Germany Still Doesn't Know What to Do With Democracy

"Congratulations to Germany, which has overtaken France in the race to become Europe's Most Dysfunctional Government.

The competition was fierce. France is hamstrung by the chaos resulting from an inconclusive parliamentary election, a lame-duck president, and a recent court ruling that may prohibit the presumed front-runner in the next presidential election from campaigning.

But Germany still comes out on top. Chancellor Friedrich Merz hobbled into his new post Tuesday after a surprisingly fraught vote in Parliament. Lawmakers in his center-right Christian Democratic party (the CDU and Bavarian sister CSU) and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) were supposed to fall in line for a pro forma exercise to confirm Mr. Merz's new administration. Instead, some 18 lawmakers rebelled in the first vote, forcing Mr. Merz to stage a humiliating second round to secure his office. It's a sign of how far Berlin is from solving the problem that currently makes the country ungovernable: the ever more popular far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Mr. Merz is in this fix because February's was at least the second consecutive election in which rising support for the AfD deprived mainstream parties of the seats they'd need to form an ideologically coherent coalition on either the right or the left. Mr. Merz was the plurality winner, but a relatively weak one with only 28.6% of the vote. The SPD, which has now finished governing the country for three and a half years under Olaf Scholz, waddled away with 16.4%.

The Tuesday fracas demonstrates that the coalition is internally divided to an unusual degree. But what is Mr. Merz to do? None of Europe's typical methods for defanging a party like the AfD are available at the moment.

The AfD is in many ways unique among parties of the insurgent right in large European countries. Most other such parties either never had neo-Nazi or other unsavory elements (Nigel Farage's Reform UK in Britain) or systematically purged such elements in pursuit of electability (Marine Le Pen's National Rally in France). This has allowed mainstream parties to experiment (albeit grudgingly) with co-governing with or co-opting the upstarts, and requires such parties to rise or fall on their own electoral and -- when the time comes -- governing competence.

The AfD, in contrast, does still harbor elements accused of Nazi sympathies (although they deny it when pressed). The party has proved either unwilling or unable to purge them, making it impossible for any other party to form a governing coalition with the AfD. At the same time, Germany's other parties have proved singularly incompetent at trying to woo AfD voters by co-opting key issues, for instance by adopting more-aggressive approaches to immigration.

Instead, Germany's mainstream parties may try to defenestrate their rival legally. Last week the country's domestic intelligence service, the BfV, formally labelled the AfD an extremist organization, which could pave the way for a ban from running in elections or even from continuing as an organization. Yes, a ban of the party that won 20.8% of the national vote less than three months ago, and is the main opposition in the parliament.

Stipulate that Germany's 20th-century history leaves Germans acutely sensitive to certain kinds of political speech and more tolerant of restrictions than other societies might be. This still is a mess. The BfV on Thursday put its extremist designation on hold pending an AfD appeal, but if it eventually takes full effect it would allow the agency (equivalent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation) to recruit informants and tap wires to monitor the AfD. This sort of surveillance might be suitable for a gang of a dozen skinheads convening in a cellar. It's bananas to try it on the country's second-most-popular party.

This is especially true in light of the agency's reasoning. It isn't the AfD's alleged Nazi sympathies that riled Germany's domestic spooks, but its inflammatory language about migrants. 

The BfV accuses the AfD of acting contrary to the "free, democratic order" by stoking ethnic tensions. Particular sins include suggesting that Germans whose families originated in Muslim countries aren't fully German, and using the term "knife migrants" (it's alliterative in German) to call attention to stabbings perpetrated by immigrants.

This is a surefire way to alienate German voters further from establishment parties. The AfD is popular not because some of its leaders may have Nazi sympathies but because the party claims to speak more openly than others about matters of immigration and assimilation. 

A competent mainstream political class might experiment with offering other versions of a tough immigration policy, as Mr. Merz belatedly tried to do with some success in the weeks before the February election.

Yet Mr. Merz's limp across the finish line this week augurs poorly for the capacity of his right-left administration to convince voters it is capable of dealing effectively with AfD voters' legitimate concerns, so that beating the party is out. Joining it via a coalition remains taboo. The intelligence report on the AfD highlights how any attempt to ban the party is likely only to feed into the sense of grievance that fuels its success.

How to wade out of this tar pit now stands as the biggest political challenge in Europe." [1]

The Trump team rightly calls this order a despotism. In the age of the Internet, everyone hears and knows it. How can the Germans talk about exporting their democracy to Zelensky's dominions if the Germans themselves have no democracy? How can the Germans talk about friendship and a common market with democratic America if Germany is the biggest  tyranny in the European Union?

1.  Political Economics: Germany Still Doesn't Know What to Do With the Far-Right AfD. Sternberg, Joseph C.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 May 2025: A15.