The AfD's new meekness
Dear Reader,
Today the Generaldebatte was held in the Bundestag. This is the central debate of budget week in which the Chancellor takes to the rostrum to defend the government’s spending plans.
Olaf Scholz used his speech to defend the extra debts the government would be taking on to modernise the army, house Ukrainian refugees and secure new energy supplies. He pledged that this spending would not come at the cost of the pricey commitments already made in the coalition agreement.
What struck me most about the debate was the limp reply by the Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose co-leader Tino Chrupalla was the first party head to respond.
Chrupalla avoided any mention of the war for the first five or six minutes. Bizarrely, he led his allotted time with generic attacks on the government over its alleged failure to address social inequality between urban and rural areas and between the west and the east.
When he did talk about the war, he condemned the government’s decision to halt the Nord Stream 2 pipeline as “ideological” and accused it of “hypocrisy” for buying “Arab gas” as a substitute for Russian imports. The clear implication was that the AfD don’t think the Russian invasion warrants a serious German response.
Chrupalla then criticized the government for spending €100 billion extra on the army. Delivering weapons to Ukraine means Germans have “blood on their hands,” he argued.
The AfD usually overflow with righteous indignation at the lectern, but this speech was meek by comparison.
Its timidity highlights what an awkward situation the far-right in many European countries find themselves in. Just like Marine Le Pen in France, Matteo Salvini in Italy and the FPÖ in Austria, the AfD have cosied up to Putin for years. They even allowed the Russian state to pay for their leaders to fly to Moscow by private jet back in 2016, all while claiming to stand up for German sovereignty.
Some radical AfD politicians at the state level have actively spread Kremlin propaganda in the past few weeks. Others have publicly criticized Russia but believe Germany should be following an neo-Bismarkian Realpolitik - i.e. putting cheap gas supplies above the lives of Ukrainian citizens. On social media, the AfD leadership have taken to posting photos of the latest prices at the petrol pump.
Paradoxically, the Russian invasion has caused the government to do something the AfD have been calling for for years - increasing military spending. But just at the moment that this happens, the AfD decide that such spending constitutes a dangerous “arms race” that could bring about a third world war.
The AfD’s arguments are pretty transparent: Germany should be worrying about its own narrow self-interest and not waste time defending liberal values elsewhere.
But Chrupalla’s reluctance to say this directly shows that he knows that such views have almost no public support.
In the past the AfD have been good at identifying issues where a substantial minority of the public feel that the government has gone too far. That started with EU debt sharing, then came the Wilkommenskultur of 2015, and most recently the measures taken to contain the coronavirus.
On all of those issues differences of opinion cut through the mainstream of German society.
This time though the AfD find themselves firmly on the sidelines. Polling shows that the public want German to support the Ukraine militarily as well as financially. As long as the Tagesschau evening news shows pictures of Ukrainian cities flattened by Russian bombardments, this unity is unlikely to fracture.
For the first time in years, German society has found a theme it almost universally agrees upon.
That’s bad news for a protest party.