Where false equivalences fuel fascism

March 4: Thuringia State Election
For Bodo Ramelow (Die Linke): 42
Against: 23
Abstention: 20

In early March, the 90 legislators of the east German state of Thuringia had to make a choice. Two candidates for governor were on the ballot, two very different politicians. 

One option was to give Bodo Ramelow of Die Linke, the left party a second term as Thuringia’s state premier. Ramelow, a former unionist in West Germany and moderate leftist, had built a stable coalition with Social Democrats and Greens for the last five years and was largely popular among the citizens of Thuringia. 

The other candidate was Björn Höcke of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party that was founded in 2013 and has since become a home for right-wingers including Nazis. Höcke, leader of the hard-line movement inside the party known as ”The Wing,“ has been a driving force behind the radicalization of the AfD in recent years. He has criticized Germany for remembering the Holocaust. He has claimed that the African people will “replace” Europeans. Last year, a German court ruled that Höcke could legally be termed a fascist.

Ramelow won 42 votes, enough to be elected by a simple majority. But not all contingents in the legislature chose to vote decisively against his fascist opponent. Instead, both the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) didn’t vote for Ramelow. The pro-business Free Democrats, who in recent national elections aimed to present themselves as a tech savvy choice for Germany’s cosmopolitan set, boycotted the electoral process completely, remaining seated during the vote. Representatives of the centrist-conservative CDU, the party of the German chancellor Angela Merkel, decided to vote only to abstain. Rather than participating in a multi-partisan coalition against a demagogue, FDP and CDU politicians stood back. 

It was the latest in a series of events in Thuringia that have shown how unwilling Germany’s self-declared centrist parties are to effectively oppose the AfD and the country’s broader far-right movement. 

Few countries have figured out how to fight stop far-right tides, which gain purchase through fear mongering and racism. But Germany’s task would be a lot easier had the democratic parties agreed on at least one thing: no collaborations with fascists. 

Of all countries, Germany should have learned this lesson. 

It’s been just over seven years since 18 men met in a church hall to found the party which would soon shake Germany’s political landscape. The AfD started as a conservative, anti-euro project, but has steadily grown into an overtly racist and powerful force over the years. In the last general election in 2017, nearly six million Germans voted for the AfD, making it the first far-right parties to enter the German Bundestag  since the 1950s. The party has now won seats in all 16 state parliaments. Recent polls show the AfD polling between 11 and 14 percent nationally. 

Since its inception, centrist politicians have done little to stop the AfD from gaining a foothold in power. 

Nowhere is this clearer than in Thuringia. 

The March gubernatorial election was itself the consequence of a previous parliamentary crisis in Thuringia. This past February, the CDU and FDP voted, along with the AfD to support the center-right lawmaker Thomas Kemmerich, a member of the FDP, in order to prevent Ramelow’s Left Party from forming a minority  coalition. In accepting their support, Kemmerich became the first high-ranking German politician since World War II to be elected by relying on votes from a far-right party.

After a wave of public fury—including street protests across the country–Kemmerich announced that he would resign in order to allow for new elections. But his election had already created a crisis for Angela Merkel’s governing CDU party. The chancellor called the outcome “unforgivable,“ stating that, “you don’t win majorities with the help of the Alternative for Germany“. Many saw the incidents as a sign that Merkel’s successor as CDU leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, was losing control over her party since she wasn't able to convince her party comrades in Thuringia to initiate new election. Shortly after, Kramp-Karrenbauer announced her resignation. But the actions of the CDU’s Thuringia contingent has only further decimated public faith in Merkel’s party as a bulwark against the far right’s spread.

The Thuringia elections illustrate the consequence of the political center’s deployment of horseshoe political theory: drawing dangerous false equivalence between the far left and far right. 

Both the CDU and FDP have officially declared that they will never enter a coalition with either the AfD or the Left Party, equating the two as equally extremist. As a justification for their distorted comparisons, centrists cite the Left Party’s history as successor to the East German communist party. They ignore how much the party has changed over the last 30 years. In Thuringia, this unmovable opposition to the left ultimately strengthened the far right. It’s especially appalling given how often Germany’s self-declared centrist parties have teamed up with the far right in recent years.  

Fear mongering about “left extremism“ has been a defining feature of conservative and liberal parties for a long time. One might call it a German tradition given the widespread anti-communism during the Weimar Republic. One big difference today, as Adrian Daub, professor of German studies and comparative literature at Stanford University, recently stated in The New Republic, is that the current left is not “composed of extremists.” Neither Berlin nor Thuringia nor Bremen–the three states where the Left Party has built coalitions with Greens and Social Democrats–have seen even the faintest stirrings of communist insurrection.

But Merkel’s conservatives have been willing  to converge with the far right on matters of legislation and policy. The CDU cooperated with the AfD in at least 18 local governments, as German media reported last fall. Leading Christian Democrats from several states have declared their willingness to work with the far right. In Saxony-Anhalt, CDU and AfD teamed up on an “inquiry on left extremism.”

Other centrist parties have done the same. In the state parliament in Hamburg, Germany’s second biggest city, the liberal FDP have supported 43 of the AfD’s proposed legislative bills in the last five years. Yet blurring the lines between the center and far right hasn’t paid off for the party. In the last state election at the end of February, the Hamburg FDP received less than 5 percent of votes. 

Only a few years ago, Germany was internationally celebrated for its resilient liberal center. In 2015, Time Magazine named Chancellor Merkel “Person of the Year,” shortly after The New York Times called her the “Liberal West's Last Defender.” And to be fair, in contrast to other European leaders Merkel has been more progressive by, quite reasonably, letting in over a million refugees in recent years. 

But the notion that Germany is a role model that upholds liberal values and an anti-fascist consensus has always been flawed. Merkel deserves credit for giving her conservative party a friendlier face. And in some respect, she has stood for stable politics in unstable times. But in all of her almost 15 years as the country’s leader Merkel never made the fight against nationalism and racism a priority. 

The necessity and urgency of this fight once again became clear just some weeks ago, when a far right extremist killed nine non-white people in the city of Hanau near Frankfurt. The 43-year-old opened fire on busy shisha bars, where he expected to find Germans of color. It was the second major white supremacist attack in recent months, following a massacre outside a synagogue in the city of Halle last October, when a heavily armed gunman attempted to enter the building and shot two people on the street. The German Interior Ministry currently counts 12,000 people as known right-wing extremists ready to use violence. 

German Centrists, however, have repeatedly downplayed the dangers of far-right extremism. When Friedrich Merz, the most conservative candidate for the next leadership of the CDU, was asked a few weeks ago how to tackle right-wing extremism, he said he wanted to shift the focus on border control and organized crime. When journalists of the newspaper taz exposed a right-wing network of German soldiers, police officers and intelligence agents in 2018, German media gave it scant attention. They have not learned their lesson from earlier instances of far-right violence: When the neo-Nazi group National Socialist Underground (NSU) killed at least ten people between 2000 and 2007, the authorities turned their suspicions towards the victim’s families instead of investigating groups of extremists. 

Ramelow won the vote in the parliament earlier this month. When AfD leader Höcke reached out his hand to congratulate the newly elected governor, Ramelow refused to accept it, in full view of the media. The message was clear: No collaboration with fascists. Not even a handshake.   

The next day, however, the very same Ramelow voted to recognize the AfD’s pick for the role of vice president of parliament, Michael Kaufmann. Ramelow could have voted no or abstained. “I do not like the party, nor do I have any sympathy for Professor Kaufmann, but I respect the parliamentary rules,“ said Ramelow, arguing further that the AfD would have blocked the electoral committees of judges and prosecutors without this vote.

Respecting the parliamentary rules, as Ramelow put it, sounds noble. The problem is that parties like the AfD don’t play by the same rules. Höcke and the rest of the AfD are hardly subtle about their goals. It’s high time all other parties recognize this threat.