While falling short of first place in elections in the eastern German states of Saxony and Brandenburg on Sunday, the anti-globalist Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) Party scored its greatest vote share total in its history. The continued rise of AfD threatens the continued dominance of Germany’s two major political parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD).
AfD is riding the wave of German opposition to the globalist elites who run the European Union (EU) and the nearly-open doors policy of long-time German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the CDU.
Merkel’s center-right CDU garnered the most votes in Saxony, with 32 percent; the center-left Social Democrats ran first in Brandenburg with 27 percent of the vote. But AfD’s support has increased significantly since 2014, when the party took 18 percent of the vote in Saxony and a mere seven percent in Brandenburg. By contrast, AfD’s vote totals on Sunday had increased to 27.5 percent in Saxony and almost 23.5 percent in Brandenburg.
Clearly, the animosity against uncontrolled immigration (mostly from the Islamic-dominated nations of the Middle East) and the heavy-handed authoritarianism of the EU is driving many Germans to look for alternatives to the mostly open borders and globalist policies shared by the CDU and the Social Democrats. This concern about immigration and loss of national sovereignty is the same reason that Boris Johnson is now the prime minister of the United Kingdom and the reason for the rising electoral fortunes of similar parties across the European continent favoring continued national sovereignty rather than a massive super-state in which bureaucrats in Brussels dictate what each supposedly independent nation in Europe does.
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The CDU held on to first place in Saxony, with 32 percent of the vote, but its share of the vote is off more than seven points from 2014. In Brandenburg, the Social Democrats ran first with 27 percent of the vote, but that was a decline of five percent from 2014. In Brandenburg, the CDU finished a distant third to AfD, with a mere 15.5 percent of the vote, while in Saxony, the Social Democrats fell to fifth place, scoring only 7.6 percent.
Merkel is expected to retire at the conclusion of her present term, and the increasing support for AfD is causing some to wonder if her hand-picked successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, will be able to keep the CDU in power.
While AfD’s political fortunes are clearly on the rise, all the other political parties are refusing to join in a coalition government with them, denouncing them as “far right.” In a parliamentary system of government, as is the case with Germany, the voters tend to split up their votes among several political parties. Contrast this with the United States, where the two major political parties — the Democrats and the Republicans — tend to get almost all the votes in presidential and congressional elections. Because of the situation in Germany and other such parliamentary systems, it is almost impossible for one political party to receive a simple majority of the vote, forcing one of the largest parties to form coalitions with smaller parties. This contrasts with America’s two-party system, in which disparate political groups tend to coalesce within one of the two major parties. (For example, the Republican coalition tends to include both big business and small business, whose interests are not always the same, while among the Democrats, labor union members are often at odds with other parts of that party’s coalition, such as the environmentalists).
Most major American media tend to dismiss parties such as AfD as “far right,” largely because of their desire to maintain the national sovereignty of their country and to keep immigrants from overwhelming their culture. They even go so far as to compare these nationalist parties with the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. But the Nazis were actually left-wing, not right-wing. After all, Nazi was simply a shortenend version of the party’s actual name, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). It would be sort of like calling a communist a commie. And, immigration was not even an issue in Nazi Germany, because few non-Germans even wanted to move into Germany with Adolf Hitler running the show.
Globalists hate these nationalist political parties, as evidenced by their dismissal by the globalist publication Foreign Affairs, as “far right.”
As of now, the CDU and the Social Democrats, presently in a coalition government, will maintain their control of Europe’s most populated nation, Germany, which enjoys the continent’s largest economy. While Brexit certainly rocked the globalist establishment of Europe in 2016, if the AfDwere ever to come to power in Germany and pull that country out of the EU, it is almost certain that the globalist superstate would implode.
Image: screenshot from Alernative for Germany website
Steve Byas is a university history and government instructor and author of three books, including History’s Greatest Libels. In History’s Greatest Libels, Byas challenges the some of the prevailing myths about some great historical figures, including Senator Joe McCarthy, Christopher Columbus, and Warren Harding. He may be contacted at [email protected]
