Angela Merkel has created Germany’s far-rightShe has deleted most of her party’s conservative tradition – and AfD has been quick to fill the gap
Fredrik Erixon
Bankruptcy, wrote Ernest Hemingway, happens in two ways — ‘gradually and then suddenly’. By now, Angela Merkel will be beginning to fear that her remarkable career is about to move into that second motion. Barely a year ago, she was being talked about as the leader of the free world. Now she is blamed by her own party for upending German politics and, in the process, allowing the far-right to become a real political force for the first time since the 1940s. The cover of Der Spiegel, Germany’s main weekly, last week summed it up in one word: ‘Crisis.’
It’s a crisis that’s been intensifying for some time. It began when the federal elections last September delivered the worst result for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union since 1949 — a result so abysmal she was lucky not to be ousted. That may yet happen. There is growing ‘Merkel fatigue’ in the country and her centrist theology — Merkelism — is seen as a cause, not a remedy, for the current malaise. Her open-door migration policy has been blamed for pushing voters into the arms of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and transforming it from a reviled fringe group to a party with 92 members of parliament. Merkel’s latest move is to give AfD the status its members crave. By forming a coalition with her main opponent, the Social Democratic Party, she has made AfD into the main parliamentary opposition. Or, as the party itself would put it, the main alternative for Germany.
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This is all quite new to modern German politics. Unlike Austria and France, the far-right has never been a realistic electoral force. Nor did AfD start out as extremists: it began when a group of economics professors set out to defend German economic orthodoxy, protesting against the eurozone bailout of Greece. It later branched into migration policy and gradually found its populist voice, helped in no small measure by Merkel’s welcoming of refugees in the summer of 2015.
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https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/02/angela-merkel-has-created-germanys-far-right/
