How far right will Germany's center go?

May 1, 2021, Chemnitz. Supporters of the far-right party "Der III. Weg" are escorted by the police to a rally of the party "Free Saxony". Sebastian Willnow/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

It’s an election year in Germany. Looking at the Christian Democratic Union's (CDU) plummeting polls gives a pretty good idea of the state of Angela Merkel’s party. After having given Germany five chancellors and governed for a total of 50 years (compared to 19 years for its rival the Social Democratic Party) since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, the CDU has the support of around 20% of possible voters, behind the Green party. In the local elections in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate last March, the CDU recorded the lowest numbers in its 76-year history. 

The nomination in April of Armin Laschet, 60, the president of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, as the party's official candidate for the chancellery did nothing to boost its popularity. Laschet ticks all the party's boxes: Christian, free-market oriented and concerned with social democracy, a Merkel in a male (and slightly younger) guise. He is a man of the center, although many voters would have preferred Markus Söder, 54, a Munich politician nicknamed the "Trump of Bavaria." 

Many CDU voters believe that almost sixteen years in power under Merkel have distorted the CDU by turning it to the left. In 2017, disappointed members of the CDU created the 'Werteunion' (Union of Values), an ultraconservative and nationalist collective with nearly 4,000 members. On its website, the Werteunion calls for a “political transition” for a strong Germany, based on “freedom and not socialism.” “We find genuine values in the traditions of our homeland: biblical revelation; humanism and the Enlightenment; the cultural nation of Germany with its philosophy, poetry, art and customs. For us, this means: a foundation of values that is Christian, liberal and patriotic,” reads their manifesto. Its new president, elected in May 2021, is the German-American economist and businessman Max Otte, 56, whose vice president, Klaus Dageförde, was once a ringleader of a neo-Nazi group. 

What will the far-right’s influence on the party and the country be? In 2020, I immersed myself in an investigation into a rising neo-Nazi group called the Third Path. No subtlety here: the name as well as the program makes a clear reference to the Third Reich. Monitored by the intelligence services, the Third Path had nearly 580 members in 2019 (a figure that doubled between 2015 and 2017), is organized in some twenty regional cells, from Erfurt to Leipzig, and brings together hooligans, nationalists, and "besorgte Bürger" (worried citizens) — a protean category of disaffected voters, both old and young, that is ascendant in the final days of the Merkel era. The Third Path is firmly established in Saxony, a state considered to be the "laboratory of the German radical scene,” according to the sociologist Michael Nattke. The group is both a political organization and a political party: they have been elected to the small east German city of Plauen’s city council, have run for the European elections and will also compete in September’s federal elections. For eight months, talking with politicians and observing outreach and even a “family values” hike organized by the group, I was able to observe the influence of the Third Path on the local political scene and the dangerous links maintained with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right party that holds 94 seats in the German parliament.

More worrisome than the fringe are the seeming links between the far-right and the CDU. In early 2021, at a roundtable meeting in the small east German city of Plauen, the CDU politician Jörg Schmidt joined forces with the AfD and the Third Path to block the allocation of a budget of 8,000 euros to an NGO defending democracy and minorities. Although shocking, this type of alliance or strategy is not an isolated case. In the state of Saxony-Anhalt, part of the CDU group in the regional assembly allied with the AfD in 2017 to create a commission of inquiry against "left-wing extremism." In 2019, two CDU members published a text condemning "uncontrolled immigration" and advocating "the reconciliation of the social and the national." In 2020, some conservatives voted with the extreme right against the increase of the annual fee Germans must pay to have access to public media. It appears that in an attempt to appease a rising right wing, CDU politicians are willing to dip their toes in far-right waters. In the summer of 2020, several CDU politicians stormed out of the Werteunion, accusing it of becoming an "AfD light." And yet the faction continues to influence the party.

The CDU isn't alone in its willingness to collaborate with the far right: In another former East German state, Thuringia, another political explosion occurred in February 2020, when Thomas Kemmerich, an elected member of the free market-oriented Free Democratic Party (FDP), found himself propelled to the minister-president of the region thanks to the combined votes of his party, the CDU  and the AfD. The debacle, not only electoral but moral, occupied the country's editorial writers and citizens for weeks, as they mused on what it meant that mainstream parties were willing to strike deals with a party they had previously shunned as ‘non grata’ when it allowed them to consolidate power. 

Nowhere are the boundaries between the conservative right and the extreme right more porous than in the states that formerly made up East Germany. Here, Berlin, its hipsters, its cranes and its cosmopolitanism give way to senior citizens in walkers, disused train stations and deindustrialized landscapes. This is the Germany of 450-euro monthly jobs and discount chains. The AfD, an anti-euro currency party created in 2013 that is now anti-migrant and then anti-system, is a major political force in several former East German states, behind the CDU. In 2019 elections, it became the second-strongest party in the states of Saxony and Brandenburg.

The CDU’s electoral guidelines are clear: any electoral alliance with the AfD is not permitted. But the nomination of Hans-Georg Maassen as the CDU candidate for Thuringia in this fall’s parliamentary elections, has further muddied the waters. A member of the Werteunion, the former head of German domestic intelligence is ideologically close to the extreme right and the author of a recent text with anti-Semitic overtones. Most recently, he has caused controversy by accusing a public broadcaster of "opinion manipulation" and suggesting "attitude tests" for journalists, whom he claims are too left wing.  His candidacy is a test case for pandering to the extreme right, whose results will only be known in September. 

This may be the direction that the CDU turns in order to stem its defeat. Against all odds, in June 2021, the local elections in Saxony-Anhalt were won in a resounding manner by the CDU, which garnered 37% of the vote (20.8% of voters opted for the AfD). Laschet, the candidate for chancellor, has refused to speak out against the "Werteunion," perhaps because is unsure how far right his own campaign will go. When it comes to German politics, it remains to be seen who is the wolf in sheep's clothing.