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The 80 million euro it has cost to deploy Germany’s Federal Police to monitor the country’s external borders since May of this year was money well spent, wrote Jasper von Altenbockum in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 15 August 2025. He claims that anyone who says otherwise, such as Die Linke, wants to “delegitimize a policy that seeks to control immigration. The costs for democracy, which are already looming, cannot be counted in the millions of euros, as Die Linke currently claims.” For von Altenbockum, these “costs for democracy” include the continued rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which he thinks the current German government’s policies can halt. Anyone who criticizes that, as Die Linke does, is the real extremist here.
Gerd Wiegel is a political scientist and head of the “Democracy, Migration, and Antiracism Policy” committee of the federal executive board of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB).
We have reached a point where the segment of the radicalizing conservative movement that the FAZ is speaking for here argues largely without regard to the facts. What is presented as a necessary step to contain the AfD, namely the current asylum policy, is nothing other than the far right’s programme for its own further development. The AfD is polling between 3 and 6 percent higher than it did at the German parliamentary elections last February, and the focus on immigration, particularly by the ruling conservatives (CDU/CSU), is contributing to that growth.
It is no longer possible to believe that they are doing it out of ignorance or stupidity — it has been well known for years that adopting far-right positions strengthens the far right above all. One look at last month’s debates shows that portions of the CDU/CSU are systematically repeating the AfD’s ideas. Be it rainbow flags on the Reichstag (Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Bundestag President Julia Klöckner), a ban on gender-inclusive language (Wolfram Weimer, the Commissioner for Culture and the Media), or the practical implementation of a New Right campaign during the scheduled election of new constitutional judges, the CDU/CSU is actively trying to move the AfD’s ideas into the political and media mainstream. What rationale could there be for this strategy?
On the one hand, there is certainly the (false) hope that, if the CDU/CSU adopts the AfD’s positions themselves, then voters will come back to them. But on the other hand — and this is the more politically dangerous part — there is a vision of using the present window of political opportunity to shut down the left-liberal zeitgeist, which conservatives have been complaining about for more than 50 years now. This segment of the conservative and libertarian camps looks at the US, Argentina, and Hungary and does not see a nightmare, but rather a prophesy, and now, it seems, there is a chance to bring that prophesy closer to home.
Apart from ideological proximity, the question that arises for this spectrum of radicalizing conservatism within the CDU/CSU is: With whom would it be easiest to reorganize or dismantle the welfare state domestically and give Germany a leading role in Europe internationally? This is happening as the Social Democrats (SPD) continue to waste away and an activist “Alternative” is seen by numerous voters as fresh and innovative. If the crisis-riddled start of the new German government should continue, then the latter solution could gain supporters.
However, this segment of the CDU/CSU could have made that calculation without the AfD, because the parties are not playing for second place here, but rather playing to win, as is evident from the strategy paper that the AfD adopted at its July 2025 party meeting.
Intensifying Antagonisms
The paper’s core message is this: “For the AfD to be able to take political shape, the firewall will have to fall.” The text identifies various ways that this goal can be achieved. Additionally, it addresses the question of how to expand its own potential and convert that into votes.
The party’s current base of reliable voters (18 percent) is regarded as good, however its present potential is largely exhausted, and so the paper argues for the importance of gaining acceptance even beyond that segment of the electorate. Apart from building on the party’s own strengths, the authors of the paper look to develop a second approach, namely preventing majority coalitions without or against the AfD.
Expanding the Party’s Potential
In addition to its voter base, the party also proceeds from the assumption that it has the potential, all going well, to win as much as 30 percent of the vote. But even results like that would not guarantee that the firewall would come down. For that reason, they want to create an “accepting environment” made up of people who would not actively vote for the AfD, but who are not fundamentally opposed to its participation in government.
The paper describes the consolidation of different core constituencies as the primary task. This means making specific appeals so that they do not vote simply out of protest, but rather conviction. The following well established groups and regions are named: “East Germans, workers, people in villages and small to mid-sized cities, Russian-Germans and Germans from the post-Soviet world, first-time voters, and especially young men”. According to the document, the AfD’s task is to develop political initiatives that are “geared toward advancing the concrete interests of core constituents and improving their living situation”.
The greater the pressure on the SPD from the Left, the more difficult it will be for the SPD and the CDU/CSU to collaborate.
It goes on to say that the party needs to develop a communication strategy that will project a positive image of these groups, “like workers as the ones who truly keep society going or East Germans as the avant-garde of democracy”.
Groups identified as needing more intensive party outreach included women, university graduates, people in big cities, and people over 60. However, these groups had already been identified in all the party’s prior strategy papers and can easily be read off the data on those groups whose likelihood of voting for the AfD less than average. It is also clear to the AfD that the party’s politics mean that it cannot reach these groups in their entirety, which is why it needs to address more receptive sub-segments of these groups, such as housewives and mothers, university graduates in technical fields, and people over 60 who are worried about crime.
Ultimately, the “accepting environment” needs to be enlarged in conjunction with the goal of reducing “the portion of the citizens who express fear of the AfD, support a ban on the AfD, and reject cooperation with the AfD to less than 50 percent of the electorate”.
Preventing Majorities Against the AfD
The second approach identified in the paper is directed at working out how to prevent future majorities against the AfD. To the idea of a “democratic consensus” the party opposes the notion of “coalitions across political blocs”, which, in their view, are worth obstructing. Accordingly, the AfD needs to raise tensions between political blocs: “Majorities without the AfD have thus far been made possible through inter-bloc coalitions. … The firewall will fall when these political options fail and are no longer possible.”
The AfD sees starting points for cleavages like these in the opposition between the conservative, market-oriented segments of the CDU/CSU and the left wing of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). From the AfD’s perspective, there are two ways to exacerbate this tension:
- Polarize the debates between the left and conservatives, and
- Increase the pressure on the CDU/CSU by tactically bringing elements of the CDU/CSU programme up for parliamentary votes.
With respect to the first point, the AfD wants to use Die Linke as a wedge to create division between the two camps. The greater the pressure on the SPD from the Left, the more difficult it will be for the SPD and the CDU/CSU to collaborate: “Our goal is to create a situation in which the political rift is no longer between the AfD and the other political movements, but rather sets a bourgeois conservative camp against a radicalizing left, comparable with the situation in the US.”
According to the authors of the paper, the first step toward forming camps like these and radicalizing society can be found in the results for the AfD and Die Linke among first-time voters in the Bundestag election, where those two parties came in first and second. They believe that trend needs to spread to the entire electorate.
Regarding the second point, the AfD wants above all to put pressure on the CDU/CSU with respect to the swing voters that these two parties have taken from the SPD, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), and non-voters. The idea is that they voted CDU/CSU because the CDU under Merz changed course from what it had been under Angela Merkel. If the AfD is able to win over these swing voters, then, the paper argues, it will become the strongest party.
Migration policy and economic responsibility are the key areas for this approach. Economic responsibility is viewed as particularly critical for hitting the CDU/CSU in their areas of core competence: “In the eyes of the voters, the AfD has to not only represent a change in migration policy, but also a change in economic policy.” Alongside migration policy, economic growth and promises of prosperity have to bind different AfD voting blocs together, from the unemployed to workers to the self-employed.
The German Government Is Implementing the AfD’s Strategy
The pronounced discord as the CDU/CSU and SPD left for the 2025 summer break appears to have arisen from the very AfD playbook outlined here. The failed vote for Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf for constitutional judge in the wake of a New Right media campaign touched on every point of the culture war that the far right has conjured up — and simultaneously shifted the focus of the debate from questions of material distribution to the trigger points of recent years. This essentially brings us back to the offensives led by Klöckner and Weimer.
However, one central theme of autumn 2025 could be an accelerated attack on the welfare state, wherein the coalition partners’ opposing positions leave no room to hope for a major breakthrough, but rather for just muddling through, resulting in dissatisfaction on all sides. However, the vague promise of an economic upturn could expand the government’s room for manoeuvre, saving the coalition from a premature end and making it possible to imagine that it could continue into a second term after the next Bundestag election in 2029.
At the moment, there are no left majorities of any kind in the country. Bloc-based coalitions can therefore only be formed on the right.
By then, it will be clear whether there is enough pressure within the CDU/CSU to allow it to collaborate with the AfD in any way. From a conservative perspective, it appears that it would be possible to take more radical steps with the AfD than with the SPD with respect to the critical future issues of dismantling social services and building up the military. Raising the retirement age, reducing the social safety net, and even industrial policies that disregard climate policy would be easy to achieve with the AfD. With its acceptance of mandatory military service, the far right has abandoned positions that might previously have been regarded as obstacles to collaboration. Looking at the composition of the AfD’s voters, there could be a strong temptation to execute a targeted attack on the welfare state with the collaboration of a party that is deeply rooted in the classes that would be affected by it. For that, further toughening of migration policy would be the AfD’s asking price, which would allow the party to justify the demands it would be making of its voters.
Consequences for Die Linke?
It is a given that Die Linke is antagonistic to the interests of capital and to fantasies of demolishing the social state, however its strategic positioning is subject to a great deal of discussion. It is, of course, important to keep up the pressure above all on the Social Democrats — they are the segment of the coalition that is sensitive to pressure in this area. At the same time, the AfD’s stated goal of intensifying political antagonisms between a right and left camp in conjunction with the objective of preventing “coalitions across political blocs” needs to be kept in mind. At the moment, there are no left majorities of any kind in the country. Bloc-based coalitions can therefore only be formed on the right.
The theory of conservative and left political camps presented in the AfD paper illustrates Germany’s current political reality, but it is insufficient. It underestimates the differences that also exist between conservative voters, among whom supporters of the Merkel-era CDU still carry a lot of weight in that party. It also misjudges the fact that, for the most part, Die Linke occupies a constructively critical position from which it has been making it increasingly difficult for the CDU/CSU to justify maintaining equidistance from the AfD and Die Linke even within their own camp.
Nonetheless, the paper’s authors are correct when they point out the fragility of inter-bloc alliances, which are often the only option for preventing the AfD from participating in government. Resolving this situation in a progressive way would mean strengthening the left political field in order to conceivably enable a politics that fights against the actual reasons for the ascent of the right: neoliberal competition as the prevailing principle of society. In light of the still-growing right-wing political dominance in Germany, Europe, and around the world, that is a task that goes far beyond the politics of left-wing parties, but rather will require new approaches to collaboration between parties, unions, and progressive segments of civil society.
Translated by Joseph Keady and Marc Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective.
