The AfD are an eclectic mix of petty bourgeois racists and bigots, fringe conspiracy theorists and oldschool Nazi sympathizers. But they are gaining ground because the situation that the current coalition government has led Germany into is so disastrous. We are now in a recession and they are still doubling down on making things even worse. AfD are the only big Euroskeptic party in Germany, and the only major party who take a somewhat reasonable stance on the conflict with Russia. The mainstream liberal centrist parties have all been completely turned into unhinged warmongers and puppets of the US and NATO who are so spineless that they don’t even protest when their own allies destroy vital German energy infrastructure. Instead they go along with sanctions that seem almost purposely designed to sabotage the German economy for the benefit of the US. It is yet another instance of liberals making fascists popular through their disastrous incompetence and fascists being smart enough to opportunistically adopt popular political positions.

The saddest part about this data is that if it remains true until the elections the only leftist party that Germany still has with any even marginal political relevance, Die Linke, will not get over the 5% threshold which will disqualify them from getting any seats in the parliament. The center and right will have managed to completely eliminate the left at the federal level.

And i have to say that part of why this has happened is because the SPD, which is a nominally “social democratic” but in reality has long since turned even more liberal than even the labor parties of countries like the UK or Australia, has had such a terrible track record of time and time again betraying the working class. It has become so unpopular and so indistinguishable from the other liberal centrist parties that it has dragged down the whole of the left with it, including Die Linke which is for lack of a better word a schizophrenic party, internally divided between a more traditionally left wing and an opportunist reformist socdem wing, and not only does this mean they lack a clear party line and decisive stances on political issues, but more often than not the opportunists get their way and make all sorts of awful compromises and alliances with the SPD that just demoralize their base.

So it’s no wonder that so many people gravitate to the AfD because there is no other significant political party that at least rhetorically if not in practice dares to champion the interests of Germany instead of being complete shills for the EU, NATO and the US at the expense of the people of their own country. I see this as a catastrophic failure of the left in Germany (and in fact in the EU as a whole) that we have ceded the populist, anti-war, anti-imperialist position to the right and far right. Because despite the omnipresent, daily barrage of anti-Russian propaganda in almost the entirety of the mainstream media here in Germany, there are still a significant number of people who are not buying into the bullshit and want good relations with Russia or at least an end to sanctions and involvement in the war.

There is a real appetite for anti-neoliberal, anti-EU, anti-war and pro working class political options and unfortunately the left is not filling that demand (with the exception of a few communist parties too small to be relevant, such as the DKP in Germany) so people turn elsewhere.