Germany’s Rising Right

Europeans born in the early 2000s have never not lived in times of crisis. The Great Recession, the hysteria over migration half-a-decade later, the recent shocks from the war in Ukraine: Europe has been in turmoil for so long that one forgets it could be otherwise. The political establishment has paid a high price, with ‘populists’ on both the left and right booting out incumbents everywhere from Lisbon to Lithuania.

Everywhere, that is, except the Federal Republic of Germany, the largest EU member-state, whose long-term macroeconomic strategy has been to gain an edge on the world market by repressing domestic wage growth and consumption, and using the savings to maximise exports of cars and heavy machinery to China. This model weathered the downturn of the 1980s relatively well. It soldiered on after the global financial crisis under the steady hand of Angela Merkel, who presided over sixteen years of sustained growth and low unemployment, effectively neutralising opposition from across the spectrum, and enjoying the support of two-thirds of the electorate by the time she stepped down in 2021.

For a while, it seemed that Germany’s outlier status could last forever, that it would remain stable and predictable even as its neighbours descended into chaos. But now, as Merkel’s memory fades, the foundations of the German social compromise are beginning to crack. Erstwhile customers in the Global South are becoming competitors, placing the German industrial heartland under growing strain. In June, Volkswagen announced plans to cut some 100,000 jobs. Energy prices are high and growth is slowing. According to a poll conducted late last year, less than half of Germans held positive expectations for themselves or their families for 2026, while only 22 percent described their outlook on the country’s future as optimistic.

The consequences are familiar. While the political centre, embodied by the government of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, has not yet collapsed, it appears to be well on its way, with the parties placing second and fourth in the polls respectively. The conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has proven to be profoundly inept. Appointed last year, he is already the least popular chancellor in modern German history. Rather than forming at least a modicum of social consensus, as Merkel did so well, he is pushing a slew of aggressive cuts and ‘reforms’ to the welfare state. Some ten years after the initial populist wave crested, it would appear that Europe’s anchor of stability is now headed for its own. What is the likely outcome?

Searching for Alternatives

The forces harnessing this populist moment in Germany are not exactly new — the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was founded in 2013, far-left Die Linke in 2007 — but they have been given a new lease on life after years on the margins of parliamentary politics. This is particularly the case for the AfD, which is still subject to the political ‘firewall’ that all other parliamentary parties including Die Linke have erected around it, but is currently polling in first place nationally and on the cusp of winning a majority in some eastern states, where protest parties of different persuasions have traditionally been most successful.

At least for now, the AfD seems to be the first address for German voters looking to express frustration with the country’s political and economic situation. For years, exit polls have shown the AfD topping the polls among workers and the unemployed, whose economic anxiety has been ignored by the political mainstream. Like far-right parties practically everywhere, it is particularly strong among lower-middle-class men in rural areas. Yet it is increasingly gaining support among industrial trade unionists, at least some of whom have responded to external economic threats by turning inwards, seeking to protect their jobs by excluding potential competitors from the job market. Although its organised presence within the labour movement remains meagre, at least in demographic terms, the AfD is now Germany’s leading workers’ party.

Ironically, the AfD began as something quite different: a Eurosceptic formation founded in opposition to bailouts for Germany’s Southern European neighbours. Populist, perhaps, but certainly not popular. Indeed, the early AfD was eminently middle class and its activist core remains overwhelmingly so to this day. Its stunning success, then, has less to do with a supposedly populist agenda (as critics are keen to point out, the AfD’s economic programme remains well within the neoliberal mainstream) than with a mixture of deft opportunism and blind luck. As xenophobia began to spread in the aftermath of the 2015 ‘summer of migration’, the AfD quickly positioned itself as the anti-migrant party. When protests against lockdowns broke out during the pandemic, it again pivoted in time to become the voice of Covid-scepticism. The anti-migrant and anti-lockdown waves have long since subsided, but the AfD — now shorn of its more moderate layers — has endured, and is now stronger than ever.

Populism in Power

Precisely because of its exclusion from government and polite society, the AfD appears to millions as the only truly authentic voice of protest. The question is whether the party, on track to win a majority in the state of Saxony-Anhalt later this year, might become a victim of its own success: moving from an insurgent outsider to an established governing force. An AfD-led government is certainly an alarming prospect, particularly in a part of the country where its most reactionary elements dominate, but it would not mean the end of parliamentary democracy in Germany, as some alarmist voices tend to imply. The populist decade has already given us several examples of what the European far right in power actually looks like. The governments of Giorgia Meloni in Italy or (until recently) Viktor Orbán in Hungary succeeded in implementing regressive policies, but were — much like their counterparts on the populist left — domesticated by the institutions in which they operated. More importantly, they can, and almost certainly will, be voted out sooner or later, though it is less clear what will come next.

Could Germany’s belated populist turn therefore come to benefit the left? That is hard to say. Die Linke’s path to power has been rocky and winding. Teetering on the brink of political oblivion two years ago, the party has undergone a remarkable rejuvenation under the leadership of Ines Schwerdtner, once the editor of the German edition of Jacobin magazine. Today, it is gaining ground among disaffected centre-left voters and young people in urban areas, but has struggled to win back its traditional eastern electorate from the far right, and has made few inroads among working-class constituencies. As was the case for left populism in the rest of Europe, the resurgence in Germany remains largely restricted to downwardly mobile segments of the professional middle classes. Breaking out of this pattern will be key if Die Linke is to avoid the same fate as Corbynism or similar experiments that came to ruin.

It will also depend on whether the party can learn from the experiences of the last decade. In their book The Populist Moment (2023), Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello describe this trend among left parties as an attempt to ‘rethink mobilisation for an age of demobilisation; to organise for an age of disorganisation’. But while populism has had distinct success in mobilising an electorate, at least sporadically, long-term organising has proven far more difficult. In countries like Spain and Greece, where the left rode the populist wave into government but lacked corresponding structures on the ground, this project is now for all intents and purposes dead.

Schwerdtner for her part prioritises ‘building a house of stone’, meaning a solid organisation rooted in workplaces and communities, as opposed to a short-term electoral focus. But come September, Die Linke stands a good chance of taking first place in the Berlin elections and coming under pressure to join a cross-party coalition to exclude the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt. There are strong arguments for doing so: Berlin is desperately in need of public investment after years of austerity, and it is hard to see any government without Die Linke making the necessary expenditures. As with Zohran Mamdani in New York, the party hopes to turn the city into a beacon of hope for the rest of the country, showing that democratic socialists can not only govern reliably, but improve the lives of their constituents in a meaningful, lasting way.

At the same time, assuming government responsibility — particularly in a poor state like Saxony-Anhalt, where there is little fiscal room for manoeuvre — risks tainting the party as part of the rotten establishment that sparked the populist wave in the first place. As was the case with Syriza in Greece, Die Linke’s foray in government could ultimately end up bolstering the far-right’s reputation as the only ‘real’ opposition and accelerating the country’s rightward drift. Schwerdtner surely had this dynamic in mind when she spoke of taking ‘difficult decisions’ at Die Linke’s party congress back in June. 

Whether or not the AfD or Die Linke find themselves in government later this year, the structural crisis of the German economic model will not be resolved anytime soon. Bearing that in mind, we can expect the populist moment to stretch far into the future, with all the political unpredictability that entails. For Germany’s — and Europe’s — sake, left populism needs to succeed where it failed in the 2010s. That means combining immediate electoral priorities, to restore confidence in the left as a force that can wield effective power, with the slower work of cadre-building and coordinating among our base. These are the foundations on which a house of stone must rest. Without them, parties like Die Linke will, in their desire to halt the advance of the far right at any cost, repeat the same strategic missteps which have undermined their projects in years past.