Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) has won the state elections in the eastern German state of Saxon-Anhalt, plunging Germany into a political crisis.
The AfD was founded as a euro-critical party in 2013 amid the European debt crisis. The party’s name is a direct rebuke to the politics of Angela Merkel, who, from the outset of the European debt crisis, declared that there was “no alternative” to her government’s political positions.
Under Merkel’s leadership, the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party adopted a policy of strategic demobilisation. Bolstered by the CDU’s conviction (in the light of Germany’s Nazi history) that it alone was the legitimate representative of the conservative right, Merkel’s CDU incrementally adopted policy elements from its opponents on the political left. This strategy proved successful and kept Merkel and the CDU in power for 16 years. During this time, she kept the largest opposition party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), either out of power or in a junior partner role. However, her strategy left a significant void on the right of the political spectrum.
Angela Merkel’s initially popular open-door policy during the 2015 refugee crisis resulted in the AfD’s dramatic shift to the right. Over the last ten years, the party has gradually attracted voters who no longer feel the CDU represents conservative concerns. The CDU’s response, like that of all other mainstream parties, has been to erect a “firewall,” or cordon sanitaire, against the AfD.
This firewall has not only led to a complete breakdown of communication across the political divide, but it has also stoked deep personal animosities.
For example, when AfD candidates were first elected to the District Council of Reutlingen in 2019, members of the Green group of which I was a part were instructed by party officials and our local member of the Bundestag to neither greet nor shake hands (as is customary in Germany’s electoral bodies) with AfD councillors. AfD politicians were both politically isolated and socially ostracised.
Where Does The AfD Stand Now?
The AfD appears to have moved rightward, away from its Eurosceptic conservative beginnings. Variously characterised as the Nazi party resurrected, far right, right-wing populist, nationalist conservative, ethno-nationalist, national socialist, neoliberal, or just plain conservative, it’s difficult to pin down what exactly the party would do if it were ever to gain power nationally. It has become a stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off party of borders, boundaries and base instincts.
The firewall excludes the party from political participation, but it also shields it from what German poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht once called the “Mühen der Ebene”, or the hard slog of day-to-day practical politics. Precisely because of the firewall, the AfD is free to make wildly extremist and economically, financially and legally unrealistic demands. Whatever one makes of the party, other radical right-wing European parties are reluctant to be associated with it and accuse the AfD of “being held hostage by its most radical elements”.
The true nature of the AfD as a political movement remains deliberately enigmatic and designed to appeal to the broadest possible coalition of voters – from social conservatives through to extreme neo-Nazis. Hence its strategic use of the term “remigration”. This could mean either the deportation of the 260,000 illegal immigrants currently required to leave the country, or of anyone who is not “ethnically German”. As one AfD member in a state parliament has said: “Germany doesn’t need 80 million people; it can get by just fine with 60 million.”
The long shadow of the Nazi past continues to hang over Germany and shape the political imagination of the most powerful country in Europe.
The AfD and Gender
The AfD is indisputably anti-immigration. And this – alongside worries about the economy and the Ukraine war - is the issue that appears to garner it most support among voters. But it also holds consistent positions on trans issues. The party regularly introduces motions in the German parliament to reverse the 2024 Self-ID law, with the aim of re-establishing protections for minors, individuals with mental health issues and women-only spaces. The AfD calls for an evidence-based policy to restrict paediatric gender medicine and an “immediate moratorium on puberty blocker drugs and cross-sex hormones for minors.”
Nevertheless, at least until now, its political rivals have regarded the AfD as a pariah party. And therein lies the rub. No matter how constructive AfD initiatives on transgender politics may be, they have been ignored as a matter of principle by all the other political parties. And so the madness has continued.
It would take hundreds of pages to document the innumerable iterations of gender insanity in Germany. Parents can randomly pick and choose the registered sex of their child from birth, but those who question their children’s self-identified sex risk falling foul of social services and being stripped of their parental rights. Anyone can ‘change their sex’ once a year at will, with no formalities.
Mastectomies for minors are openly promoted online and endorsed as a human right by politicians. Teenagers are fined for not taking part in school-based LGBTQ+ school workshops, while academic achievement falls to record lows. Women’s spaces are systematically opened up to men. Male rapists are referred to as “she” in the press. Critique of transgender politics by feminists is branded “anti-feminist” and “anti-democratic” and recorded as such by the watchdog organisations of government-sponsored and financed NGOs.
Questioning gender orthodoxy is extremely difficult. The centre-right CDU has watched all this happen, sometimes critically, occasionally enthusiastically, but more often than not impassively, because they fear being seen as sharing common ground with the AfD.
Breaking Through the Intellectual Firewall
“Those who want to see the AfD diminished should expend less energy talking about the party and more on working out what has allowed it to grow and prosper”, wrote the historian and journalist Katja Hoyer six months ago. In other words, it’s high time the German political establishment talked about the issues that divide people.
Political scientist Christian Stecker has proposed that Germany break with traditions no longer suited to a time when political parties are proliferating and fragmenting. The political firewall, he argues, is undemocratic. For example, it prevents the conservative CDU from implementing policies for which it would likely have majority support, simply because the AfD might support them.
This could be the case with the transgender issue. Specifically, the 2024 Self-ID law (SBGG). The CDU’s basic programme, also published in 2024, recognised that:
“Biological sex is a scientific fact that cannot be changed. We therefore maintain the legal distinction between the two biological sexes.”
By sticking to its red lines while accepting support from the AfD on specific issues in a new political arrangement, the CDU could reform the Self-ID law in a number of practical ways. To safeguard freedom of expression and academic freedom, it could ease the ban on disclosing a person’s biological sex (Section 13 SBGG) and prohibit fines for journalists, academics or private individuals stating facts. It could strengthen child protection and parental rights (Sections 3–5 SBGG) by raising the general age limit to 25 and making any change of sex markers dependent on mandatory specialist medical and psychological counselling.
It could remove the family courts' ability to substitute for the consent of legal guardians and implement clear regulations in favour of women’s refuges, prisons, sports facilities, and areas where users’ privacy must be protected, such as, in particular, showers and changing rooms. This would not require the CDU to renege on its commitment to a “diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities”, which have been enshrined in law by Germany’s constitutional court.
Such a compromise would not be ideal from the perspective of sex realists. But it would represent a feasible legislative compromise that would likely reflect broad public opinion and recognise that politics implies periodically renegotiating issues over time.
Germany is suffering from reform gridlock, exacerbated by the formation of anti-AfD coalitions between parties that hold fundamentally different convictions about the way forward. The resulting policy drift is undermining confidence in the political system and driving ever more voters to the political margins. An institutional answer must be found that lets political representatives vote on some issues on a case-by-case basis, rather than being constrained by rigid coalition agreements designed primarily to exclude antiliberal players from power.
Whether this will happen remains to be seen. I am not optimistic. The most likely scenario is that the face-off between two irreconcilable blocs will continue and the political crisis will deepen. The consequences for sex realists of the current “tectonic convulsion” in German politics are uncertain.
David Allison is a former member of the German Green Party and speaker for Transteens-Sorge-Berechtigt (TTSB). TTSB is a parents’ initiative in Germany that opposes the unnecessary medicalisation of adolescents and young adults who question their gender and/or do not conform to gender stereotypes.
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Does one have to just frame the gender policy as an AfD policy, rather than noting how changes occurred in England, for instance?
Thank you! I find German politics very confusing and this has given me a framework to at least thing about it.