THE RISE OF GERMANY’S FAR RIGHT REFLECTS A SYSTEMIC CRISIS

New piece in Jacobin magazine on the AfD's 44% in Saxony-Anhalt and why the standard explanations for the far right keep failing.

Already in the run up to the election, the German commentariat went looking for the "one" variable. The bureaucracy is too slow - need to cut it. East Germans have a defective political culture - need to educate them. It's immigration - need to toughen up. Merz concluded that the government simply hadn't explained its excellent policies clearly enough. Thirteen years of uninterrupted AfD growth, 20 years of rising illiberalism globally, and the diagnosis is a communication problem. What level of intellectual nihilism is this?

The institutionalist story fails because the far right is global: it's now Europe's most popular party family, and every country blames its own local quirk. The Ossi-bashing story fails because the same servile-national-character thesis was applied to Poles and Hungarians, among many others, right up until they voted their illiberal governments out, turning the two countries into laboratories of democracy. And the cultural backlash story of old uneducated man, still the most influential and by now the most thoroughly refuted theory of populism, fails on the basic facts: the AfD was founded by neoliberal economists, its chief whip has a Hayek portrait on his office wall, it won 41 percent of first-time voters, and its biggest donors are a diagnostics magnate and a real estate billionaire. This is exclusionary nationalism as a rebranding of neoliberalism, the path Fidesz, the Republicans, and Reform UK & co have all taken.

Misdiagnosis produces dead-end strategies. The firewall creates a dual political sphere that leaves the theme of change to the far right and produces coalitions that cannot govern. Copying its migration program doesn't work either; Merz tried it in January 2025 and four weeks later the AfD doubled its vote from the previous election. As to "letting them govern and watch them fail:" I have sixteen years of "demystifying the far right in power" with Orbán to offer as a test; I don't recommend trying it.

The far right is a symptom of the exhaustion of the postwar class compromise that made liberal democracy possible in the first place. Polanyi and Gramsci worked this out for the 1930s, and their frameworks fit today with uncomfortable precision. German real wages have stagnated since the early 1990s; 89 percent of AfD voters in Saxony-Anhalt fear they cannot pay their bills; the state has lost a quarter of its population since reunification. Wherever the industrial crisis is concentrated, the far right is strong, including in the old SPD strongholds of the Ruhr.

Polanyi identified two exits from this kind of paralysis. One was fascism. The other was social democracy. So far, today's "polycrisis" has produced only the first answer. As long as we keep reading the far right one variable at a time, nobody will offer the second answer.

Full piece here: https://jacobin.com/.../afd-crisis-system-psychology...

Thank you David Broder for the opportunity!