Can extremists win power in Germany?

The full version of this report in available in PDF format

Germany is the European Union’s largest economy and the linchpin of NATO’s conventional defence on the continent. Instability in Berlin quickly becomes instability across Europe. Russian president Vladimir Putin knows Germany very well – he speaks German and was posted as a KGB spy in Dresden during the Cold War – and Moscow is closely monitoring what is happening there. That is why events this summer and autumn are of crucial importance not only for Germany’s democracy, but also for democratic Europe. A Germany in political crisis – with a paralysed government, a Kremlin-friendly party on the verge of power in Berlin and in power in Eastern Länder (states) – is one of the clearest signals of fragility that Europe could send out.

Can a pro-Putin, anti-Muslim, anti-EU extremist far-right party win national elections in Germany? Two dramatic years in German politics have changed the answer. Yes, it could. Look at German election results since 2024. Never had the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) come first in regional elections then in any German state. It first happened in autumn 2024. There were state elections in three (of sixteen) German federal states. In all three, the far-right AfD reached record results. In Thuringia it came first, with 32.8 percent. In Thuringia the three parties then governing Germany – Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals –won only 10 percent of the vote combined. The AfD was the most successful party among young voters. Among those aged 18-24, 38 percent voted for it in Thuringia. The Thuringia AfD had been found to be a “confirmed extremist” threat to the democratic constitutional order by the Thuringia Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the Verfassungsschutz, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, which has the obligation to watch groups suspected of threatening democracy; each state has its own independent branch).

The AfD in Thuringia is led by a politician who moved from Hesse, in the West, to the East in 2008: the ultranationalist history teacher Björn Höcke. Höcke studied history and then worked as a history teacher in schools in Hesse. While teaching, Höcke met Thorsten Heise, a convicted neo-Nazi and politician of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD). In February 2010, Höcke demonstrated with neo-Nazis including Udo Voigt, then chairman of the NPD, in Dresden, Saxony. In 2011 and 2012, Höcke wrote articles under a pseudonym in far-right publications close to the NPD – “Volk in Bewegung”, “Der Reichsbote“ – published by Heise. In 2011, he wrote that “the Second World War was not only economically motivated, but can also be seen as an ideological preventive war, as the National Socialist German state had established the first anti-globalization movement.” He praised the NPD as “the only political force that stands up for the right to life of our people.” In 2019 the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution wrote that these texts included “decidedly positive reference to historical National Socialism as an idea” and offered a “radical revisionist reinterpretation of the causes that triggered the Second World War.” That Höcke was hiding behind the pseudonym ‘Landolf Ladig’ was ‘almost indisputable’ and ‘can be assumed almost with certainty.’

Thuringia is known for the historic towns of Weimar and Jena, as well as for the Buchenwald concentration camp. It was the first state in Germany where the NSDAP (the Nazi party, led by Adolf Hitler) became part of a government in the Weimar Republic in January 1930, three years before this happened in Berlin.