Alice Weidel, the blonde-haired female face of the German far right party, AfD (Alternative for Germany), is a migrant. She lives with her registered partner, Sarah Bossard, in Switzerland. Sexual orientation and living abroad could be regarded as private choice and affair. However, spearheading a racist anti-migration (anti-migrant) political party and pushing xenophobic discourses further in Germany while enjoying the privileged life of a trans-national bourgeois makes this individual lifestyle bizarre. According to Pink News despite living in Switzerland, Weidel is registered in her electoral German district, Überlingen (Germany). Further, Pink News mentions that Weidel’s grandfather, Hans Weidel, was a Nazi judge directly appointed by Adolf Hitler.
On 23 February, Germany saw a snap election following 6 November 2024, when the then chancellor Olaf Scholz dismissed Christian Lindner, the leader of the FDP, liberal party. The government collapsed when (ex) chancellor Scholz decided he was no longer willing to continue with the governing coalition, any longer.
The so-called ‘traffic light’ coalition had been formed in 2021 between the Social Democrats (SPD), the Green Party and the Liberal Party, FDP. Clearly, it was a balancing act from the start trying to cope with a new scale of international military threats to Europe such as Putin’s invasion war in Ukraine since 2022, as well as bridging ideological corners between an ambitious ecological restructuring of the domestic industry and society – socially adjusting – and the liberal economic credo of creating wealth (not necessarily income distribution), pulling from the other angle.
The election results in February 2025 confirmed the far right AfD as the largest winning party of the day, coming in second place: 20.8% of voters were in favour of Weidel and her team.
The differing space to the leading party, CDU with 28.5 %, does not look huge and mirrors an overall drift to the right, more generally. That said, the Linke (the Left) achieved 8.7% and will sit in the Bundestag’s new period of legislation (Legislaturperiode), next to the SPD, only arriving by 16.4%, and the Green Party coming in with 11.6%. Christian Lindner and the FDP missed the 5% threshold needed to be included in parliament. Apart from the rise in fragmentary votes across the political spectrum, what stands out is the overall far right vote in Eastern parts of Germany.
Source: https://www.fr.de/politik/ergebnisse-live-aus-allen-gemeinden-und-staedten-in-unserer-karte-zur-bundestagswahl-zr-93587599.html
The light blue demarcates votes for the AfD, black for the CDU, red for SPD and green for the Green party.
It seems more than 30 years after the German unification of the early 1990s, overall socio-economic and normative-cultural integration of both, Western and Eastern geo-political regions, did not fully work, and the frictions are running deeper than it is acknowledged.
Remarkably, the 2025 election result is less shocking as it would have been years ago. High percentages of counted votes for the AfD were predicted and on the horizon for months. Mainstream media provided TV platforms for Weidel and the AfD; for example, the main German broadcasters conducted interviews with her as chancellor candidate and the party’s conferences were covered in their primetime news outlets (Tagesschau), regularly. The public broadcaster follows here their duty to cover all parties, which can be elected in a democracy. There were discussions to ban the AfD, but it proved more challenging to do so. The most recent social media event – an interview with Weidel by Elon Musk on his platform X – was even worth mainstream news coverage on prime day news. A political party, as any other?
The visible election success of the German far right does not do justice to the hundreds of thousands of people having demonstrated in major cities, such as Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt/Main but also smaller cities such as Oldenburg or Cottbus, and across generations and different walks of life, for weeks and months. Omas Gegen Rechts (Grannies against the Far Right), for example, were warning against the return of fascists to government. By now, and just two weeks later, the Omas Gegen Rechts, are on a list of NGOs interrogated by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader and chancellor in waiting, Friedrich Merz. Merz accuses NGOs critical of his party politics and himself when schmoosing the AFD on anti-migration legislation to be (too) political and misusing their status as ‘gemeinnützig’ (charitable). A charitable status is a form of indirect funding by the state not unlike charities in the UK, and elsewhere, usually giving tax advantages to those supporting these NGOs monetarily. Merz’s move in parliament to silence critical voices, who acted politically as conscious citizens in an Arendtian sense could give us some warning, what might come, next.
Forgotten, too, seems the scale of civil protest after it emerged that politicians of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), Alice Weidel and Roland Hartwig, met secretly with Austrian and German neo-Nazis and members of the identitarian movement in November 2023. They were discussing possibilities to deport migrant citizens, e.g. revoking their citizenship. According to Corrective, two politicians of the conservative centre right party, Christian Democratic Union (CDU), also took part in this meeting. In vocal public outcries and in response to this secret meeting, millions of people took to the streets across Germany for several weeks.
Interestingly, Corrective is on Merz’s list of charitable organisations right now, disputed on their political activities. Apparently, the explicit anti-fascist stand of citizens is viewed as a threat by Merz while attacking those who dare to challenge the normalization of far-right racist policies and nativist consensus.
What Scott Poynting and I have called ‘normalization’ or respectabilization (2022) – and the German word ‘salonfähig’ captures this process literally – is the mainstreaming of previously extremist views. In our book ‘Normalization of the Global Far Right: Pandemic Disruption?’ we refer to Aristotle Alexander Kallis’s work who regards ‘fascist radical uncivility as rooted in a continuum of mainstream acceptability, embedded in key trends of the ‘civilizing process’ but resting on revised underlying norms about community identification and treatment of otherness.’ (2015: 5, cited in Vieten & Poynting, 2022: 5)
Historically, the centre right was not willing to resist the populist appeal of fascism and – as far as Germany is concerned – National Socialism. That said, in the aftermath of the German election, the concern is about who will be able to join in a coalition government. Does Merz, who repeatedly said he would not cooperate with the AfD, keep the cordon sanitaire (or as it is called in German ‘Brandmauer’)? Will he invite the SPD to negotiation talks trying to build a (CDU/SPD) grand coalition and therefore compromise his liberal-economic vision for a socially (democratic and green) balanced domestic policy?
Austria might be an interesting country to watch out for a comparison. After a six months lasting period the SPŐ, ŐVP and NEOS – parties that pretty much mirror the ideological corners of SPD, CDU and FDP in Germany – agreed to join each other in a coalition. In the first round of negotiations, they failed to come to an agreement. The NEOs left the negotiation table, and president van der Bellen had no choice other than to ask Kickel of the far right FPŐ to initiate negotiations with the other parties and try to find common ground. Kickel failed in his attempt to find a coalition partner, and the three parties, mentioned earlier, got their act together, at last.
Late February 2025, they announced they were taking over as the new government of the Austrian Republic. Kickel and the FPŐ, despite having been the winner of the Austrian election in 2024 (28, 9%) ahead of the centre conservatives, did not achieve their goal to install their far right led government with a chancellor, Kickel. The winner does not take it all; it matters for what the winner stands for and who else has been in the race. Similarly, we can expect longer rounds of coalition negotiations in Germany. The question being, which route Merz and Germany will take.
Olaf Kosinsky, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons
