Ruairí Casey

A desperate flurry of possible solutions, from the stopgap to the structural, has whirled across the German political establishment and media in the week since the AfD won a record 44 per cent of the vote in the small eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, leaving them only three seats short of a majority. Existing efforts to deflect or contain the tide of support for the far right, primarily through a ‘firewall’ agreement between established parties to refuse to go into coalition with the it, have run out of road. Exclusion has both radicalised and strengthened it. The AfD’s winning campaign in Saxony-Anhalt put the issue of ‘remigration’, adopted directly from the fascist Identitarian movement, front and centre. It now stands to enter government not as a junior coalition partner but as a senior one.

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.

The parliamentary resolution, entitled ‘Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany’, was jointly conceived by the three governing parties and the opposition Christian Democrats. Hours after Olaf Scholz sacked his FDP finance minister, bringing an end to the governing coalition and heralding new elections, the Bundestag passed the resolution this morning by a large majority. The AfD also voted in favour. Its deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch (a scion of the royal House of Oldenburg whose maternal grandfather was Hitler’s finance minister), paid thanks to the parties behind the resolution, in particular the Greens, for following the AfD’s lead in linking antisemitism to immigration, the left and Islam. ‘Reality has caught up with them,’ she said. ‘The proposed solution in their motion also goes in our direction … Put Muslim antisemites on the plane and back home.’

After East and West Germany signed a Transit agreement in 1971, people trying to escape across the Berlin Wall were less likely to use subterranean tunnels than to conceal themselves in food trucks or rental vans as they passed through checkpoints. Some were helped by friends or family but more turned to professionals, who charged as much as 45,000 marks for their expertise in smuggling people over the border. The East German authorities searched vehicles for stowaways and handed out stiff prison sentences to Fluchthelfer, who were vilified as criminal traffickers.

German lignite coal makes an appearance in the Annals of Tacitus, who described ‘fires breaking from the ground’ in 58 AD. Rain did not quench the flames, and desperate locals thrashed them with clubs as the blaze raced towards Colonia Agrippina, now Cologne. Cheap and peaty, lignite is the world’s most polluting fossil fuel; no country has burned more of it since the industrial age began than Germany. Extraction requires open-cast mining, which has displaced tens of thousands of people, razed hundreds of settlements, and disfigured an area larger than Surrey. Lützerath, a village an hour west of Cologne, will be lignite’s last victim in the Rhineland, soon to be swallowed whole by the vast Garzweiler pit.