Is Germany Tipping towards Fascism?

This year, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) garnered around 30 percent of the vote in the German state elections in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg, becoming the most or second-most popular party for the first time in history. As soon as these results were announced, Benedikt Kaiser, one of the leading intellectuals of the party’s neo-fascist identitarian wing, reiterated the goal of delegitimizing all of the established parties and “pulverizing” the CDU/CSU alliance, stripping it of its role as a “bulwark of the state” and clearing the way for the rise of the AfD.

The election represents a further stage in authoritarian, populist mobilization in Germany: the conservatives (CDU/CSU), Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW, and relevant sections of the media establishment all instrumentalized a brutal stabbing in Solingen on 23 August for the purposes of a racist law-and-order campaign. Striving to outdo one another, they called for the abolition of the right to asylum, as well as for border closures and tougher treatment of refugees — proposals aimed at “mastering” a migration policy that had allegedly veered “out of control”.

All of this occurred just months after the revelation of the AfD’s fantasies of remigration had been met with widespread indignation. It also occurred just prior to highly symbolic state elections, which were framed both as a litmus test for liberal democracy and as a popular verdict on Germany’s ruling “traffic-light” coalition. The result: significant gains for the AfD.

The CDU/CSU now faces the challenge of weathering its mounting internal conflicts in light of a new coalition with the BSW. At the same time, Christian Democratic party leader Friedrich Merz was able to secure his candidature for chancellor relatively easily. Wagenknecht’s new social-democratic, authoritarian, populist formation led most notably to bitter losses for Die Linke.

More than an Anti-Left Conjuncture

Fewer and fewer people trust politicians to find the right answers to the challenges that loom in our collective future. This is true for all generations.

One relevant shift consists in the fact that the AfD has now also succeeded in gaining a foothold among people under the age of 30. Ever since the COVID pandemic, the sense that we live in a world characterized by permanent crisis in which it is no longer possible to plan for the future has only deepened, with the Ukraine war and the ensuing inflation have only reinforcing this impression. These crises have exposed government priorities, revealing how they ignore the lived realities of many people, and rendered palpable the limits of the political system.

Although these feelings and experiences could potentially be given a left-wing inflection, at the moment only the Right is managing to capitalize on them. They are stirring up fears of individual and collective ruin, of increasing competition on the housing and labour markets, and are preaching “national strength” in a crisis-ridden world that many perceive as chaotic. Indirectly, the AfD promises that control, order, and sovereignty can be regained by means of a war — both culturally war and literally — in the spirit of “Germany and the Germans first”.

Even if Die Linke is mired in crisis, and left-wing responses are deliberately delegitimized in the media, it would be a simplification to speak of an anti-left conjuncture. A variety of political forces from the CDU/CSU to the BSW to the AfD are fuelling a boom in racist, anti-refugee sentiment that combines authoritarian affect, the fear of a potential loss of status, and outrage at social injustice. The underlying dynamic is a constellation that is blocking social transformation.

The traffic-light coalition’s promise of “social and ecological transformation” has been broken. But the coalition has also failed in its aspiration to be a modernizing, neoliberal “alliance for progress” — foundering both on its own internal contradictions and on tensions and resistance from within the neoliberal hegemonic bloc. As a result, the political relations of force have undergone a fundamental shift, with the failure of the traffic-light coalition also helping to put “green capitalism” on the defensive. There is little social mandate for a transformation that would implement green imperialism via a neoliberal framework. In other words: there can be no climate transformation without wealth redistribution and social protections, without an economic and industrial policy that is coupled with social guarantees.

Broad sections of the neoliberal bloc want a new offensive aimed at increasing Germany’s global competitiveness.

Contrary to what right-wing and neoliberal conservatives have claimed, what we are seeing is not “green hegemony” but rather a double crisis of leadership: a crisis of leadership in the neoliberal bloc and an inability on the part of the bourgeoisie to advance a dynamic renewal of the existing mode of production and way of life and to forge a new social consensus. Instead, a Janus-faced constellation has emerged: the contradictory interplay of forces that constitute imperial liberalism at the moment of its crisis and an authoritarian and nationalist right wing is leading to various authoritarian developments and paving the way towards new fascist tendencies.

Have we already reached a stage where the immediate imperative is to defend parliamentary democracy and our fundamental rights and freedoms against the rise of fascism? No, we are not at that point yet. But if we look at Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg, there can be no doubt that fascization processes are taking place before our very eyes: a party with neo-fascist characteristics has been able to reach over a quarter of the electorate, establish a foothold in civil society, help shape the political atmosphere by means of authoritarian, populist, and racist campaigns, and appeal to social majorities on key issues (for example, with its demand to curb the intake of refugees). At the same time, Germany’s established parties have apparently been caught off balance, and are adopting elements of the far-right agenda.

Fascization is just one dimension of the creeping crisis of hegemony — profoundly dangerous, but as of now still a secondary aspect of the situation. The conservative-neoliberal section of the bourgeoisie is presently rallying around the CDU/CSU alliance. The new orientation it has received under Friedrich Merz offers these forces a point of convergence. In the current moment, this shift in the balance of forces is the crucial one. Whether it “succeeds” will be a deciding factor when it comes to the future of democracy in Germany.

Project Merz

Broad sections of the neoliberal bloc want a new offensive aimed at increasing Germany’s global competitiveness. From their perspective, further neoliberal reconstruction was necessary under Merkel, but was neglected. In part, they felt — or still feel — alienated from the CDU/CSU and its modernized attitude towards social policy.

Since 2022, the bourgeois media (especially the Springer press) have run a concerted campaign against the “green transformation”, which they argue will lead to deindustrialization and send Germany into economic decline. This campaign also included a successful Federal Constitutional Court challenge by the CDU/CSU to the climate and transformation fund established by the governing traffic-light coalition. As a result of this challenge, the fund’s climate protection budget now has a shortfall of 60 billion euro.

The neoliberal offensive calls for “openness to technological innovation” (meaning the inclusion of nuclear energy, fracked gas, and liquefied natural gas in the energy mix) and rigid austerity that would rule out any exceptions to the debt brake. The priorities here are to reduce welfare spending, “bureaucracy”, and corporate taxes. Public investment in the energy and mobility transitions and the renovation of building stocks is considered excessive and is rejected.

In essence, this is an agenda that would benefit a section of the car industry (most notably Daimler/BMW) and its suppliers, the chemicals industry, the finance and insurance sectors, the armaments industry, plus companies that are working on nuclear fusion and the fossil-fuelled sectors of small business. At the same time as military spending has risen in the wake of the Zeitenwende (“historic turning-point”) declared by Chancellor Scholz, the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA) has called for tax cuts and adherence to the debt brake — in other words, nothing less than a blatant frontal assault on the welfare state.

The network surrounding Friedrich Merz, which includes the CDU’s economic council and neoliberal think tanks such as r21 and Publizisten, can be understood as the current political anchor of these forces. If there is indeed such a thing as a “Merz project”, it consists in responding to the polycrisis and the rise of the neofascist right by turning this strategy into a bourgeois, authoritarian, neoliberal campaign. The project is absolutely devoid of any kind of perspective for the future, and instead represents an explicit wager on a willingness to lead, act ruthlessly, and assert class interests. The idea is that a “conservative-liberal” or “bourgeois renaissance” will create options for alliances in the medium term be able to implement this strategy, even against the will of social majorities. This “renaissance” counterposes a neoliberal, conservative understanding of freedom, competition, the family, and the nation — supported by an authoritarian and populist culture war — to what it sees as an “ideology of transformation”.

Germany appears to be at a tipping point, but in which direction will it tip?

In the short term, this might help to raise the profile of the CDU/CSU, but it will also put the internal coherence of the hegemonic bloc to the test. Important sections of the bloc have been critical of the foray into “populist” messaging undertaken by Merz, Carsten Linnemann, Jens Spahn, and others. Some in the bourgeois media are already claiming that the CDU/CSU alliance is divided and its prospects bleak. The CDU also has strong internal opposition, comprising state premiers Daniel Günther and Hendrik Wüst, parts of the North Rhine-Westphalia branch, the Christian Democratic Employees’ Association, and the Frauen Union — or in other words, those parts of the party that have tended to favour coalitions with the Greens.

This internal opposition has been kept quiet mainly by poll results and the pressure to present a united front in the lead-up to an impending federal election. The dilemma facing the Merz camp is that — barring a coalition with a “normalized” right-wing populist party — they have no potential partners who would be willing to assist in implementing a pure form of their “bourgeois renaissance”. The SPD and the Greens would have to be sufficiently weakened so as to be forced to act as an entirely subordinate coalition partner that the CDU/CSU could pressure into cooperating.

It is unclear exactly what the prospects of success are. The favourable poll results currently enjoyed by the conservative parties are primarily due to the unpopularity of the traffic-light coalition. According to research conducted by Deutschlandtrend in September 2024, only half of CDU/CSU supporters and 25 percent of all those polled consider Merz to be the right candidate for Chancellor. The Greens are polling poorly, which is certainly part of the plan, but they are also positioning themselves more explicitly as an alternative for middle-class voters, at the same time as the gap between the Greens and the climate movement and social liberalism is widening by the day.

Nonetheless, the realignment of the CDU/CSU — as one of a number of experiments currently taking place within authoritarian conservatism — should be taken very seriously. The insistence of the CDU/CSU on beating the drum of the culture war has only bolstered the AfD’s resonance among voters. In this context, authoritarian, neoliberal populism can be understood as a strategy aimed at bringing about a permanent shift in the balance of forces, making the CDU/CSU the dominant political force while also realigning it — and in the process waging a neoliberal offensive. One major aim lies in the pre-emptive delegitimization of any and all forms of socio-ecological transformation, including in the form of a “Green New Deal Light”, such as broad sections of the SPD and the Greens aspire to realize while remaining within the bounds of the neoliberal framework.

The Fascist Threat

This strategy does not envisage an endpoint, and it is deeply uncertain where the “red lines” would be drawn in a future economic and political crisis — one that could prove even more profound than those that preceded it. For, of course, only part of the neoliberal right is rallying around Merz — other figures and currents further to the right are organizing within the AfD, the Werteunion, and the Hayek Society. The last of these three calls for neoliberal shock therapy of the kind currently being pursued by Argentinian president Javier Milei, calling this approach “the only hope for freedom and a global liberal turn”.

An equal partnership with the AfD, envisaged by the newspaper Junge Freiheit and other parts of the right-wing landscape, would tear the CDU/CSU apart. Future dynamics would be hard to predict. Germany appears to be at a tipping point, but in which direction will it tip?

Amidst the present organic polycrisis, “green capitalism” was and is the only discernibly progressive promise being articulated by sections of the ruling bloc. If that promise is blocked and delegitimized for the longer term, we will have witnessed a fundamental shift in the balance of forces. Are we now seeing an emerging “convergence” of radicalized conservatism and neofascist forces in Germany — as in the US, Hungary, Italy, Austria, and in a different way, France?

The split in Germany’s hegemonic bloc does not run as deep as its counterpart in the United States.

We are not yet at that point. Relevant sections of Germany’s ruling bloc want to head in a different direction. For example, both the Federation of Industries in Germany and, at the European level, Mario Draghi have been calling for massive government investment in a “decisive transformation” that would increase the country’s competitiveness. Both strategies, however, ultimately imply a new neoliberal offensive that would exacerbate the dynamics of social and political crises.

There is no doubt that in the lead-up to the elections, we will see an intensification of disputes within the establishment camp over how to respond to the rise of the AfD and deal with its claims to power. While in the lead-up to this year’s elections in Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg, numerous businesses took a stand against the AfD and in favour of the “firewall”, CDU/CSU politicians have declared the failure of the latter and have blamed this failure for the rise of the right. My suggestion is that we distinguish various tendencies within the hegemonic bloc when it comes to the question of how to relate to the AfD:

• Liberal-bourgeois antifascism, whose exponents see the AfD as posing the gravest danger to a potential modernization of the German export model and the future of liberal democracy in Germany. They also reject a tactical relationship to right-wing populist parties. The CDU’s premier of North Rhein-Westphalia puts it this way: “We believe in patriotism, not populism, respect, not racism, and compassion, not vilification.” In addition, since the beginning of the year, two arguments have been increasingly directed against the AfD: it is damaging Germany’s economic position and it is acting in the service of competing global powers (a charge that sometimes even takes the form of accusations of espionage). However, this strategy has hitherto largely contented itself with aspirations towards an alliance of all parties (including Die Linke and/or the BSW). Representatives of this tendency have so far been reluctant to make concessions that would go beyond support for the minimum wage and perhaps the preservation of the status quo of a post-neoliberal welfare state. The essential commitment is to maintaining a neoliberal state that places full trust in competitive mechanisms and thereby continues to nurture fertile ground in which right-wing trends can take root.
• Neoliberal, right-wing conservative forces primarily desire a new neoliberal offensive, which a realignment of the CDU/CSU towards right-wing conservatism is intended to enable. In support of this, they look to a strategy of “right-wing neoliberal transformismo” vis-à-vis the AfD. The aim is to discipline the AfD and integrate it into a newly realigned neoliberal bloc. Exponents of this tendency have a tactical relationship to CDU/CSU-AfD coalitions at the state level, which however currently seem unfeasible on account of the political damage that would presumably result. They wish to contain the AfD and, if possible, split it into a neoliberal wing with a transatlantic orientation, and an ethnonationalist wing, which if achieved would open up options for new coalitions. A strategic convergence might then become a reality, if neoliberal offensives can no longer be achieved via other government coalitions or technocratic governments formed in moments of national emergency.
• Neoliberal, antidemocratic, right-wing conservatives (as for example at the Hayek Society, the Werteunion, Junge Freiheit, etc.) pursue the goal of a convergence of the CDU/CSU, the AfD, and the FDP. While they are open to the idea of antidemocratic ruptures, to the degree that the unleashing of neoliberal offensives may appear to “require” them, they do not desire a neofascist social model. Instead, they tend to consider a strong presidential regime to be the suitable path (to transformation within the formally liberal-democratic framework).
• Protofascist forces: proprietors of family businesses and far-right individuals among the wealthy and the educated middle class who support the ethnonationalist wing of the AfD. They espouse an ethnonationalist politics of national reawakening, despise liberal “decadence”, demand the introduction of a dictatorship and a state centred around the Führer, and mobilize fantasies of violence and destruction directed against “enemies”.

The split in Germany’s hegemonic bloc does not run as deep as its counterpart in the United States. At this point in time, a variety of options remain for building up new offensives. Neoliberal conservatives, authoritarian nationalists, and neofascists all find themselves in a phase in which their forces are being reconfigured. The transition to a phase of convergence and a phase of conflict over state power has yet to occur.

Where masses of people transition from authoritarian, neoliberal forms of subjectivity to fascist forms, we can speak of advanced fascizing tendencies. According to the Mitte-Studie, almost half of all people surveyed view the uncompromising assertion of national interests as a political priority.[1] The project of globalization is unambiguously in crisis. If the crises intensify, it is conceivable that we would see people being radicalized into more extremist social Darwinist and nationalist attitudes.

At present, ideological shifts are still in flux, and only a (growing) minority in Germany espouses neofascist attitudes. There is also an open question regarding whether the growth strategies of right-wing populism will pave the way to a “normalization” of a populist right wing of the neoliberal bloc, or whether we will witness a large-scale reciprocal radicalization of the base and the political leadership. This would be yet another indicator of fascizing tendencies.

Twilight of Social Democracy?

Now that the AfD and the ethnonationalist, neofascist right have succeeded in building themselves up, right-wing nationalism has achieved relative coherence as a political force in Germany — in spite of all the differences over policy and the nasty political infighting. With a clearly polarizing set of messages — such as “capping migration”, “Germans first” when it comes to access to welfare benefits, a staunch battle against Islamization, and the rejection of “more regulation in the name of climate protection” — the AfD has tapped receptive potentials that extend well beyond its own country-wide electoral potential, which presently sits at around 20 percent. Furthermore, in the future the party will be able to use its emerging dominance in eastern Germany to try to “force” assent to coalitions at the state level.

In other words: the normalization of the AfD is already under way, and in spite of several setbacks (the Krah case, accusations of espionage, debates over “Melonization”), the party is currently making extensive use of its potential. As it does so, rather than softening, its right-wing messaging is, if anything, gaining in coherence: racism, economic nationalism, resistance to climate policy, and queerphobia are condensed into a declaration of enmity vis-à-vis the “political class” and are already beginning to be linked to ethnonationalist themes of “social patriotism”. However, the potential for social mobilization towards “regime change”, as far-right strategist Martin Sellner puts it, remains weak. Neofascist forces are still in a formative phase — which is partly what the term “fascizing processes” means.

The balance of force is not stable, the situation is undecided and could tip in any one of several directions.

The post-Merkel CDU/CSU, meanwhile, is split into (at least) three factions, and it is unclear whether it will manage to hold itself together over the next decade. The dynamic of the political crisis also depends on the stability of the CDU/CSU as a “bulwark of the state” in the hands of the hegemonic bloc. The ethnonationalist, neofascist majority of the AfD will not be satisfied with assuming a subordinate position in a governing coalition, but yearns rather for the dissolution of the CDU/CSU — it is positioning itself as a major power in waiting.

Should the German export model fall into a deep crisis and a new conservative government go on a neoliberal offensive, contradictions in the CDU/CSU could rapidly intensify. If the liberal centre, in the form of the CDU/CSU as a bulwark of the state, were delegitimized, then fascization could lead to an authoritarian rupture.

From my perspective, there is much in the current German conjuncture to indicate that we are witnessing dynamic processes of fascization: both at the level of ideology and subject-formation, and in the construction of neofascist organizations, which already have an influence on political relations of force and, in some small towns in eastern Germany, use intimidation and terror to exercise partial dominance over everyday culture and public opinion. This remains, however, a marginal trend on the right wing of society, and the neofascist right has so far had only limited success in forming alliances with sections of capital.

The balance of force is not stable, the situation is undecided and could tip in any one of several directions. If the current authoritarian-populist trend persists, it could form the overture for a complex dynamic of crisis, for a twilight of “social democracy” and an authoritarian transformation of the neoliberal liberal-democratic state and of society. The ramifications of Trump’s victory in the US presidential election are difficult to predict, but it could catalyse a transnational laboratory of right-wing authoritarian, antidemocratic state projects.

For now, it remains the case that electoral majorities in Germany do not want fascism, and that most people do not wish to see the destruction of the welfare state, or endure a future plagued by war and catastrophe. However, this majority is also politically fragmented and not organized. Social struggles will decide where developments will lead. Proceeding from the recognition that authoritarian developments and the betrayal of a decent future for humanity and the environment not only emanate from the far right, the German Left needs to reorient itself and develop effective strategies of socially minded and socially rooted antifascism. Antifascism requires the liberation of all people as its guiding light.

This article first appeared in LuXemburg. Translated by Marc Hiatt and Louise Pain for Gegensatz Translation Collective.