For a rather modestly sized blossom, the lavender-colored corn flower carries a heavy burden. Despite its unassuming, dandelion-esque appearance, it was chosen as an element in the logo of the Alldeutsche Vereinigung political movement way back in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the 1890s. Alldeutsche wasn’t just any political party, though. It was at the vanguard of the passel of virulently irredentist groups that were popping up across the German-speaking world at the time like fungus after rain. And its founder, Georg von Schönerer, was one of the most radical anti-Semites around. An early proponent of racial anti-Semitism, Schönerer even received the dubious honor of a mention in Mein Kampf as an early, ideological mentor of Adolf Hitler.
Skipping ahead a few years to early 20th century Vienna, a corn flower worn on the lapel became a symbol for anti-Semitic hostility. In the 1930s, when overt Nazi symbols were outlawed in Austria, the corn flower became a way for covert Nazis to recognize each other on the streets.
Ahead of Germany’s Sept. 24 general election, Matthias Helferich, a candidate from Dortmund for the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) was photographed at a campaign appearance with a corn flower pinned to his lapel. It is the kind of stunt that has become common among right-wingers in Austria in recent years, with even Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the Freedom Party of Austria, wearing the pale-purple blossom in parliament on occasion. But in Germany, which has spent decades confronting the horrific crimes of its past, all forms of extremist dog-whistling have traditionally been a political dead-end.
Helferich, it should be noted, isn’t one of the 93 AfD deputies who will soon take their seats in Germany’s federal parliament in Berlin after the party raked in 12.6 percent of the vote in last Sunday’s general election. He lost his bid for to be directly elected. But it almost certainly wasn’t because of the corn flower.
A quick glance at some of those now entering parliament on the AfD ticket makes it clear that the German firewall – the country’s national consensus to never again flirt with right-wing nationalism and identitarian racism – has eroded dramatically. Alexander Gauland, for example, who will lead the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag, believes that Germany’s Turkish-German commissioner for integration should be “disposed of” in Anatolia and that Germans “don’t want a Boateng as a neighbor,” a reference to German national-team player Jérôme Boateng, who is black.
The AfD parliamentary group also includes Martin Hohmann, who was booted out of the center-right Christian Democrats for his 2003 plenary speech seeking to relativize the crimes of the Nazis by comparing them to the alleged crimes of the Jews. It includes Wilhelm von Gottberg, who believes the Nazi mass annihilation of the Jews is a “myth.” It includes Judge Jens Maier, who pledged during the campaign that he would fight against “the production of half-breeds that are wiping out our national identity.” And it includes Siegbert Droese, head of the local AfD chapter in Leipzig, whose car bears the license plate number L AH 1818. The “L” is for Leipzig. The rest? It doesn’t take an expert in Nazi numerology to figure it out.
There are some in the foreign media who have sought to sell the election results as a setback for the European populist right and evidence for Merkel’s tight hold on power in Germany. Joe Scarborough of NBC, for example, tweeted not long after the polls closed on Sunday evening: “In Germany, Merkel’s center holds. Reactionary populism is held in check once again in Europe.”
The broader picture, though, is slightly more disturbing. Merkel’s conservatives lost heavily in this election relative to four years ago, winning just 32.9 percent against 41.5 in 2013. Her junior coalition partners, the Social Democrats, were likewise pummeled, limping to 20.5 percent, the party’s worst result since the Weimar Republic. And worst of all, 12.6 percent of the population either welcomed or saw fit to ignore the AfD’s increasingly vociferous embrace of Islamophobic and xenophobic nationalism, granting a right-wing party seats in the Bundestag for the first time in decades. It was almost as though the “wall-pickers” of 1989 had suddenly turned their attentions to Germany’s historically-informed firewall against right-wing extremism.
Early on in the campaign, it looked as though things might turn out differently. To be sure, the AfD entered last autumn on a high, consistently polling well over 10 percent and building on a trio of strong performances in state parliamentary votes in 2016. The party’s high-water mark, an astounding 24.3 percent result in Saxony-Anhalt in March 2016, had many fearing the worst as the general election appeared on the horizon.
But last winter, the party went into a swoon—a dip in support that would grow deeper throughout the spring and bottom out in the summer. During that time, another trio of state elections came and went, and while the AfD managed to squeak into parliament in all three states, its results were hardly convincing. Many began hoping against hope that the scourge of the AfD was fading.
An important pillar of such optimism was a feeling that perhaps the AfD’s strategy for attracting attention had grown obsolete. Right-wing populist parties tend to thrive in situations where they can blast away at the “establishment” and accuse the “elite” of ignoring the true concerns of the “people.” It is a recipe that has worked well across Europe, particularly in those countries where the two big-tent parties on the center-right and the center-left have ruled either alternately or together in a “grand coalition.” Not coincidentally, the AfD’s growth began accelerating soon after Merkel joined the Social Democrats in a grand coalition in 2013, her second such government in three legislative periods.
As 2017 progressed, however, the AfD’s signature issue—the refugee crisis and its aftermath—faded further and further into the background. Not only that, but two other developments seemed to be eating into their support. For one, the slow-motion train wreck of Brexit combined with the election of Donald Trump on the strength of his siren song sung to the white-supremacist right—and the catastrophic start to his presidency that ensued—seemed to send a collective shudder down the spines of Europeans across the Continent. One survey released in June by the European affiliate of the Pew Research Center revealed a rapidly rising approval rate for the European Union in a number of EU member states, including Germany.
The other development had to do with Merkel herself. The AfD had initially planned to run a campaign heavily focused on Merkel herself, due to her direct responsibility for opening German borders to the influx of refugees from Syria (and elsewhere) in September 2015. Indeed, an AfD strategy paper leaked to the press in early 2017 noted: “The AfD would be well advised to transform the 2017 election into a ‘plebiscite against Angela Merkel.'”
But then, Merkel—who many analysts thought had finally jettisoned her reasoned, analytical political style for a more emotional approach to the refugee crisis —turned back into Merkel. In preparation for her run for re-election to a fourth term in the Chancellery, Merkel tightened up her refugee policies, making it easier to deport those refused asylum and making it more difficult for those granted asylum to bring their families in after them. Just as she had spent much of her first 12 years in the Chancellery moving left to capture votes in the center of the political spectrum, she was now moving to the right in an attempt to poach back voters from the AfD—an attempt that looked to many pundits, including this one, as though it was meeting with some success.
Except that it apparently wasn’t that simple. The election on September 24 returned the most diversified—or fractured, depending on your perspective—parliament postwar Germany has ever seen. Fully seven parties are sending deputies to parliament, if you count the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister to Merkel’s CDU, as a separate party. And Merkel’s conservatives saw their vote share drop to its lowest level since 1949. Apparently, the national Merkel-fatigue that become apparent in 2016 hadn’t gone away.
Moreover, when it comes to support for right-wing populist parties, it isn’t clear that policy is the decisive factor. Perception is at least equally important. And in the final weeks of the campaign, the AfD threw everything it had into getting potential supporters to buy into its two-fold message: It was time for Merkel to go; and it was time to throw off the chains of political correctness and speak openly about the problems facing the country.
A result of 12.6 percent for the AfD, of course, is hardly an indication that Germany has completely turned its back on the critical examination of its 20th century history that allowed the country to regain a central place in the European community of nations in the decades following World War II. It does, however, show that the right-wing populists managed to tap into a vein of identitarian frustration in a similar way that Trump mobilized frustrated whites in the U.S. And their campaign slogan—”Show Courage, Germany”—was custom made for those voters who were still wary of breaking the linguistic and ideological taboos that, though eroding, remain strong in Germany.
Furthermore, the AfD proved radically more adept at using social media to get its message out than other German parties – at least partly a result of the decision to team up with Texas-based Harris Media. The marketing agency’s founder, Vincent Harris, has been dubbed by Bloomberg as “the man who invented the Republican internet” and he was involved in the campaigns of both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. With just weeks to go before Germany’s Sept. 24 general election, the AfD once again began gaining in the polls.
Perhaps the best marketing for a mainstream-rejecting, political-establishment-excoriating party like the AfD, though, came from the establishment parties themselves. Merkel ran a campaign focused tightly on her person, almost completely ignoring the issues altogether. One widely-used poster, in fact, was simply a photo of Merkel with the date of the election printed in bold lettering. For those who were tiring of her leadership, it was essentially an invitation to vote for the party that was most critical in its condemnation of the chancellor. SPD candidate Martin Schulz, meanwhile, proved unable – at least until his televised temper-tantrum after the polls had closed on election night – to convince voters that he was much different from Merkel. When the two took to the television studio in early September for their lone debate, they spent most of the 90 minutes agreeing with each other.
In a certain sense, one could argue that the country’s firewall is holding up just fine. Even if the AfD did manage to embolden many voters to cast their ballots for the far right, much of the party’s support came in eastern Germany, which due to its communist history, isn’t nearly as well inoculated against political extremism as those in the west. In states belonging to former East Germany, the party won more than 20 percent of the vote whereas in western Germany, it came in fourth place, with just over 10 percent.
But if the vote showed one thing, it is perhaps that people are tiring of the leadership of the country’s two big-tent parties more quickly than was initially apparent during the campaign. Both the CDU and the SPD lost significant chunks of voters to other parties and together, they lost 105 seats in the Bundestag.
For the time being, the AfD is well positioned to profit from that growing fatigue. With Merkel back in power, the populists will be able to continue their attacks on the political establishment. And now that the party has 93 parliamentarians, it will benefit from even greater exposure in the national media than it has already enjoyed.
That, though, also poses one of the greatest threats to the AfD. Ever since its founding as an anti-euro, CDU splinter party, the brainchild of semi-prominent economist Bernd Lucke, it has been moving to the right. And each lurch to the extreme has been accompanied by a leadership battle, bitter infighting and the specter of a split. The most recent such battle has pitted Frauke Petry—who was the face of the party until its April convention, when her attempt to stop the rightward drift at “Islamophobic” rather than “extremist” failed—and Alexander Gauland, who has just been named the party’s parliamentary group leader. Though elected to parliament as an AfD parliamentarian, Petry left the party the day after the election and is by all accounts hoping to be able to take some of the party with her.
Just as dangerous, though, will be the challenge of trying to keep the party’s more radical deputies from completely trampling the standards of decency in German public life. At first glance, though, that doesn’t seem to be much of a priority for the party, if one can take AfD floor leader Gauland as an example. Speaking to his supporters on Sunday night after the first exit poll results were announced, the 76-year-old former CDU member said: “We will hunt her down! We will hunt down Ms. Merkel… and we will take back our country and our people!”