Fall of the Berlin Firewall

Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and soon to be chancellor of Germany, announced he was going ‘all in’ last month when he presented the Bundestag with his plan to turn asylum seekers away at the border. This meant openly courting support from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose votes proved decisive. It was already clear that migration – not Ukraine, the climate or the recessionary economy – would be the dominant theme of the federal election on 23 February. But after a deadly knife attack by a rejected Afghan asylum seeker in Aschaffenburg on 22 January, Merz upped the ante. It was a characteristically impulsive and provocative move, without a clear purpose other than to prove his mettle by violating the taboo on co-operating with the far right.

When the eurosceptic economist Hans-Olaf Henkel used the term Brandmauer, or firewall, in the European Parliament in 2014, he was referring to Article 125 of the Maastricht Treaty, a ‘no-bailout clause’ supposed to shelter prudential Swabian householders from the financial contagion sweeping southern Europe. Henkel had recently been elected as one of the AfD’s first MEPs. The word Brandmauer was later used to refer to the divide between the fiscal conservatives who founded the party and the unsavoury characters lurking at its völkisch fringes.

A decade on, Henkel’s coterie are long gone, and the firewall supposedly surrounds the entire party, which includes so many right-wing extremists and Nazi sympathisers that even Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni have kept their distance. Yet its growing political presence is not easy to contain. There is no Brandmauer in the many local councils, especially in the east, where co-operation between other parties and the AfD is routine; and in 2020 the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) relied on AfD votes to elect their candidate as premier of the state of Thuringia, though he promptly resigned.

But Merz’s pulling down of the Brandmauer at the national level, just two days after the Bundestag marked the liberation of Auschwitz, electrified the campaign. The AfD leader, Alice Weidel, celebrated her party’s triumphant arrival in the political mainstream; Angela Merkel made a rare post-retirement intervention to rebuke her successor; several CDU deputies balked on a second vote to pass the plan as a law; and hundreds of thousands of people assembled in towns and cities across Germany, chanting ‘Wir sind die Brandmauer!’ (‘We are the firewall’). In the Bundestag, the Die Linke deputy Heidi Reichinnek, a tattoo of Rosa Luxemburg visible on her left forearm, tore into the conservatives and called the masses to the barricades. The video gained millions of views on TikTok and Instagram, and the democratic socialist party, widely predicted to fall short of the Bundestag’s 5 per cent entry hurdle, began to climb in the polls.

Turnout on Sunday was 82.5 per cent, the highest since reunification. The CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, finished first with 29 per cent. It’s enough to make Merz chancellor, but a poor showing by the goliath of postwar German democracy against a weak and unpopular incumbent government.

Events were not kind to the coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and FDP that came to power in 2021. The war in Ukraine inspired a new German militarism and a massive rearmament drive, but the loss of Russian gas spiked inflation and crippled heavy industries already suffering from years of underinvestment and increased competition from China. The coalition collapsed last November, precipitating the early election, when Olaf Scholz sacked the FDP leader, Christian Lindner, as finance minister.

The debt brake that Merkel added to the constitution in 2009, which limits new borrowing to 0.35 per cent of GDP, along with the machinations of the fiscal hawks in the FDP, had scuppered the coalition’s agenda on social policy and climate, leaving the SPD and Greens with little to do besides increasing deportations and assisting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As workers have been laid off at steel mills, auto plants and chemical works across Germany, the SPD slumped to 16 per cent, its worst result in more than a century. The entire board of the Greens’ youth wing resigned last year in protest at the party’s compromises on climate policy. Its vote share on Sunday fell to 12 per cent.

On the eve of the election, the AfD’s loudest international cheerleader, Elon Musk, shared a video by Bjorn Höcke, the chair of AfD Thuringia, demanding ‘our country’ back. The level of direct election interference by Musk and J.D. Vance, who at the Munich Security Conference called for other parties to work directly with the AfD, has astounded German politicians from across the spectrum. Yet over ten million Germans voted for the party, more than twice as many as in 2021.

The AfD is now the dominant party nationally among young men, those who consider themselves economically precarious, and self-identified blue-collar workers. It finished in second place across the states of what was once West Germany, and won in Gelsenkirchen, the country’s poorest city. Its dominance in eastern states such as Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg verges on the hegemonic. Reports by domestic intelligence classifying the AfD branches in those states as right-wing extremist have not prevented it from embedding itself in schools, workplaces, sporting clubs and throughout associational life.

Among the party’s new intake are the winner of Merkel’s old constituency, 31-year-old Dario Seifert, who as a teenager marched with the youth wing of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party; and the long-time MEP and Tiktok provocateur Maximilian Krah, who has been readmitted to the party after he was suspended last year for saying that not everyone in the SS was necessarily a criminal. As the largest opposition party, the AfD will receive significant financial support from the state and speaking time in the Bundestag. Its influence will grow on parliamentary committees.

The FDP did not meet the 5 per cent threshold to get any seats in the Bundestag – they got 91 last time – and Lindner, with a final misty-eyed paean to the freedom of the individual and the market economy, bowed out of political life. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, a splinter from Die Linke, also fell short.

Die Linke’s focus on wages, housing, climate and fighting the far-right drew tens of thousands of new members in just a few months, many of them disaffected SPD and Green voters. In Berlin, waves of volunteers hit the doorsteps – still a rare tactic here – and the party took its first ever districts in the former West Germany. It finished on 9 per cent, just shy of its historic best, winning overall in the capital and nationally among the young, especially women.

The election marks the end of the frontline careers of Scholz, Lindner, Wagenknecht and the Green leader, Robert Habeck. Yet the result is familiar: a return to the grand coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD that has governed Germany for most of this century. Even Merz, a Transatlanticist beyond reproach, is persuaded that the rift between the US and Europe will not be mended under Trump and Vance. On Sunday night he compared the White House’s election meddling to the Kremlin’s, and said that Europe must ‘achieve independence from the US’. He also reiterated that the CDU/CSU would uphold its interpretation of the Brandmauer and never form a coalition with the AfD, a position backed by an overwhelming majority of voters.

With the campaign of immigration mania over, focus has turned back to reform of the debt brake. The AfD and Die Linke, which both oppose increased weapons spending, will hold enough seats in the next parliament to block it: any breach of the constitutional spending constraints requires a two-thirds majority. Merz’s conservatives are now in negotiations with the outgoing SPD and Green government to push through a special defence fund worth up to €200 billion.