On Politics: Germany's Far-Right Future?

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The AfD have so far been kept from exercise of power by an informal firewall policy on the part of the constitutional parties and there are questions about whether it can form a sustainable state government or whether that firewall will endure. There were some serious surprises in how the election unfolded. A tactical voting campaign buoyed up the results of the SPD and the Greens, both of which looked fairly troubled at various points. More strikingly perhaps it was a high turnout election, 77% of those eligible came out to vote and many of those typical non-voters seemed to have mobilised in favour of the AfD. Other features are also difficult for British observers to get their head around, whereas we instinctively expect a strong generational split, here the 18-24s as well as the middle aged, broke strongly for the AfD. Some chunk of the AfD's success is personal. Its leader in Saxony and Halt Ulrich Siegmund got his start as an anti-lockdown influencer and is enormously successful on TikTok. His rallies tap into a kind of loose ostrichy and have a distinctively celebrity quality to them, but there is some serious and seriously worrying policy heft as well. The AfD's chief policy is of course migration and deportation not just of recent migrants but also settled historic arrivals as well. Saxony has about 170,000 foreign nationals currently resident in a state of 2 million people. The AfD's platform has taken aim at Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans but also calls for the deportation of Ukrainian war refugees as well. But the AfD is not a single issue anti-migrant party. It trades on a number of other populist hot buttons as well. Siegmund has promised that his first act as regional minister president would be to pull state funding for public broadcasters which he decries as left-wing propagandists as well as axing funding for programs dedicated to combating far-right extremism and perhaps that one is not so surprising. He promises to ban the rainbow flag in schools and wants to sever the state's connection with its Bauhaus heritage, replacing its slogan "Think Modern with Think German". He promises to kickstart deportations and remove the children of asylum seekers from mainstream schools. If that is, he can form a government. There is no doubt that the AfD is a party of the extreme right and with dubious international links, the Vaphassenschutz, the constitutional agency tasked with domestic intelligence certainly agrees. But the taboo on parties of the far-right in Germany and elsewhere is clearly eroding. Neither this designation nor the firewall policy has stopped people voting for it. Why? Is it, as Saxon and Houth was once in East Germany, the long and bitter fruit of an imperfect reunification? Is this election the latest and clearest sign that the fundamental coordinates of politics in Germany and in Europe are changing? You're listening to on-politics on the LRB podcast back after our summer break. I am James Butler, and as you can probably hear, I have something of a seasonal or terminal code, but I am recovered sufficiently to have this conversation joining me, to talk about this election as well as the wider question of what exactly the AfD represents in German politics and beyond. Is Jan Van Amulla, with whom, of course, we explored the question of populism earlier this year. Jan Van Amulla, welcome. I suppose the place for us to start is with those results in Saxon and Houth. Obviously, when people have been thinking about a potential breakthrough for the AfD, they've thought that it would probably come in one of those five former East German states. They've thought that that's where it's strongest and it's likeliest to make its breakthrough, and in the run-up to this election in particular, it was widely predicted that they would do very well. Was there anything that surprised you about the result? I think there's a danger of simply falling back on sort of ready-made interpretations along the lines of, well, of course, in the East, we find allegedly more authoritarian mindsets, and that explains all these outcomes. I think one has to play close attention to how they ran that particular campaign, because that was very different from what we usually associate with the far right. In a certain way, it was a very positive campaign. It was a campaign that projected hopefulness. They found a person who didn't look scary at first sight, who was a very good salesman, kind of projected a lot of, if I may put it this way, positive vibes of one sort or another. So, of course, there's still an element of fear in the background as well that remains very strong in the party program and in the party as a whole. But for the first time, it felt like, okay, this is not simply about being defensive and creating anxieties. They had slogans like everything is possible or everything will turn out well, which is, however, also another way of saying that the campaign in general, and that includes the other parties, had virtually no real content. Other than, on the one hand, let's for the first time win an exercise power. And on the other hand, let's prevent this party from gaining power. And one would have thought by now that parties who oppose the far right should have learned the lesson that that's simply not enough. It's simply not enough to have this negative attitude, you know, constant warnings about this will happen. That will happen. The warnings are justified. But you also got to give people some sense of what actually you would be doing differently, better, also find symbolic means of getting across the fact that with your party life will be better. I know this sounds incredibly banel on one level, but it remains important. And if I may add one other point that is also on one level, incredibly banel, but again was vindicated here. Showing presence on the ground really matters. And the same way that let's say Petra Madya in Hungary was able to combine a sort of almost 19th century politics of being there in small villages and at the same time having a 21st century politics of being very present on social media and translating, you know, very attractive images with, you know, with crowds into social media. That the AfD did as well, very successfully. And the other parties eventually were trying to catch up. They also realized, okay, this time really a lot is at stake. We have to have a lot of people who go from door to door. And a lot of people did spend a lot of time and energy that has to be recognized as well to prevent this outcome. But it was a little too late. And basically the others, I think we're paying the price for not having built up this very strong presence locally in the way that the AfD did for a very, very long time. Yeah. I mean, I think that there's something interesting about that sort of contentless politics or very kind of thin content politics that's been part of this election. And obviously it's a syndrome that's repeated across Europe. I mean, in the wake of the election, there's been lots of argument about the brand mower, the firewall, which is the position of the constitutional parties that they won't work with the AfD. And the only party, small party that has indicated otherwise is that the Sara Vagen lector lines, the BSW, who are a split from the left party, who have received a lot of attention in the Anglican sphere for being anti-woken and have not really translated that into significant electoral success in Germany at least so far. But there's a serious question here, isn't there about the firewall, which is that certainly, I think it's understandable that lots of these parties have the disposition and make the judgment that the AfD is a risk to democracy, and that it is simply constitutionally unthinkable to work with them. But they are now a very successful party, certainly in this state, and they don't have an outright majority, but 44% of the voters is more than just a little. And there's a problem here, isn't there, because in a state in which you have an overwhelming, you know, also a huge plurality for a party like the AfD, in order to govern against them, you would require finding some way of making a sort of grand coalition among parties which really have very little in common and various parties at the centre right don't want to work with the left party and so on and so on and so on. So this is a difficult thing, right? It produces this kind of quite stuck politics. Can the firewall endure? So I think it depends a little bit on what one really means by firewall in the first place. So the official definition, as you said, is no coalitions with the far right. But at the same time, there's also a sort of firewall in terms of content or maybe there isn't. So if other parties, and as you all know, this has happened in many, many European countries, essentially keep copying the far right at the same time. People at one point start asking, "Okay, but what's the difference? Why is this unacceptable when basically some other parties are talking exactly the same way?" So I think this is something that maybe hasn't always been seen, that this sort of firewall of content has long been breached in all kinds of ways and plenty of parties in Europe have had to learn the lesson that actually copying the far right is not really a recipe of success. And this is something that with all your respect, Friedrich Mertz and others could have known. It's not like we have, you know, huge amounts of robust results and theories and political science, but this one is pretty strong. And somehow, people don't seem to get it and keep making the same mistake over and over again. And it's maybe also telling that on election night, you know, when the usual pundits appeared on television, all they talked about was that all the other parties haven't understood that migration is a real, is a real issue. And you really want to kind of sort of hang your head because you think, "Well, look, people have been talking about nothing but for years and years." And then also turns out, actually, if you look at post-election analysis, that the number one issue for citizens was not migration at all. It was the economic situation. And that would have actually provided an opening for the other parties also to say, "Look, yes, the IFD talks a certain talk. It can look like it's a party for workers, but if you read the program carefully, it certainly isn't. It actually is a party that wants to lower income tax. Well, you know, who pays the most income tax?" It's actually still a very pro-market, if that's not a cool and expression party. The way it's in a sense, it was already at the beginning when it came onto the scene in 2000, in 2013. So that's one thing. The other thing, though, I would agree with you. Of course, if the other parties basically can only talk firewall and can only talk negatively, then you might indeed have an outcome where you get into a kind of vicious cycle, because you are forced to form ever more heterogeneous coalitions that reinforces the sense among citizens that, "Oh, they're always squabbling, and this is so incoherent, and what are they actually doing for us?" So the IFD, of course, is aware of this and also realizes that, yes, actually, in a perverse way, the firewall works for them, because they feel, "Okay, we just have to wait this out until there has to be an all-party coalition, which will possibly fall apart, or look so bad, that again, they will benefit." Having said all that, I mean, to give you more direct answer, I still think, though, it's important to stick to it. I think it would be catastrophic, if all of a sudden one said, "No, let's try a coalition," and then we will show that once they're in power, they can't really govern. Again, it's a very popular view. It doesn't work like this, it's simply not true that they will immediately be exposed as incompetent, and as a number of observers have also pointed out, it's always a bit of a question of who says, "Let's be done with a firewall." Is the person who says that going to pay the price or are certain other citizens, minorities, let's say, going to pay the price, and you can simply lean back in your armchair and observe how the breaching of the firewall experiment is going to turn out without too many consequences for you personally. Yeah, just on that question of the adoption of policy or rhetoric from the eye of the mayor, shortly after he took office, of course, decried Ukrainians. Many of the Ukrainian refugees are actually welfare refugees and people who are economic migrants fundamentally. There's been a real bleed through this rhetoric into, certainly, the rhetoric of the so-called centre-right. I mean, Matt's is known for speaking, I suppose, a bit more off the cuff than his predecessors and being a bit more sort of forthright. So the idea that this stuff hasn't translated into the mainstream is simply not true. I wonder whether it's worth asking that question about the relationship between economics and politics. Of course, it's the case that I think those numbers about economic anxiety or sort of anxiety about social security, it seems to me to be something that can be articulated in a sort of welfare showvanist way, right? So it's one of the things that when you ask if they vote as what they want, it seems to me that what they want actually is they're not very strongly pro-redistribution. They think that there's a sort of excess presence of foreigners and by expelling people, they will get further ahead in their jobs and in their careers, and that their income will pick up. So there's this question I suppose about the sort of political articulation of economic distress. As it's worth saying, I think that the IFA did very well among workers, those in work. So it's about 60-61% of those. And again, those downwardly mobile or financially distressed, about 65% of those broke for the IFA in this election. So they're doing very well among those people. And I think that question is worth asking because actually, you go back and you look at the historic results in this state. This state hasn't always voted in this direction. It's had a number of SPD regional governments over the years, historically in coalition with the PDS, which is the predecessor of the left party today. So there is, I think, in the background a story here about, you know, the long-term fortune of those Vogue's partying, the historic mass parties of both left and right. And I wonder, I mean, the temptation for me is to say, oh, you know, basically the SPD loses its credibility after, say, the hearts, packages of reform. So these sort of neoliberalizing wage reforms. I never really recovers it. Is that too simplistic a reading? So it is, as so often, tempting now to say, look, are people just deluded? You know, are workers simply mistaken? Why don't they read the program? Why don't they realize that at least, you know, a number of the major policies the IFA advocates for are really definitely not good for workers. But of course, they'll be far too simplistic. And of course, always patronizing in a certain way. I think it's important to see that, especially young men, which I hasten to add, does not mean that everybody who's young nowadays is much more right-wing. Generally, again, that was actually not true in this election. But I think especially young men might be tempted, and this is obviously somewhat speculative, by the thought that actually, I like a certain kind of promise of competition, because I think I'm going to win. And I feel that right now I'm being sort of blocked in my career. And among older voters, I would think, but again, it's speculation that if you look around, you actually don't, and that sort of, I think, reinforces your point, you don't feel that you actually are seeing very good alternatives in terms of obviously pro-worker parties. As you say, the SPD has struggled with its legacy ever since Gerhard Schröder. Especially now, it's often seen as, you know, basically the sort of second-in-command, also true at the federal level, that essentially helps and legitimizes, you know, basically cutting back the welfare state. It's very hard to see what else they are really doing, other than sort of rear-guard battles. We're still saving this for you. We're still doing that. But that's not really very promising. And then the obvious question is, what about the left party? And they are, I think, the rather banal observation is relevant, that while the left has also been around for a very long time. And of course, for a while, it was very, very successful in Eastern, Eastern states, but might also prompt the question, but what have you actually done for us? I mean, just as background, it is worth reminding ourselves that, you know, Sachsen Unheard is really in bad shape in terms of, in terms of depopulating, in terms of having no sort of major industry really. So the complaints are real. And if you then think back and say, okay, I made these choices in the past and nothing ever seems to change, it's maybe at least understandable to some degree, if people say, okay, I'll give that a lot of chance because they are promising real change. And I'm not sure what the change is going to be exactly, but at least, you know, things are being shaken up. I'm not saying this is true for everybody. But I think that explains what otherwise might indeed look somewhat peculiar as a mismatch between who votes and what they're actually voting for. Yeah, I mean, I suppose for listings, it's worth saying that Sachsen Unheard was an industrial center. It produced lots of things prior to reunification, strong chemical industry, strong produced train carriages, you know, strong, strong sort of industrial manufacture, all of which is gone. You know, there is arguably a pattern here that's replicated across Europe in the same way that Rassom Blumon National found its feet in the former coal areas in the north of France, in North Padicale. These were areas where industry had simply vanished. There are many similarities between, they're also depopulating, aging population, the youth goes elsewhere. In Germany, in particular, of course, there is 170,000 foreign nationals in a state of 1.8 million or so, 2 million so people. And this is a cause of great agitation. And that's a substantial increase in the last decade, right? There's a noticeable change there. So some numbers from the Conrad Adnauer Stiftung, after voters in their reading are pretty well-fair chauvinists, right? They worry about the entitlement of people who are recently arrived. But they're also very hostile to the idea that the state can do things. They're a bit skeptical about the state's delivery. And that seems to me to run to your point that the track record here is not of a state that has done much for them, arguably ever since reunification. And that leaves us in a difficult situation where the traditional progressive response to these things is to find some sort of distributive welfare-based solution. But is that likely to have much purchase here? Well, again, it's an incredible binar point I'm about to make. But it's a question of what you, as we often nowadays, like to say, deliver, but then also how you find to use a more abstract term, symbolic condensations for what you deliver. So Biden, for instance, delivered a hell of a lot. And it's not like, oh, nobody had realized that you need to do certain things for red states. But if you cannot communicate this successfully, again, if you don't find this peculiar combination of 19th century politics on the ground, physical presence, I'm here. I'm listening. I mean, that's what the AfD often did. They didn't say anything. They simply said, we are here to listen to you. And on the other hand, okay, and here's something that we can also sell on social media as something that is happening for you on the ground. This is, again, as simplistic as it might sound. This is the Magia lesson. This is the Mamdani lesson. This is the kind of thing that actually, just in terms of outcomes, will really help. Now we can talk about what exactly you should be doing and what makes most of a difference on the on the on the ground. But the fact that there is the sense of not being hurt, not having anybody present, of course, usually then reinforced by the far right itself. I mean, in a sense, they've become very good at creating solidarity on the basis of shared victimhood status. You know, this is a big difference to many phenomena in the 20th century, even Trump, you know, remember, would tell people, you're all victims and I'm a victim. And this connects us in certain ways. And this can be a very effective rhetorical strategy. And it can be countered. But you've got to have, in a sense, both the communicative means and good ideas about, okay, this is really going to symbolically drive it home that we're actually doing something for you on the ground. And we are there. We are there for you. Again, this can sound like incredibly basic. But if again, if I may one do one quick detour in the US, you again feel, okay, everybody's agonizing about sort of, you know, Democrats' consultancy speak about a little bit more of that and that at a level that is completely irrelevant to what might be happening, how it might be happening on the ground. Yeah. Yeah. That question, I think, in some way, I think one of the questions that was noticeable in the selection campaign was that was about the sort of sense of agency that was given to voters by Ziegmann, in particular, who is an extraordinary political communicator. He's actually very, very really remarkable. And one of the things that, you know, I came to think at the end of this election was that actually, you know, it's a thought that's been dawning on me for some time. You know, this is a guy who has 800,000 followers on TikTok. Now, I don't use TikTok. The whole short form video thing is lost on me. But it's there's no doubt in my mind that this is the terrain of political communication. And he does it by adopting this pose as if he's demystifying politics to his followers, right? Like he's saying, you know, here is, I didn't believe it when I first heard this or like, can you believe that they're doing this? You know, it's a really, like he's acting as an interpreter, you know, and giving to his followers this sense that they are being let into a secret about how the world really works. And I think, you know, it worries me, but I think these people are far, far, far ahead of any progressive communicator I can think of on that scale. So that's a, that's a bit worried. Can I say one word about that? It's a very clear answer, yes and no. Because when you think about the fact that people in their 50s actually voted more for the AfD than people in their teens and 20s, I think maybe should remind us that we sort of now live in kind of hybrid system where, yeah, social media are incredibly important, but there's also plenty of interaction with much more traditional forms of media. And as many people had pointed out, it was a godsend for the AfD when the country's most important weekly had a title which simply said, Zekemont is the country's most dangerous man. They could just run with it. He kept signing, you know, this, this magazine for people saying, look, this is, you know, I'm, I'm so important. And this, this sheer frisson and then combined with what you just said, you know, who wouldn't say, wow, you know, I can vote for the most dangerous person in the country. So I'm not saying that, therefore, you know, journalists all have to, you know, 100% become democracy defenders and so on. But nevertheless, I think there are also some pretty obvious mistakes that we've learned how to avoid. If one has the willing, let's to avoid them. Let's talk about the background to this party. So I think it's, you know, the hook here is the Alice Fydall, who is the, one of the co leaders, one of the two leaders of the if day. Interesting for a leader of a far right party is a lesbian in a domestic partnership with a woman is opposed to gay marriage for civil unions opposed to gay adoption, so cultural or conservative type. She has declared she's come out and said that the CDU will never win a federal election again. It's kind of talk that leaders of parties make all the time. But that this is an interesting trajectory for a party like this one. So you alluded to it earlier, but I think it's worth listeners knowing that the if day didn't emerge in 2013 as a national populist party, right? It was much closer to a sort of neoliberal ordo liberal. It was founded by an academic economist, I think, a guy named Bound Luca, who was very, very influential, is ousted relatively early on. So so perhaps you could tell us a little about that, you know, where that sort of what seems to me like a new right kind of influence by which I for listeners, I mean, you know, this is a formation of the extreme right in France in particular under Alan de Benwurst, which are thinking about ways to make this kind of politics successful in Europe again. There seems to be a stream of that that enters the if day at some point. It obviously seems to be drawing on a German heritage from from someone like Schmidt as well. But that's not there in the beginning. So how does it? What what happens in in that space of time? So forgive me, but I would slightly disagree with the characterization of the origins. You're absolutely right, of course, that initially this mostly appeared as a party of professors. In fact, if I recall, there may even have been elections where every single person who was a candidate was a professor doctor. So that would really appeal to a certain, you know, bourgeois clientele for obvious reasons. So that that's true, but I think it's also important to see that from the beginning, there was a very strong nationalism and auto-liberism in particular has different strands and some are for sure to have more universalist, but some have always been very strongly connected to nationalism have also been very strongly connected to certain varieties of Protestantism. So from the beginning, ideologically, it was a pretty complicated package. And they had many intellectuals initially who also felt that under Angela Macco, the CDU had become basically like any other mainstream party was giving up on genuine conservative commitments. They had a lot of hope for this for this party. Then the thing happened that virtually always happened with new parties for a very long time, which is major disagreements conflicts all the times all the time. And in the old days, that would have been the end of it. People would have said, you know, these people are, you know, amateurs, they don't have to do these things, they're constantly arguing with each other. And something must have changed more generally, such that this is no longer enough to discredit a party. And I think again, this is sort of true in other European countries as well, that what in the old days would have been sort of game over is no longer game over. And then, as I've said, leaders themselves pretty clearly said, basically what happens in 2015 saves them because they looked like they were indeed on a downward slope. And all of a sudden, they get the topic with which they've been running. ever since, so anti-migration, anti-refugees, etc. And then as we talked about already, others eventually start to copy their rhetoric, eventually start to legitimize them. The one thing that is I think really important to underline is that unlike so many other far-right parties in Europe, which have gone out of their way to say we distance ourselves from a certain radicalism, we distance ourselves from certain parts of our national history, whether that's always really true or not we can debate, but I mean Marie Le Pen, very obviously said, don't ever confuse me with my father. Melanie has been, you know, been very clever in terms of how she presents herself. Of course, she still wants to keep on board certain things who might be very nostalgic for fascism, but still has been very good at also kind of giving the impression that she has distances herself very thoroughly. And the AfD is the great exception. And frankly, for many of us, this is also particularly shocking, that in a country which prided itself for decades and decades on having come to terms with its past, lecturing many, many other countries on this is how you do this, etc. That in such a country, you can have a party that basically, you know, presents its historical revisionism very, very openly, that also has many people who have not just far right, but real neo Nazi background. This is also true of Ziegmund, where people say, look, he's surrounded by people who are really close to him, who have to put it mildly very, very dubious past that they never seem to have disavowed. Again, seems not to have hurt him in a way that let's say in the 90s, till you would have felt, okay, this is at least a problem or these, this is at least going to dominate headlines for a sufficient sufficient amount of time. So, this is why even though the general European trend of mainstreaming the far right, normalizing the far right has also happened in Germany, it's in a sense even more disturbing precisely because here's a party that doesn't make much of an effort. At, you know, what Le Pen famously or infamously calls "D" "diabolization" in terms of, you know, we're going to make ourselves very acceptable to centrist and more bourgeois voters. This is on politics on the LRB podcast. Bear with us now as we take a very short commercial break and we'll see you in just a minute. The National Gallery has an online art history course called "The Story of Painting". You'll explore the secrets, mysteries and tales behind a thousand years of painting through expert teaching, lively online discussion and reading recommendations. It's designed for curious beginners and art lovers alike and book your place today, just start your journey, just search for National Gallery story of painting. Tammy regularly hauled stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's wholesale club saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods even they can't screw up. Have you met my kid? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home road warrior mom, home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com/maskied and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon, limited time offer new members only. BJ's home of the save. It was exposed I think it was earlier this year last year. Ziegmann's presence at a meeting, a secret meeting with speech by Martin Zelner who is who is in arguably a neo-fascist, in arguably a neo Nazi. I had believed, perhaps just unwisely, but I had believed that that political taboo on because I mean one of the one of the contexts here is that for some years the fascist shorts, the agency tasked with protection of the constitution so-called but it keeps an eye on political extremism domestically. There are various faces of that agency but had been sort of treating the IFD as is it an extremist party? I think the local party in Saxon Unhalt has been deemed a properly right wing extremist party. I had believed that taboo on this stuff was still extant. One of the results of there being an agency like that that observes this stuff means that often parties will talk in this kind of double talk kind of way and you see that from time to time I think in the IFD where they say, "Oh, every German citizen is a German," I think they've stopped saying that now actually but they used to occasionally say it. There's a question here about actually how open this stuff is in a context of a sort of national political culture where there have historically been sanctions for speaking very openly about this stuff. So is it your sense that this taboo is just gone now? It's certainly not gone. I think for many many people this is still extremely off-putting and again I think it isn't important to underline that there was also great counter mobilization in Saxon Unhalt. So it's not like all everybody else was now simply accepting their fate and so on. I mean let's not forget it is a small state, two million people. It's not that the IFD actually won a majority in the way that some had some had predicted so we should also not sort of read too much into this but I agree with you with your overall point and again I mean somebody made this joke online the other day that you know the the self-declared world champion in national remembrance and learning lessons from the past has been eliminated at the group stage because basically what seemed to have been a given for a long time that there were simply certain limits that you couldn't possibly cross without paying a very heavy political price doesn't seem to be true anymore. If I may add just one point because as you as you as you were saying, Germany also for a long time prided itself on this thing called Milton Democracy where they said this is one clear lesson from the interval period that you sometimes have parties that use democracy to gain power in order to then abolish democracy and we need to find out who they are hence this quasi-political police this office with the protection of the Constitution which for some people sounds pretty all-wellian and there is the possibility of banning a party and that has happened in the past and there's now been much talk of banning the IFD as well. In fact some people in the among the Christian Democrats who were against this might now sort of be coming around to this to this view but of course you again might say it's a too little too too late. The real point however is that there was always something very double edged about this machinery of Milton Democracy because A of course it allows those who for instance are being observed as the phrase goes by this office for the protection of the Constitution to present themselves again as victims as martyrs. You know this is the last thing the establishment can come up with we are so powerful we are truly the voice of the people you know we are the ones who basically break all the taboos in a good way and hence you know they have to resort to this to these legal legal means so they present themselves always as martyrs and victims anyway but this gives them sort of additional resources to make that that claim probable and then second point is that of course at some point they can also say look you keep saying that we're so horrible you keep saying that we're fascists then why don't you ban us if this is also obvious and you have the means of actually taking us out of the poor game the fact that you don't do it actually to show you hypocrisy to show us that you actually don't really mean it it's just you know again propaganda by the establishment because you know I have nothing else really left to say and and and do so in that sense I'm not saying that therefore one should you know basically disavow this whole machinery but it also takes a fair bit of political judgment to understand how to use it effectively and you almost feel like now it's the worst of both worlds people talk about a possible ban but they don't actually do it so it allows the far right to present itself as victim as martyr but actually there's no effect in terms of actually sort of countering them in any any way that that actually would be be working yeah I think that's I think that's right I mean I guess there's a possibility I suppose as things go on rather than because it feels to me that a ban at this point would be so substantial and so dramatic or you know if we're applied to the party as a whole that you know we'll have any number of kind of counterproductive effects whether it's possible to go after individual politicians you know there are there are sort of legal all sorts of kind of legal possible legal consequences involved so who knows I have some you know misgivings about an organization like the the Office for the Protection of the Constitution it's you know I feel very worried when agencies state agencies are empowered like that but then I also feel very worried about the existence of the AfD so I want to ask a question about the legacy of Angela Merkel which obviously hangs pretty heavy over German politics at the moment and the argument that's often made by people on the right and by people some people on the left so I'm thinking of the the Buddhist Sarah Wagner is that with a decision to open the gates as they put it after 2015 to accept an enormous number of Syrian asylum seekers and to have a kind of pro-Assignment policy has been completely destructive of political coherence and political integration in Germany. And so the solution, obviously, on the part of the AfD, and I think it's probably worth saying that the AfD is not just opposed to Islamic migration, it also wants to send Ukrainians home, it's sort of very skeptical about foreign nationals of all kinds, right? But certainly on parts of the sort of anti-woke left, the claim is that by adopting a stricter, much stricter asylum policy, and I think there are very few advocates of remigration on the left, that's a fascist policy. But by adopting a much harder position on migration, then the AfD can be defamed, right? Or the potential forces here can be put back in their box. But that doesn't seem to be the case. I mean, as we've explored already, the position of the federal agencies in Germany is already much more hostile. Is there a solution here that doesn't end up with the AfD deporting? Because so it's worth saying. Segment has promised that the first thing he will do, well, actually, he said the first thing he will do is pull funding from public broadcasters who he accuses of producing left-wing propaganda, but he said that he will kick-start deportations from Saxon Unhalt. Is there a way of avoiding this happening? I mean, it seems to me like it's, you know, people have started to accept that this is the inevitable consequence of the direction of politics in Germany at the moment. Allow me one quick, pedantic preface. Because I think it's sort of, it's important for how we read what has been happening over the last decade or so in Germany, particularly maybe in Europe more broadly. So, as pointed out in an important book called Democracy in Rhodes from the top by a former colleague, Larry Bartels, it can seem like the far right is becoming ever stronger. And it's partly because, you know, disappointed conservatives, voters who used to go for center-right parties are all flocking to them. But as Larry rightly pointed out, in many cases, what you actually see is that people who didn't vote at all beforehand, now all of a sudden find a supply of a party which they like. And if you also look again at Saxon Unhalt, the AfD did incredibly well among citizens who were not voting before. So, it's not the case that, oh, Angela Merkel does X. And then, you know, Y follows and all these people wake up one morning and say, actually, I'm okay with the far right. And now I've no other choice. But at the same time, and we did talk about that, if the center-right more and more basically copies the far right, then indeed also, eventually, plenty of citizens are going to say, well, look, you know, if it's basically now Christian Democrats who I still regard as mainstream actually tell me that it's okay to say this and it's okay to do that, then why shouldn't I, you know, as the phrase goes, go for the original rather than going for what always appears as the pale copy. Now to your actual question, so there's very little that the AfD, I think, can do in terms of, you know, it's, it's major kind of topic refugees migration and so on. They can certainly make life more difficult for people on the ground. It's maybe, it's maybe also worth saying since you mentioned figures like Zellner, that, you know, Greg Bovino came to Europe and basically, more or less, I think, explain to people, look, copy our approach, which on one level, you might simply say, is look, treat people with such cruelty, cruelty and brutality on the ground that eventually does have knock-on effects, even if you can't always change the official, the official policy. So it's possible that they will try something, something like this. But on the whole, there's really not a lot they can do, they can try to restructure the bureaucracy in their own lung to some degree, but the area where they really do have a lot of authority is culture and education. And they also do have figures who, since you alluded to, figures like I did Benoit and sort of more intellectual people behind the far right, they do have people there who think they have ideas and who sometimes also tend to be Christian nationalists and the way that you now find them in the US. Sometimes also actually very anti-Christian, maybe that's also worth pointing out that the far right also has a very strong legacy of paganism that basically comes down to saying actually real man are pagans, real man aren't actually Aaron, actually Christians. Saxon Unheard has a very, very low percentage of Christians. So they have all kinds of things they could play with in terms of how they try to restructure, you know, what is taught, how it's taught. And maybe one thing that's also worth adding is that they have a very, very strong policy commitment to reducing basically inclusion in schools. They also want to make it more difficult. Again, this goes to the point about who actually does some of the workers, they're able to try to make it more difficult for kids to get to gymnasium, so to the kind of school that eventually will get you into university. And as our colleague Doug Mahatsok in a really important short book called The New Fashion's Body pointed out a couple of months ago, they have a lot of rhetoric that seems to be really, I mean, not seems, but really is directly targeting for short-hand that disabled and a little bit like Trump and others, they're obsessed with IQ and who's really deserving and who should be on top in hierarchy. And this is the kind of stuff which, you know, they can do something about where they really have the levers of power now and they could really make life very difficult for people on the ground if they really want to. I mean, it's worth saying, of course, that one doesn't want to draw as you've been saying throughout. This is a relatively small state in terms of population, if not size. We have two more regional elections coming up soon, including one in Berlin. Might it be the case that after those where we have a more complicated and perhaps less gloomy picture, certainly the left seem to be doing that the numbers seem to have ticked up in Berlin. Berlin has a strange kind of political dynamics, but it seems, you know, it's a less, certainly, the IFD is less successful there for reasons that are perhaps not surprising. But is that, you know, is there a risk of drawing two hasty conclusions from this one election? At the risk of saying the obvious clearly now the IFD can present itself as having momentum. And again, if it doubles down on these more positive slogans, everything is possible. I mean, it sounds like Obama rather than, you know, the typical thing the far right would say. It's likely that some people might say, look, you know, something is happening and, you know, we should never forget that, you know, politics is also full of opportunities to will say, look, you know, now it looks like they are really making it. I'm going to get more engaged now and do something for them. So it's hard to to think that, no, this doesn't change anything. At the same time, it would also clearly be wrong to say that, oh, now, you know, we're going to see a similar outcome everywhere. Clearly not. One of the maybe interesting things also to flag is that so far compared also to other countries, other democracies, I think it was right to say that the relatively large degree of decentralization in Germany to have these 16 individual states with, you know, sometimes very significant competences could be seen as something that overall is very good for democracy. It can make life difficult because it can also create lots of veto players, you know, makes politics slow in certain ways, all true. But when the chips are down, it also gives to, you know, use a very big word resistance for democracy a certain foretold. I mean, something we've also seen in the US to some degree. But now, if they really start governing in one state, all of a sudden the question becomes, okay, so what if we have a far right veto player and how much can they do with that? And again, that's particularly relevant in questions of education where a lot of money is basically spent on the basis of agreements between the federal government and all the individual states together. And so far, yes, there were disagreements, but it was basically a given that at the end of the day people were sort of on the same page in terms of what they wanted. I mean, as hollow as all these phrases can be about, you know, excellence in education and so on, it was still sort of clear that, okay, this was not something where you would see major major conflicts. And all of a sudden that possibility might be there. Let me ask a question about the international and perhaps European dimension. And there are, I think, two strands to the international question. And one of the great anxieties at the moment is the, you know, should, should, should, should segment succeed in forming a regional government which I think is still not clear, right? You know, who knows, let me get another round of elections, whatever. But he will be privy or should be privy to, you know, various pieces of sensitive information, you know, as a prominent player in a party that has been very skeptical of support for Ukraine is very close to Russia and is historically at various points, [BLANK_AUDIO] style to the European Union. So that's one risk, I think. And then the other I think, when you step back and look at the possible trend in European politics, there is, you know, and I think it's a bit dangerous as you've suggested to talk purely about a sort of European reactionary international because there are real tensions here, right? Le Pen is going to run for the presidency and actually, you know, for the kind of sort of swing voter that she wants. Proximity to the AfD and it's re-migration policies, perhaps actually excessive for them. So there are real tensions there. Nonetheless, you can see a Europe in which Rassamblum national, Fratelli-Ditalia, Vox in Spain, the AfD. These are all prominent players and then Europe itself starts to look really rather different as well. So I suppose that's my question. It seems to me the AfD is a little bit pseudo-generous in its approach to kind of international questions. It's not quite as, you know, it has this kind of, perhaps inherited from the new right, a kind of civilizational logic, right? It thinks there is a European civilization, you know, that can have relationships. So it's interested in relationships with China, with Russia, and so on, but those are very strongly boarded ones. You know, is it quite distinctive in its approach to these international questions and how far should we be worried about its proximity to Russia? Yes, allow me to make three points in response. So first of all, yes, I would very much underline the first thing you said. Who knows whether Putin would win free and fair elections in Russia today, but he can win an election in Saxon Unheard. That's obviously too simplistic. I'm not saying everything is due to Russian disinformation, but since, as you mentioned at the very beginning, Zara Vagenknecht's party, it is also incredibly pro-Russian. You feel like, okay, this is actually a clear majority and I think it's not a completely crazy thing to say that given how Putin might also misread situations in other countries, remember when, you know, Ukraine is governed by Nazis and we will just liberate them and so on, I think it actually creates a very dangerous situation because he will have paid very close attention to what happened here and what this means about public opinion in Western Europe. So I think that's a major thing to be concerned about. Secondly, again, I don't want to sound like I'm always blaming the center right for everything, but it's maybe also not completely irrelevant to point out that in a certain way, Mouts could have started his whole time and office very differently. He could have said, I mean, not in those words, obviously, but he could have said, "I'm a relatively old man and I'm a child of the Old West Germany." And that means that I still understand the EU in a way that others don't. I'm also very close to Paris. I'm one of the last politicians who understand, so whatever happens, you give a call to Paris first, you make them feel included, even if they're actually not really, you know, very powerful in certain questions. And I'm going to ignore at least certain parts of domestic politics. And I leave it to my, you know, a bad guy interior minister to deal with all the questions around refugees and migration. But not have been a crazy thing to do. And you would have basically been saying, these are such exceptional times. Russia is attacking us. The US and the Trump is now attacking us. China wants to destroy our industry. It's an unprecedented challenge for the European Union. I got to be a great European statesman, but he didn't do that. And more particularly, if anything, he's been signaling that he's very comfortable with Miloni. And that this is the, you know, the basically acceptable ally in many, many ways. And not directly, but indirectly, also been signaling, I don't want to be part of some Paris Madrid axis. I don't want to be Macron, Sanchez, and so on, two left wing, etc. And I think historians might one day say that was actually a pretty important strategic blunder in terms of how both internationally but also domestically, things may have gone differently if she had simply framed his time in office very, very differently. Last point is that yes, the AfD in certain ways, as you say, is Sui generous. It's different, certainly from Miloni, who, you know, has convinced us that she is actually quite skeptical of Russia and so on. The one factor that will now enter the picture, maybe not in a massive way, but I think it's also an entirely trivial, is that Washington has committed to supporting whoever they consider MAGA aligned forces in Europe. I mean, the amounts are not enormous, but the signal of itself is important that now you can basically apply for money from the state department to basically be doing the kinds of things that Orbán used to do in Hungary, you know, basically in a very corrupt way, spend a lot of taxpayers' money on think tanks, on, you know, great festivals and so on. So it's, I think, very likely that the AfD will be seen as a prime contender for that kind of money and that they may well also say, look, you know, we really want to create more of a European network. There's always the vision of if only all these far-right parties truly aligned in the European Parliament, it will be a different world. Usually they don't in the end, there are always new initiatives, you know, Patriots, etc. But I think they all have an incentive to keep trying and to keep sort of, you know, that project alive in certain ways. So the more also I think the AfD now wants to present itself as a party that can sort of show the responsibility more broadly and that must include foreign affairs, I think the more they will have an incentive to, you know, do more in this, in this respect. And, you know, they still have some in Europe who are clearly on their side. So not Malone, but Savini, you know, was immediately gushing that actually that's exactly who we allied with and so on. He might not have that much of a future in Italy, but it's not like there's nobody they can possibly, they can possibly talk to. Yeah, I, I, I, you mentioned the European Parliament that I think they sit separately from even from the major sort of far right grouping. I think they're, I think actually, and it goes to your point, I think they were expelled after one of their MEPs, made some sort of neo-Nazi statement. I can't quite remember the details. Car, I think his name was, yeah. So, so basically not everybody who was in the SS, you know, was a bad person. Yes, right. And that was, if you recall, that was a wonderful court on court opening for Le Pen at the time, because as you said earlier, it allowed her to say, look, we're not like them. Yeah, okay. So, we are a perfectly respectable, you know, party, conservative, and certain ways, and we're not, we're not the far right. Yeah, if a, a final question about the sort of political change in Europe as it were, very famously, Schultz, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, spoke of a site inventor, turning point, and sort of epochal change, and things do seem to be changing. I mean, one thing we haven't mentioned is that, you know, Germany has begun to take militarization and arming itself more seriously in a way that it had, you know, has historically been a bit of a taboo. But it seems to me that there are more fundamental assumptions in European politics changing as well, and one of them is to do with universalism, right, the way that historic parties of the left and the sort of liberal center tend to think in these sort of universalist ways that there is, you know, that you can talk about a category of human beings who deserve things like human rights and political equality. These are no longer, it seems to me, to be taken for granted in the context of European politics. I include Britain in this as well, right? Britain being a small European country whether it likes to think so or not. You know, it seems to me that there's a strong trend now in thinking about the kind of fundamental axioms of politics, in less universalist terms, certainly on, you know, obviously this is true of the AfD, but it seems to be happening in other parties as well, right? So you think in civilizational terms, you think in sort of terms of natural inequalities, right? And there's a strong movement from the United States to push back against the idea of their being a sort of fundamental political equality of human beings or citizens or whatever. There's a strong effort to emphasise that there are outsiders to our political community and that society has to be defended from them. I suppose it's an open question, it's a difficult one to answer. Does this, one does this sound like a reasonable reading of a trend in European politics and global politics, but two, is there a risk that's simply arguing in these terms, simply restating the fundamentals of political equality, simply restating, you know, these things that we have taken as axioms for so long, is inadequate. Do we need to re-articulate, I say, we, anyone who's interested in the defence of kind of democracy as, you know, predicated on political equality? Does there need to be a re-articulation of a reasoning basis for this political form? Well, we must be universalist, one that includes all. Let me maybe draw a distinction between, on the one hand, what is sometimes in the U.S. and I think increasingly also in the U.K., known as reactionary centrist, indeed opting into a sort of soft nationalism, that basically makes many concessions to the far right, at the same time says is what we actually differ in but basically the nation stayed nationally. is one level it's kind of non-negotiable and that certainly has been, has been, has been happening. At the same time, I think we also need to give credit to those people, including among Christian Democrats, for instance, who actually say that certain, let's say, notions of human dignity are not negotiable. And I think this is by now completely forgotten, but this was one of the justifications from Merkel in 2015 to say, "Look, I as a Christian, I, you know, if somebody comes to me with this level of desperation and an emergency, I can't just simply turn them away. I'm not saying, and therefore she was great and everything was okay. But nevertheless, I think there are still plenty of people around who actually, in principle, would want to hold on to certain, to certain ideals. And of course, it's a problem. If then elite actors who they tend to identify with keep telling them that no, but that's naive or the success of the far right proves conclusively that, you know, there's no way you can ever win elections with this. So, I think that's, there's certainly something happening, but I think we should not be quite so, so defeated. I would distinguish that from something which really has disappeared. And if you think back, you know, 20, 25 years, there was all this high-minded talk of the European Union as what was called a normative power. So, especially around the time of the Second Iraq War, there were lots of people who said, look, the Americans, you know, they invade countries with a military, and that's how they try to make them into democracies. We do it differently. And we basically just make them members of the European Union. And even beyond the member states, we have this kind of radiation of great universalist ideals. And everything around us always, always becomes, becomes, becomes better, almost like a burky and sort of story of contentric circles in a certain, then a certain way. And as far as I know, nobody talks like this anymore. Europe simply has sort of switched into an entirely defensive mode. And as we said a few minutes ago, I mean, that good objective reasons for that. It's not crazy. Nevertheless, the sense that actually in certain ways, this is also a model which might be important. People seem to have entirely given up. And of course, the fact that actually, you know, when was the last time there was actually a new member state of the European Union? Well, it's a demo. It's very long ago. And that everything that happens around Europe now is something that nobody ideally in elite circles wants to talk about, because we've basically outsourced, you know, the very things that we criticize in the US in terms of what ISIS is doing to, you know, the Libyan coast guard and Libyan prisons, that's what. So I think that that is a real sea change. And again, I would somewhat tend to blame certain German elites more for this than others. We shouldn't, you know, start to idealize my call. But if you recall in 2017, you get this big speech at the so bonn. And he basically says European sovereignty, a new vision of Europe. And Berlin never called back. I mean, Paris is still waiting for that phone call that says, and he has what we now say in response to that. And that's a distinct, that's a distinct failure. And I think in the end, all Europeans probably would pay the price for that in a certain way. Well, I think that is probably the right place for us to leave it. Not, not a bright note, but an important one. But no, I'm curious about the central question of the purpose of Europe. I mean, it remains an open and important, important question. Jan van der Müller, thank you. Thanks very much for having me. My thanks to Jan van der Müller for guiding us through the rather disquieting rise of the if day in Germany and its implications for Europe. If you have enjoyed this conversation, you would probably enjoy reading the London Review of Books and our current issue, which is out now on Newstands near you includes James Meek on Council and Social Housing Colin Barrow on literary criticism in the legacy of Helen Vendler, Emily Whitt reads Rachel Kask and Anne Carson goes to a razor leagig. Thanks for listening. Hank joined BJ's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. 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