Adam Pankratz: AfD’s rise in Germany offers stark lessons for Canada

Any sentence that ends with “for the first time since 1945” is likely to garner attention. When the first part of the sentence is “Germany votes for far-right government,” drinks are spat out and the volume on the telly is turned up.

And so it is. Over the weekend, German voters in Thuringia easily lifted the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the top spot in regional elections. In Saxony, the party placed a close second, right behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which, together with the centre-left Social Democratic party, has had a lock on power nearly everywhere in Germany since the modern Germany state was founded in 1949.

Thuringia and Saxony were part of the East Germany until unification in 1990, but the results have nonetheless sparked concern, outrage and fear throughout Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The ground has shifted in German politics.

The AfD is no doubt extreme, at least on immigration. One can also not ignore the fact that the party is classified as a suspected extremist organization by German intelligence services. Rushing to call them Nazis, however, is unhelpful in understanding AfD’s meteoric rise in these elections.

It should also be noted that, although AfD is the top party in Thuringia, it is unlikely to form government, as the other parties are refusing to work with it, similar to what is taking place in France with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National.

Commentators and politicians opposing the AfD are wringing their hands at the results. While no one factor can ever truly explain political shifts like this, one that is getting less attention than it should is former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policy.

Nine years ago, during the 2015 European migrant crisis, Merkel said to the German people: “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do it”). The “it” in question was absorbing the flood of migrants coming into Europe at the time and integrating them into Germany society.

Multiple incidents that followed shortly thereafter, including the sexual assaults of 1,200 women on New Year’s Eve in major cites across Germany that officials said were principally committed by immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, showed that Merkel’s plan wasn’t going to be so easy.

In and of itself, such an incident would probably not lay the ground for a political party so explicitly anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner as AfD. However, as we in North America experienced during the “understandable” torching of churches following the Kamloops soil anomalies and the “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests in the United States following the murder of George Floyd, governments don’t enjoy addressing difficult and sensitive problems directly.

German media and the government had difficulty taking seriously an uncomfortable dynamic about the attacks: that the background and cultural origin of the perpetrators was a significant factor in explaining and understanding why this occurred. Scared of being branded as racist, many Germany leaders avoided talking about the problem. Sound familiar?

Add to all this a sputtering economy in which Volkswagen may shutter German plants for the first time ever, and you have the kerosene cocktail of events that blazed a path for the AfD to place first in Thuringia and a close second in Saxony.

In Germany’s difficulties, we see an extreme version of our own recent immigration and economic ordeals. With that, there is a warning for any government in North America that doesn’t take border or immigration issues and their effects on regular citizens seriously. Perhaps more to the point, it is a warning to politicians to not continuously tell citizens the problems they see around them with their own eyes every day are not real.

Though Canada has so far not witnessed violence on the level of some European cities, what is becoming clear is that our current immigration and temporary worker policies are hurting ordinary Canadians. This is a key reason why Canadians want a change in government.

Though Canada’s Conservatives are nothing like the AfD — despite what many on the left would have you believe — the German elections offer a stark warning for Pierre Poilievre, as well: deal with immigration and the economy, or a nastier, more extreme political party may end up finding adherents in large numbers.

Five years ago, the AfD was little more than a joke: extreme and unpleasant, but nothing that would ever be taken seriously by a large block of voters. Today, despite AfD’s extreme nature and unpleasantness, it is top dog in two German states.

That should wake any politician up to how untrammelled immigration, a poor economy and a refusal to call out behaviour that does not conform to Canadian values of tolerance and respect could tear our social fabric apart.

National Post