*Updated May 22, 2024 at 6:00 p.m.
-Analysis-
BERLIN — Is this the end of a paradox? For a number of years, the far right has registered a stunning rise in both France and Germany, but by applying completely opposing political strategies. But their parallel success story appears to have broken down — starting this past January.
At the start of the year, the Alternative für Deutschland (“Alternative for Germany,” AfD) party had 22% support in opinion polls for the coming European elections. But this has now fallen to 15%, having been penalized by the past months’ protests, the creation of a left-wing anti-immigration party and accusations that an elected representative was paid by Russia. In mid-April, the arrest of a parliamentary assistant spying for China exacerbated the crisis.
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Meanwhile in France, the Rassemblement National (RN) is leading the polls. According to the EuroTrack OpinionWay, voting intentions for the RN have risen by 4 points since February, reaching 31%.
This divide in trajectories demonstrates a diametrically opposed evolution. Since its creation in 2013, the AfD has become increasingly radical, while the RN has chosen the opposite direction.
The rift has become even more apparent this week, after top AfD politician Maximilian Krah said that members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) Nazi paramilitary group weren’t automatically “criminals.” In a joint interview with the Financial Times and Italian daily La Repubblica, Krah said, “It depends. You have to assess blame individually,” adding that famous German author “Günter Grass was also in the Waffen SS”.
His declaration prompted Marine Le Pen, the head of France’s RN, to quickly announce that her party would be severing ties with its German counterpart: “Enough is enough now, the AfD is just going from one provocation to another,” Le Pen told French broadcaster Europe 1, while stating her RN party would no longer sit alongside the AfD in the Identity and Democracy group in the EU Parliament.
Indeed, Le Pen‘s move is part of a strategy of doubling down on dédiabolisation to counter the perceived “demonization” by opponents and the media, after taking the reins of a party that was then still called the Front National and founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was unapologetically far right in his policies and xenophobic in his rhetoric.
In the decade-plus since, the party under his daughter has come a long way.
Gas chambers
In March 1987, Le Pen (father) shocked the public by describing the gas chambers as a “mere detail in the history of the Second World War,” before declaring in 1996 that he believed in the “inequality of races.” When the Front National leader reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, over a million people marched in the streets.
Since then, Marine Le Pen has made a point to erase any hint of anti-Semitism from the movement’s discourse. She ditched the provocations and focused on social issues.
In 2015, her father was expelled from the party, in 2017, the euro exit was abandoned and in early 2022, the ban on dual nationality, a Front National totem, was dropped.
By contrast, the AfD’s history in Germany is marked by two putsches and increasing radicalization. Initially, Alternative für Deutschland was a party of public figures and professors who wanted to offer an alternative to the euro.
The AfD was led by political novices and lacked strong leadership.
“But there was no clear political line beyond the euro, and it was easy to get involved in the organization and influence its positions,” explains Maik Fielitz, an expert on the far right at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, Germany.
Novices in politics
At the time, the AfD was led by political novices and lacked strong leadership. In 2015, the migration crisis, protests by the anti-immigrant Pegida movement and the refocusing of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under Angela Merkel opened up a political space on the right.
A first putsch took place in July at a congress in Essen. One of the co-founders, Bernd Lucke, lost his majority and left the party. Further to the right, his opponent, Frauke Petry, took power, only to be replaced two years later by Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland.
Where the Rassemblement National clamps down on excesses, the AfD makes headlines. In 2017, the leader of the radical wing, Björn Höcke, called for “a 180° turn” on the national obligation to remember the Nazi period. A year later, Gauland declared that “Hitler and the Nazis are just one episode in over a thousand years of successful German history.”
Today, the AfD’s federations in Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt are under intelligence surveillance and officially recognized as organizations with “positions opposed to human dignity, the principle of democracy and the rule of law.” In mid-April, Höcke appeared in court for using a slogan from the SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, at a meeting in 2021.
Divergence of strategies
Why this divergence of strategies? Usually, “recentering” is the natural evolution of a far-right party.
Implemented in Italy by Giorgia Meloni or in Scandinavia by the Sweden Democrats, this is the most obvious way of sealing alliances with conservative parties and gaining power.
In France, this approach could wind up successful for two reasons. The traditional right has been marginalized by the emergence of Emmanuel Macron and the president’s “me or the extremes” argument has run out of steam. According to Ipsos, the proportion of French people considering the RN a dangerous party for democracy has fallen from 60% in 2015, to 52% in 2023.
France ahead
Across the Rhine, the AfD sees itself as an anti-system party and has sought to establish its radical ideas in public debate, attacking a German right-wing that is much more solid than in France.
AfD surfed on the tensions linked to the arrival of some two million Syrian, Afghan and Ukrainian refugees.
In their manifesto, the proponents of the radical wing see themselves “as fighters against the united front of the old parties and the corrupt media,” writes Kai Arzeihmer, professor of political science at Mainz University and a specialist on the far right.
Surfing on the tensions linked to the arrival of some two million Syrian, Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, the AfD rose from 10% to 23% of voting intentions between 2021 and 2023.
But this mechanism broke down this winter. The revelation of a meeting between representatives of the national identity movement and members of the AfD, at which a large-scale deportation project was presented, shocked the country.
Today, even as the AfD’s radical stance could create problems for the RN in France, it’s mostly hurting its own campaign in Germany. Indeed, German society is becoming ever more polarized, with a rise in attacks on elected representatives that is reminiscent of the Weimar Republic.
The comparison has its limits, however. It’s in France that the far right seems in a position to take power. Not in Germany.
*Originally published May 21, 2024, this article was updated May 22, 2024 to include news about the controversy caused by AfD politician Maximilian Krah’s recent declarations.
