With the voting part of the German election done and dusted overnight, we now get to see how the country’s traditionally centre-right Christian Democrats manage the big challenge of all conservative parties: the surge of right-wing neo-fascist parties off the back of anti-migrant racism.
In Germany, it’s called Die Brandmauer — the firewall against any collaboration with the extreme right. Think of it as a more high-stakes equivalent of Australia’s political parties putting One Nation last on their how-to-votes.
In most post-COVID elections across Europe, the vote for, and parliamentary representation of, anti-immigrant, white supremacist parties has increased. In most countries, the only path to a majority for the right now runs through collaboration with fascists.
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Last night’s election continues the global story of the collapse of the 20th century’s stable two-party system with the CDU (and its Bavarian partner the CSU) winning a plurality with just 29% of the vote and the outgoing Social Democrats slumping to about 16%, pushed out of second place by the far right-wing (anti-migrant, pro-Russia) Alternative for Germany (AfD). Just a decade ago in the 2013 elections, the two big parties shared two-thirds of the vote.
The traditional third party, the liberal Free Democrats which, over the years, has promiscuously formed increasingly unstable coalitions with either side, looks set to fall below the 5% threshold for representation in the Bundestag.
Will the Christian Democrats attempt to turn their plurality into a majority by looking to the long-barred right, trading tougher migration laws for parliamentary support, or by linking to their left, Angela Merkel-style, forming a coalition government with the Social Democrats and/or Greens that commits to supporting Ukraine?
Across democracies over the past three years, the fires of surging nationalist populism have already burnt past the “no fascists!” barrier in long-standing social democracies like Sweden and the Netherlands (and even, in its own way, in New Zealand) with legacy centre-right parties going cap in hand to the hard-right to claim parliamentary majorities.
As well as the now usual Russian misinformation, Germany’s traditional parties have had to contend with high-powered arsonists setting off a few spot-fires of their own: “AfD!”, the world’s richest man Elon Musk pinned to his X feed over the weekend, while US Vice President JD Vance used his intervention at the Munich security conference to declare: “There is no room for firewalls.”
Europe’s far-right parties are like vampires: they need the traditional right to invite them inside so they can suck them dry of credibility, as Germany’s Christian Democrats found earlier this year when they leaned on the AfD’s votes in Parliament to embarrass the outgoing Social Democrat-led government with a call to crack down on asylum seekers. Suddenly, polls showed, their vote slid, with voters shifting to the apparently legitimated AfD.
The American interventions last week drove mass protests under the slogan “Wie sind die Brandmauer” (We are the Firewall!). Comparing the vote to polling suggests the protests stalled both the Christian Democrats and the AfD and drove turnout to over 80%, with the surprise being the left-wing Die Linke, which broke through the 5% threshold for parliamentary representation, seeing off a challenge from the populist and anti-migrant splinter Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance.
Although CDU leader (and incoming Chancellor) Friedrich Merz renewed his pledge to respect the firewall, the conservative parties have form in playing footsies with the AfD. In a report last year, the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation reported over a hundred cases where the CDU had voted with the AfD on anti-migrant resolutions at the local level.
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Germany, of course, has an, umm… unique historical view of what happens when the traditional conservatives pander to the ethno-nationalist extreme to their right. But they also have a few more modern parallels that suggest the traditional right is damned whatever it does.
On one hand, in France, the conservative collaboration by Les Republicans in the cross-party republican front against Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National saw their vote collapse to about 7% in last year’s parliamentary vote. While in Spain, the conservative Partido Popular has held up its vote through an alliance with the neo-Francoist Vox Party but has struggled to build majorities that rely on cooperating with regional parties that have bad memories of a pre-democratic Spain.
Or they could look around the world to New Zealand, where the National government’s support for the campaign by their right-wing partner, ACT, to downgrade First Nations’ rights under the Treaty of Waitangi has seen Nationals support slide (and ACT’s rise slightly).
There’s an economic price, too. In Sweden, for example, the right’s anti-migrant policies adopted by the so-called “Moderates” government elected in 2022 have seen net emigration from the country for the first time in 50 years. Net migration fell in New Zealand last year, too, while the new right-supported Netherlands government has announced “the strictest asylum policy ever”.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton seems to need little encouragement to pander to anti-migrant sentiment, falsely claiming last week that the Australian government was fast-tracking citizenship for Palestinian asylum seekers.
His core strategy has been to consolidate to the right — to win office by drawing back that 10% of voters who drifted from the Liberals to parties like One Nation, the United Australia Party and the Liberal Democrats.
Apparently, there’s no place for firewalls here.
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