Can the AfD win power?
Timothy Garton Ash: I do think there’s a real danger for 2029 if you have a so-called grand coalition, Christian and Social Democrats once again, i.e. pretty much the mainstream center and they don’t deliver significant change. There is a really major crisis of the German political economy, of the German political model and the discontents are incredibly widespread.
Katja Hoyer: With Germany’s coalition system as it stands, they [the AfD] would always have to work with somebody to get majorities in parliament to get anything passed. So even in the medium and long term, their extremism would always be tempered in some shape or form.
The CDU [conservative Christian Democrats] have also shown they are quite happy to accept AfD votes on an ad hoc basis. That gives them quite a strong negotiating platform to say to the SPD, as the most likely coalition partner, if they want to do something the SPD is unhappy with they can potentially still go ahead and do it with the AfD.
James Hawes, bestselling author of “The Shortest History of Germany”: That phrase “second-biggest party” sets alarm bells off to an Anglo-Saxon who knows a two-party or three-party system. Of course, it’s nothing of the sort in Germany.
In a sense it doesn’t really matter which of the big three or four parties one votes for because they share an overarching commitment to what we would call, in this age of Trump, really important core values. And they can all work together and do work together at every level to protect those or work within them. Although there are different offers, really German politics has an enormous great center.
Why is the AfD so popular?
Katja Hoyer: If you look at the Cold War era in West Germany, there were basically two options on the table: You could either vote for the conservative program under the CDU which was really very conservative on a lot of issues, or you could vote for reform and modernization under the SPD. They would each only work with one small party as an add-on, usually the liberals.
