Italy's government led by Georgia Maloney, have all kept their distance. As has the new right wing parties or semi-new right wing parties in great Britain reform and restore UK. So given that the party has this similar origin, as you say to the right wing parties in both Italy and France, but they are now distancing themselves and curious what happened along the way that this common thread of resistance to migration and concern about all of its societal impacts went even further.

Was it was the party sort of co-opted by other political forces, did it just develop specifically

“because of any other contacts you need to Germany or what exactly happened that created this drift?”

Well, as with many of the right wing parties in the West, there have been a lot of indicators that external influence was involved in somewhere another, either a party funding, indirect political support, there have been staffers of Russian or Chinese origin who have since been arrested for spying that kind of thing, but I do want to say very clearly, that the German extreme right in the form of the AFD is absolutely homegrown in origin.

And it has always had an internal sort of tension between moderate elements who thought or

“quote unquote moderate elements, who felt that Angela Merkel's triangulation of the”

Christian Democratic Party, Center of Right Party, had unduly liberalized it and thought that there could be a new home for a very conservative party. And then there was the other element that was truly hard-right and whose roots lie in the French Nouvelle de Watt that was established in the post-war period in the late '50s and '1960s, and to be quite frank in a continuation of fascist and national socialist ideas, that for decades in Western Germany and in East Germany were not just

fringe but taboo, so socially and politically prescribed, and that have just been fueled by a variety of political, economic, and social development. And over time between this, the migration crisis in 2018 and today, what we've seen is that again and again the extremist wing one out over the quote unquote moderate, who were still very very conservative, and that in fact those quote unquote moderates have been pushed out of the party or have left out of their own of their own

accord, then the right wing which had been driven by all sorts of factions over ideology, over alliances, over financial sources, over instances of corruption and links to well-known new Nazi organizations, that hard-right wing developed more and more discipline,

proposals for changing the German's constitutional orders are in fact radical. So I did want to ask about the German constitution because it is of course quite distinct from the United States in the sense that there is a provision there to actually allow for the dismantling

“I believe, correct if I'm wrong, of political parties in the event that they are deemed”

sufficiently endomocratic. I'll ask you to explain a little bit more what the precise terms are.

I know you're in attorney as well. I'm a lawyer by training. I'm never practiced. I don't have

the German equivalent of the bar, but I am, yes, you're in dangerous territory because I still have a team to apologize. Perfect. So I do want to hear about that provision, but it does seem just in and of itself to be an interesting dynamic that this party is emerging and becoming ever more disciplined and prominent and really developing its strength internally and correspondingly on more of the national stage, notwithstanding this sort of counterbalance that seems to exist

“in the German constitution. Can you talk a little about that? Happy to. Just a reminder to those”

of our readers born after a German reunification in 1990, at listeners, Germany was divided into

Western East Germany between 1945 and 1990, when the Berlin Wall came down and Germany was reunified, and, in fact, the West German basic law was extended to cover the entirety of the new unified Germany. But when I talk about the basic law, that basic law was promulgated in 1949 and with extensive midwifing from the occupying powers France, Britain and especially the United States and on the US side, there were a lot of German Jewish constitutional lawyers who had fled the Nazis after 1933, gone on to work and teach in the

United States and who came back with the occupying forces and, in fact, helped the the nascent West German government draft its new constitution. So there was a great deal of American

“influence and the great deal of knowledge of German constitutional history, and the key point was to”

avoid a reputation of the situation of the Weimar Republic between World War I and 1933 when the Nazis took power, which essentially permitted the Nazis to take power using legal means with elections and laws and constitutional revisions. And the term coined at the time for the provisions that were supposed to prevent this kind of thing ever happening again was coined by a German Jewish constitutional lawyer called Carl Lovenstein who taught in the United States and who called this

Weimar after democracy or militant democracy. The translation isn't that great, but it is his own

translation. I would say that it's democracy capable of protecting itself and basically it allows

for a variety of protective measures, including the bill of rights not being susceptible to constitutional amendment, the structure of Germany as a parliamentary representative democratic federalist constitution also not being susceptible to constitutional amendment, and most importantly it allows for the ban of unconstitutional parties. But that has de facto only happened twice in the in the 1950s and it hasn't happened since then. There have been subsequent constitutional

court cases where the constitutional court laid the barriers very high. And as you can imagine with the surge of the FD since 2018 a renewed national conversation about whether the FD should not fall under this provision. And there is a whole swath of literature and documentation of the many, many ways in which the FD and its leaders have said things, written things published party programs, most notably the 258 governing program of the FD for sexy and held, which I

think we should talk about, and which plainly beyond any reasonable doubt established that the FD wants to change the German constitutional order in ways that would not be permitted by the German constitution. But the problem here, if I may, one last point here, is that the German constitutional

from the voter. Because a party ban would have to be initiated by the parliament and would have to

be decided on by the constitutional court. And paradoxically if you will, the stronger the FD has become, the more and more its support has spread beyond the East to Western Germany as well, the more plausible and effect compelling the democratic argument is, that if, if a, at this point, fifth of the voter is nationwide and polling, and a near majority of voters in this East German state of Saxony-Unheard want to be governed by this party to ban it seems like an abuse of the

party ban provision. And that's that, that is the trap of this particular provision. And I personally,

“I'm also, I think, at this sense of classical liberal, I had much rather see this thought out”

in the political arena than adjudicated, initiated by by the legislature and adjudicated by this

Supreme Court. Yeah, I wanted to drill down on that mechanism a little bit because the tension, as you say, between being a pro-democracy intended provision, but sort of permitting what could be very easily seen, especially in the event that a party has a lot of popular support as an anti-democratic mechanism for banning a party that has democratic popular will is quite a difficult tension to navigate. But in terms of the procedure itself, so you said that the, the parliament will initiate the

process and it needs to be adjudicated by the constitutional court. But can you talk a little bit about what the, what the factors are to determine that a party has met the sort of requirements for a quote unquote unconstitutional party such that it is eligible for a ban. I mean, what sorts of

“factors are we looking for in a party? I think you just have to make a compelling case that”

the intentions of the political program of the party is to overturn the constitutional order of the federal Republic of Germany. And again, there is a, at this point, a huge body of debate in Germany. And I think the evidence is simply compelling. And again, we don't even need to need to go to the, you know, a thousand page sort of documentations that have been assembled by commissions, academic commission studying this. You really only have to go to the 258 page

program of the Saxony Unheard AfD to understand what this party wants. You could also frankly go to the older national party programs of the AfD to understand that much of what is being proposed here is not in line with the foundational principles of the German basic law. But if I, if I had to boil it down to one sentence and it is a sentence that has been repeatedly used in the assessment of the German domestic intelligence services, both the national and the state level intelligence

services, who have come to the conclusion that the AfD is, is to be classified as an overtly extremist right-wing party. And who say the AfD has an ethno nationalist view of German identity and German citizenship. That is against the foundational principles of the German Constitution's Bill of Rights. Right, ethno nationalism was what Nazism was based on. And the basic law is supposed to stand against that forever. Now, very quickly, perhaps, because it's

relevant for this, for this discussion, on these domestic intelligence assessments. Germany has 16 states. If I recall correctly, the state chapters of the AfD have been assessed as,

have been finally assessed as right-wing extremist in five of the German Germany's 16 states.

The National Intelligence Service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the federal office for the protection of the Constitution, has done the same for the nationwide AfD. But that has been challenged in court, so that assessment is currently suspended. Which is why I am careful to say that the Saxony-Unhold AfD, where the we just had the state election, is clearly right-wing extremist on the national level that's currently under judicial

“investigation. Do I think that the court is going to have any trouble coming to this conclusion?”

No, I don't. Interesting. Okay, so let's talk about the September 6th election. That is

that the AFD would do quite well in Saxony-Unholds in the state elections. There, it was still a bit of a shock to people. So tell us a bit about the context for that election and what happened in the day since and how it's been received. Sure. So Germany's state elections are spread out through the four-year term of the National Government.

So this one was the first one in an Eastern German state for a while where the AFD tends to have

particularly high support. So actually on that point, can you tell us a little bit about why AFD is support started and remains stronger in East Germany despite the fact that it's transitioning more so to West Germany now? Actually it didn't start in East Germany. It was founded in West Germany by a bunch of West German professors, libertarian economists, and in fact a number of the current leaders of the AFD at the National level are also West Germans. The reason why it took on so much

in Eastern Germany again have been dissected far and wide by academic sociologist economist

state politicians. It sometimes feels frankly as though we Germans were discussing nothing else

“and had been discussing nothing else for decades. But the truth is that despite the fact that”

reunification is now more than 35 years ago, there is still a distinct socio-economic and political divide between the former West Germany and the former East Germany. The former East Germany was turned into five separate states based on old historical regional divisions. We could talk for hours about this but very simply, there is a tendency by outside commentators to suggest that the genuine socio-economic cleavages that still exist are solely responsible for support

for the AFD or that immigration is solely responsible for the AFD. The truth is that East

Germany, and indeed Saxony, and how it has some of the lowest levels of immigration of all of

“Germany, the concentration of immigrants are far higher in Western Germany and the truth is also”

that social services including hospitals and clinics and old people's homes could not exist without swathes of European and non-European immigrants, doctors, nurses and others. There is also a culture war explanation that the German notion of a civic identity based on a rejection of Nazis and the Holocaust in World War II, atonement and the making of peace with our neighbors and and rooting ourselves in the Western

Alliance that that narrative has regained support and is responsible for people's political decisions that follows Steve Bannon's famous famous saying a culture is upstream of politics.

“I personally think that that is tempting but not compelling. I think what we are really seeing”

that's my personal theory but I can substantiate it and I think it is the most complex and the most persuasive is that we are seeing in all Western societies a form of systems overload. We're seeing sophisticated mature democracies with actually quite significant economic and societal advantages and quite solid successful institutions, suddenly struggling with the disruptions created by globalization, by economic interdependence and increasingly

in Europe and in Germany, by the aggressive outside interference from other global powers, Russia, China and to some degree now the Trump administration and that is in a country as anxious about itself as Germany and as keen to feel that stability and prosperity remain the basis of of its future, right? That is deeply unsattering for people and so I tend to think that

state in the bilateral in the Cold War standoff between the West and the Soviet Union that

communists were, suddenly were surrounded by friends and through the expansion of NATO and the European Union and became immensely prosperous because they suddenly started trading with all these countries

“in the East. I think German assumed that that that a that situation was somehow a reward for having”

been a frontline state and a tone for everything that they've done between 33 and 45, which in parentheses took them a very long time and was incomplete for a very long time as well.

I could go on about this but you get my drift. And German sort of assumed that this that there

was now going to be a linear progressive path towards global market economic and democratic entropy and it took them longer than many of our central and eastern European neighbors to understand that in fact the disruptions were coming closer and were becoming more and more aggressive. And and I feel like for a very long time Germany's political elites refused to to admit, right? That this was going to become a problem for Germany. It was going to become a problem or it

was already a problem for the stability of democratic institutions and processes and for our relationships

with our neighbors and the rest of the world and that that is where we are. There is an additional element for Eastern Germany though that does that does mark a historic and cultural difference and that is that the West Germans lived under Nazism for 12 years between 33 and 45. The East Germans had an additional 44 years of Russian occupation, communist rule and in infiltration of civil society, by government spies, where neighbors and even married

couples were spying on each other. I have German friends who marched with candles in their hands in 1989 before the wall came down, knowing full well that the troops of the JDR Interior Ministry were waiting inside streets with loaded weapons. And who are deeply, deeply concerned about the unwillingness of their fellow East Germans to come to terms with what the toxic effect of the combination of 12 years of Nazism and 44 years of communism? So there is that

we had, we West Germans, I'm a West German, had under American British and French occupation, the opportunity to let representative democracy take roots in ways that the East Germans didn't have. And if you combine that with socioeconomic differences, cultural affinity is with Russia,

“oddly enough, despite a Russian occupation that wasn't very friendly. There is a, I think, a mixture”

of vulnerability and affinity that the AFD is able to take advantage of. And again, that is not to blame the East Germans. I think in fact that the West Germans who sort of blindly assumed that the East Germans would be delighted to take on the entirety of the West German constitutional order, including the statutory laws, the court systems, democratic processes took their cultural superiority somewhat for granted. And they won one of the things that they didn't see, and I was a young journalism

intern in the early 90s at a West Berlin paper. And I took every opportunity that I could to run out to cover stories happening in the Old Eastern part of Berlin or in the surrounding

“Brandberg, which was former East Germany or farther afield. And I remember covering Neonazi cases”

against Neonazi gangs, which had started marauding in the countryside around Berlin and Brandberg and elsewhere, and thinking that there had clearly been an application of public order by the authorities that to leave these gangs unchecked was untenable and was clearly had to be a source for the, for the then very visible immigration of qualified younger and female East Germans

people, torching refugee homes in the early 1990s. And the government in Berlin treating this

as reprehensible, but completely isolated cases of social violence, which would go away soon.

“And the truth is, I think that the roots of the resentment anger and fear that we're seeing now”

that motivate a great deal of the vote for the AFD, go back 35 years. And we're only now coming to understand how deep those roots are, of 35 years or more, if what I've said earlier is true, about life under communist rule. And I think that is why the AFD can succeed politically with promises that it clearly is not going to be able to keep. That are clearly radical, but that play on deep-seated, deeply rooted fears and anger and resentment.

In much the same way, frankly, that right-wing movements, including in this country, have operated. And again, it's about systems overload.

“It's about systems with their car and the AMP, as for the green, it's about the antifascist. It's about the automatic”

movement that the driver is going to get along. When you have the last time the driver is going to get the power. With every kilometer, it's also about the driver's oil. A regular oil-wax-heel, the driver and vehicle will be able to keep. It's not just a little bit of a car or a oil-wax-heel, but it's about the time when the driver is going to get the power. Now, the driver is going to get the automatic control with the smart kit of my name. The specialist for automatic delivery. And one should see my name.

Yeah, I was actually going to remark on that because it's, it does seem to me that, of course, there are very specific historical contexts. As you were describing, that are specific to Germany, but many of the phenomena you describe really are being echoed in democracies in Europe and certainly here in the United States. And I wanted to actually circle back to you mentioned Steve Bannon talking specifically about AFD. And he is, of course, not the only prominent right-wing

figure in the United States who has had something to say specifically about AFD, which is fairly unusual for American particularly politicians, particularly in this case, the vice president of the United States, interjecting in opinion and endorsement into another nation's domestic political sphere. So can you talk about what all of this means the interaction of right-wing figures in the United States and the AFD? And also in Europe, which, of course, we are, as Americans a little less familiar

with, but it certainly happening as well with far-right parties elsewhere in Europe. Yeah. So the connection between the maga right and the AFD is genuinely notable, but it does have some quite odd elements, which is that when the Trump administration came into power, you had the vice president of the United States, laying out this vision of a civilizational alliance,

basically of white right-wing parties, white ethno-nationalist parties, across the Atlantic,

at the Munich Security Conference, and he did also meet with the co-chair of the AFD at least vital in Munich. And since then, a number of AFD parliamentarians have worked quite hard

“to establish a sort of a foothold in Washington. But the truth is, it's been kind of a back-benture”

to back-benture thing, for much of the time. There is a maga affiliated representative in the House Annapollina Luna, who has met with AFD representatives, the young Republicans of New York, whom I think have been excluded by the GOP, have invited the foreign policy speaker of the AFD to give a speech at a gala earlier in the year. And Annapollina Luna also invited

Alice Vidal to come to Washington, and Alice Vidal accepted our social media, but never came.

And I'm going to assume that that happened because she wasn't assured of a reception at a level that she would have considered high enough. So there have been a couple of visits from AFD legislators

but CPAC conference, is this kind of thing, but the actual, you know, official contacts that have

“been visible to people like me have been quite limited. But after the election on September 6th,”

the AFD in Saxony and Annapollina, tiny East German state of 2.1 million inhabitants,

in the country of 83 billion, got a post of congratulations from the President of the United States from Elon Musk, and from the former Ambassador to Berlin, Richard Grinnell. The person who didn't say anything so far was the Vice President. So go figure, I have a feeling really of both sides not being quite sure how to engage. One thing to keep in mind is that despite the fact that there are segments of the AFD, there are profoundly anxious to be recognized and

faded by MAGA and by the US administration, there are also large swathas of the AFD,

“there are profoundly deeply anti-American, and this is especially true of its East German base.”

Where the emotional connection to Russia is very real, and there is a very sincere acceptance

of connections with China. So I suspect that what happened after the initial very high-level endorsements and meetings is that maybe both sides decided it was time to, you know, to tone things down a little, and then of course the attack on Iran was profoundly unpopular in Europe, and not just among centrist voter basis but also in the hard right, and that also meant that the AFD leadership had to walk things back a little, or to use the famous Simpson's image

retreat into the hedge bit. It's an incredibly complicated dynamic there, it seems to me,

because it's really within the AFD itself, it seems there are two polar opposite instincts in terms

of alignment, and then of course a lot of, as you were describing earlier, aspects of the party identity and the voter base that seems that are really quite specific to German history and have a little bit more of an inward-looking, being focused, I mean, as altumistic politics are on what is the right vision for Germany as this constitutional order working for us and all of these things, but the difference in affiliations or cultural ties

some being particularly in the East German areas being more affinity for Russia and in other areas more affinity for the Maga Wright not necessarily, I assume not necessarily a sort of NATO forward European-oriented traditional North Atlantic Alliance sort of look, but it does seem like a lot of quite dueling opposite perspectives, and I'm curious also bringing into the picture what you were describing about the difference between the AFD at state levels versus national levels,

you know, how is this party either at the state level or nationally or both holding itself together given the dueling internal dynamics? Yeah, that's a very good question. Those internal dynamics are very, very well, and they used to be greatly in evidence at party conventions, right? There was screaming flare-ups, people marching out, people marching back in, journalists will have a feast day describing all this, and there's by now a whole cottage industry in German media and in fact among

“German constitutional lawyers in tracking and describing all this, and I think all of them would agree”

that the AFD has developed and absolutely astounding internal discipline. Everybody knows that those tensions are there, but it has imposed on itself a rigid political discipline, which if anything tells you that they are very serious about gaining national power, and they will stop it very little to get there, because again because of the reality of those tensions, and just to be just to explain that a little more, the AFD is anti-European union, anti-European currency, in which case

it happens to agree violently with the MAGA right and the Trump administration. I think it's also quite clear that it's anti-natal, it pretends otherwise, but it's not, why does it pretend otherwise?

and I think that might have something to do with the shall we say ambivalent signaling of the Trump administration on the matter of the Western Alliance, and it's not quite sure where exactly it's landing pages for that particular set of questions, but that the AFD would prefer to have

“a national security policy based on nationalism and dominance, I think is perfectly clear,”

right, and again close ties with Russia and China. I think we should talk a little bit about the question of the path to national power, and the strategic intent of the AFD. I think it's worth

reminding listeners that the AFD pulls at around 2021 percent nationally, right? There is still

three-fourth to four-fifths of Germans who are horrified by this party, by its obvious radicalism, it's obvious connections to new Nazi gangs and thugs, and who would do anything to, or, you know, who would rather be, who would rather emigrate than live in a country governed by the AFD, right? The conundrum for them, apart from the paradox that a party ban is seems a democratic need less legitimate option than for this to work its way through the political process. The conundrum

is that the AFD's radicalism, it's extraordinary ruthlessness, and it's shameless lies, are not met with greater firmness by the centrist established political parties. And in fact, are showing up the political weaknesses, the self-doubt, the lack of cohesion of Germany's

“centrist political forces, and I think that that experience, that incident, is so shocking for”

many Germans, including me, frankly, right, that there is almost a sense of quiet self-paralluses,

right, watching this. How can a party that is so obviously, promising things, it could never keep,

right, that is so obviously, that has leaders saying Germany could exist with 60 million people, meaning 23 million would need to go of German citizens, right? Again, Germany has 83 million people, AFD legislators, Lena Katreys said this about two weeks ago at a party rally, all we need is 60 million. That would suggest expelling, deporting every German with foreign roots. I don't even know how they would make up that number, except that there is a that sort of

official statistics will tell you that at this point about 25% have roots outside of Germany's somewhere, but that includes the Soviet Jews who fled the Soviet Union after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. That would include the deportees who fled the expansion of communist Europe after 1945, and it would include all the many many EU Europeans, or the many many non-EU, Germans who came to Germany as refugees, as migrants who settled here in Germany, sorry,

not here I live in Washington, who settled in Germany 30, 40, 50 years ago, and now have German

“children and grandchildren. The truth is that the that the Lillie-Wannik protestant or Catholic”

Germany that I grew up in, right, no longer exist in the same way that that white America no longer exists, right? In my family alone, we have, you know, Taiwanese Africans, Catholics even, Jewish relatives, the whole to back, right, and that's true for most Germans, and so to talk

about, forcibly departing 23 million Germans is astounding, right, and yet, and yet this party gets

40% of the vote in Saxony, and that is what is paralyzing people in the rest of the country. Yeah, I mean, it's it's quite staggering. I wanted to come back to one thing that you mentioned, which was the idea that this is exposing the weakness or the self-doubt of the centrist parties, and and come back also to the idea of this firewall, which I know has a German term that I'm not almost trying to pronounce badly. If I understand correctly, the idea there was that

other parties in Germany, which is of course a parliamentary system that has to form

Other parties had agreed effectively to not form coalitions with AFD in order to try to

marginalize them or keep them marginalized as the case used to be. But I'm wondering, it seems you're describing attention where, you know, is it the case that some of those parties are rethinking, if not the firewall itself, that they're rethinking sort of the popular base, and do we, you know, for example, need to go after some of the people who are voting for AFD to try to expand our own parties umbrella for democratic electoral success, is it that they're

rethinking the idea of a coalition altogether with AFD to ensure their own power? I mean,

“what is happening in the party alignment and thinking with other parties vis-a-vis the AFD?”

So, I think one of the problems that we're looking at is that the center-right

predric merits of the chancellor is the leader of the center-right party, the Christian Democrats. And his coalition part of the social Democrats are a center-left. Those two parties for the longest time during the existence of two Germany's and even for a decade after reunification together mustered between 80 and 90% of the popular vote and federal elections, right? They were all encompassing big-tanned so-called people's parties. And it seems to me that

these parties and their leaderships have not yet understood that German politics have become as diverse and as fragmented and as polarized as everybody else's. So, they're still thinking as though they, you know, kind of have only they tried hard enough, they could have 40 plus percent of the national vote, right? And no, no party in Germany with one exception to which I'll come is willing to form a coalition with the AFD. Because of it's the obviously unconstitutional

and icon-traditional nature of its goals. That said, at the local level and at the regional level, in small and sort of less populated rural smothers of Germany, that firewall just simply doesn't work. People have to, they people tolerate each other, they cooperate across party lines, and there has been cooperation of all parties with the AFD in these sort of small communities. But at the national level, this is hard and fast. And frankly, despite the fact that there is no

“huge debate about this, I don't see how a party like the Christian Democrats, right?”

Primist on atonement, the alliance with Israel, the alliance with the United States, on overcoming historical enmities with France and Poland and everybody else in Europe, right, how such a party, right, could say let's pull down this firewall. Sorry, that was an echo of Ronald Reagan. That is just unthinkable. And so I'm on the side of those who say we can't do that.

It would be, we would be basically committing the hierarchy, right, in the middle of Berlin,

right? This would be a stab in the heart of our identity as a political party. I also don't think that if the CDU abandoned the firewall and coalitioned or let itself be tolerated by the AFD, that somehow the AFD would moderate or normalize. That's not going to happen. Right, it has happened with other right-wing parties, but in Europe, but those right-wing parties are not as right-wing as the AFD, right? That's the difference. And American listeners need to

understand that. And finally, there are some people who say, well, if they were in government, if they had to, why don't we experiment with that in Saxony and her? You know, small, small state, you know, not much can happen. Why don't we give it a try? The AFD has been very, very good in the past at deflecting responsibility, as has the Magarite for that matter, for its failures. It's obvious lies, right, onto others. And there is absolutely nothing to say that they wouldn't continue to do that.

So I don't think that the German-centric parties, or the CDU, can save themselves by dismantling

“the firewall. I think the only way they can save themselves is by basically by making good policy,”

right? And policy that is seen as democratic and legitimate by voters. And there are plenty of, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that they have not been very good at that. And that, in fact, everybody is sort of staring at the AFD like the rabbit and the proverbial headlines,

which is what governance, what what governments and parties are there for. But unfortunately,

“there's going to be a test of all this fairly soon, and maybe that's what we should sort of close”

this out on, in which is that there is going to be two more state elections next weekend on September 20th. And on the Sunday, one in the city state of Berlin and another in an East German state in Mecklenburg, Pomerania on the Baltic coast. And the, the risk here is that Mertz's, the Chancellor Mertz's CDU slides even further in its popular support and that that then puts even more tension into the governing coalition in Berlin. And there has been a great deal of speculation on whether Mertz

should then be forced to resign by his own party and replaced by another Christian democratic leader.

That is constitutionally possible in a parliamentary democracy and has, in fact, happened four times in, in German history. I tend to think, well, I think they're going to get hammered again. They are faded to stick together and, and to probably, you know, work out the, the term. I, I don't, I don't think, and changing out the, the transfer is going to work that well. And I've, I've, I've said, I've said something else only a day or two ago, but I've beginning to think that

that a changing horse's in midstream is, is not going to work. And in fact, we'll only strengthen

the FD. But it's, it is an astonishing moment in, in European politics and in German politics.

And a great deal hangs on this because the size of the German economy, all right? And the fact that it's surrounded by, by, by quite small neighbors who are economically and socially, you know, through the labor economy deeply into the integrated with the German economy as Germany goes so goes this stability of Europe, socially economically and politically, sadly. And especially at a time when the French are apparently think Marine Le Pen might make a good president in 2027.

“And, and when the, when the Brits have elected seven prime ministers in, in a decade, right?”

And, and the, the British hard right is also surging in the polls. It matters what the Germans do. And that is not to say, you know, that we're more important than anybody else. It's just the, unfortunately, this responsibility is thrust and Germany by the external circumstances of the moment. Yeah, I mean, you anticipated my last question, which was to, to give exactly that context to, you know, should we understand these upcoming elections in only a couple of days from now?

You know, how much should we understand that as a feature of domestic politics versus something that is truly, um, in earthquake in a national sense and a regional sense and, and a global sense. I mean, do you have this contrast particularly with? Marts having campaigned and really begun his, his term with an emphasis on building up European security and declaring independence from the United States? And I just wonder,

I guess, to, to end, how you think about what we should be looking for both in the elections on the 20th, but also in the coming months from then to understand how all of these dynamics are going to have ripple effects through regional and international relationships. So just to be clear, the co-chair of the AFD, at least vital. Recently, a few days ago, said in an interview that an AFD-led national government would not just end all support for Ukraine,

but would ask for repayment of all the support it's received in the past nearly five years.

“I think it tells you what you need to know.”

Much rides on this and I think centrist political forces in Germany are deeply aware of this. The it is literally, I think it's not reaching too far or being overly dramatic to say that the future of a stable, prosperous and secure Europe rides on the ability of centrist forces to persuade their voters, not just in Germany, but across Europe, that they are the most capable and the most legitimate source of governance to take them into a future at a time where

stability, prosperity and security are going to be in very short supply. And just to perhaps remind listeners who may not be tracking European politics as obsessively

Just today there was sabotage on the entire Dutch railing at work. There was another one or two weaponized

“drones in Lithuania, they had to shut down Vilnius Airport and there was a Russian ship,”

sharp flares add a Danish helicopter, narrowly missing it in international waters.

Not all of this is attributable to Russia clearly, but much of it is and there is a sense of a

Europe under siege. From Russia also from Chinese economic coercion and a very, very ambivalent and unstable transatlantic alliance whose cultural and political premises are being questioned on a weekly basis by the Trump administration. And so the great deal is at stake.

“More than I think at any time in my lifetime as an adult citizen of Europe, and Germany.”

It really does feel like the nexus of so many national security foreign policy, political phenomena that we've been tracking. So definitely a lot to watch, but I think we'll have to leave it there and I want to thank you for all of this deep context and explanation. I think it's given me a lot to think about. Thank you very much for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

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