Paul Hockenos
When Germany’s election results were announced on Feb. 23 at the packed headquarters of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Berlin, the hall erupted into wild rejoicing. The party’s leadership, among it frontperson Alice Weidel, and hundreds of supporters waving German flags immediately recognized the party’s 21 percent tally as a conspicuous victory—exactly twice its 2021 result—even though the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) won more votes by 8 percentage points, and with this the mandate to form a government.
Despite the fact that Germany’s other parties refuse to govern with it, the AfD—an extremist xenophobic party with ties to neo-Nazis—has definitively broken out of the margins and is positioned squarely at the center of German politics. It is now Germany’s second-strongest party; the largest opposition party in the Bundestag; the favored party of the working class; the no. 1 party in Germany’s eastern states; a darling of the new U.S. administration; and it also boasts representation in the regional legislatures of all but one German state and in the EU parliament, too, where it is buttressed by like-minded allies.
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