Germany, Merz and the unpatriotic extreme right

English original of article published in Italian by La Stampa today

This week I have been in Japan, where just like everywhere else all the talk is about how to deal with the imperialistic challenge of Donald Trump. Usually, the conclusion is that Japan and Europe need to work together in these difficult times. And then comes an inevitable question: are any of Europe’s leaders strong enough to stand up to Trump?

The best answer has been that we should all wait until Germany’s elections on February 23^rd, when Friedrich Merz from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) should emerge as Europe’s new focal point. But a question remains: will he, really, be that strong leader we have all been waiting for? And what role will Germany’s extreme right, the Alternativ Fur Deutschland (AfD) party so beloved of Elon Musk, play after that election?

With any new political leader, there will always be doubt as to whether they will be able to overcome their lack of experience and rise to the demands of their new job. Such doubts existed when Angela Merkel competed with Gerhard Schroeder in elections in 2005, just as they did when Giorgia Meloni was running for election in Italy in 2022. In reality, both in Germany and in Italy the biggest factor determining governmental success is the stability of the new leader’s coalition and their skill at managing that coalition.

Friedrich Merz is clearly an intelligent man who understands a lot about both national politics and the German economy. It is he, not the AfD, that truly stands a chance of restoring German competitiveness. The previous German government, a three-party coalition between Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Green Party and the very fiscally conservative Free Democrats, was weak because it was a coalition of incompatible parties, married together just for temporary convenience. It would be hard for Merz’s coalition after the February 23^rdelection to be worse than that.

It would be hard, but not impossible. The big test for Merz is coming now, and it is a test rooted in German history: how to deal with competition for votes from the AfD, an extreme right-wing party that contains elements of nostalgic support for Adolf Hitler and for Nazi-ism, which is hitting about 20% in opinion polls and looks poised to be the second largest party in the Bundestag, the key house of parliament.

This past week, Merz chose to support a quite right-wing proposal to control illegal immigration into Germany by promising to deport anyone who tries to enter the country without any passport or other official documentation, saying he would do so even if the law could pass only with AfD support.

Predictably, this caused an uproar. Even Angela Merkel, Merz’s predecessor as CDU leader, intervened to say that she thought it was dangerous to form any kind of political alliance with an extremist party, as it would break a powerful post-1945 taboo in German politics of never aligning with the far right. To Merz’s embarrassment, Merkel’s voice proved more influential than his: in the end, the draft law failed to pass in parliament as 12 members of his own party rebelled against him.

Fundamentally, this issue raises two awkward questions. The first is of how much time must pass before the terrible legacy of Nazi history can be cleared away, allowing extreme right-wing positions to become acceptable elements of democratic debate. Plainly, any idea of replacing democracy with violence or other authoritarian methods should remain unacceptable to all who believe in democracy. But the AfD, like Fratelli d’Italia, do not officially stand for violent or anti-democratic methods: the party contains elements that do admire Hitler, just as Fratelli d’Italia has elements of nostalgia for Mussolini, but this is not the main source of the party’s rising popularity.

This raises the second question: what policies and attitudes really count as “extreme” in modern times? Immigration is the constant test, and the truth about immigration policies in all European countries, like in Trump’s America, is that they have become more harsh and especially intolerant of illegal immigration. The line between illegal immigration and legitimate seekers of political asylum has become much harder to draw than was the case 10 or 20 years ago.

Tough immigration policies have become mainstream. President Trump’s deportation flights for illegal migrants in the US have grabbed the headlines since his inauguration, but they are not in fact a new idea. Plenty of illegal migrants were deported under Presidents Obama and Biden too, but they did not make as loud a noise about it. The real difficulty is the classic one for all democracies: how to reconcile competing but equally important ideas in a democratic context. The rule of law is one such important liberal idea. Equal human rights for all is another. With illegal immigration, these ideas come into conflict.

For this reason, the real shadow over the AfD, just as was the case for Fratelli d’Italia and its predecessors, is whether a party that has prospered thanks to taking extreme political positions will now be persuadable to moderate its message and appeal to more mainstream voters so as to achieve real power.

Friedrich Merz made a big political mistake this week by actually seeming to work with AfD support, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong to try to draw away AfD voters by showing that he too wants to be tough on immigration. Although critics say that this legitimises the extreme right, the unavoidable truth is that being tough on illegal immigration is popular with many voters.

The true obstacle to the AfD becoming acceptable in the near future is not its stance on immigration but rather its support for Russia and Vladimir Putin. Such backing for any country that threatens European and therefore German security and that is killing Europeans in nearby Ukraine is a flagrant contradiction to its claims to stand for nationalism and sovereignty. Only when the AfD becomes truly patriotic will it really become a viable, mainstream party. Currently it is an agent of a foreign power, and can safely be rejected.