The Phantom Far-Right Menace in Germany's East

When my wife and I were about to buy a house on the edge of the Thuringian Forest a couple of years ago, some friends from Hanover expressed concerns. Their objection was not to the home itself. The traditional half-timbered house lying on a three-quarter-acre lot with immediate access to trails, selling for less than $250,000, was, in many ways, a dream. Their skepticism, instead, stemmed from its setting. They asked if we really wanted to live in an “AfD Dorf,” or AfD village — a hamlet full of people who support Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party. 

Their perception is based on statistics and phantom data visualizations that represent eastern Germany — the areas of Brandenburg, eastern Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia that from 1949 to 1990 made up the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East Germany — as an almost solid mass of far-right sentiment. Outside major cities like Berlin and Leipzig, they see the entire east as one big AfD Dorf. 

They are not alone. In the aftermath of Germany’s March 2 federal election, which the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), won with 28.5% of the vote, there has been yet another round of commentary and analysis about eastern Germans opting en masse for the AfD. Color-coded maps, and their associated explanations, frame eastern Germany as almost solely responsible for the far-right party’s popularity and ascent to become the second-largest party in Germany’s parliament since its founding 12 years ago.

This is only partly true. In the area around Eisenach, the western Thuringian town my wife and I ended up finding the apartment we live in, 4 out of 10 voters chose the AfD. Those numbers need to be taken seriously. Yet the idea that the AfD’s rise is due entirely to voters in the east, and the maps used to sell that view, are demonstrably flawed.

According to statistics from the Bundeswahlleiterin, the officer responsible for overseeing elections at the federal level, 70.7% of the 10.3 million votes cast for the AfD last week came from western Germany, while only 29.3% came from the east of the country. The AfD did win the vast majority of eastern constituencies, but the party also took the lead in two western constituencies — Gelsenkirchen and Kaiserslautern — for the first time. 

While the ex-socialist states of the former GDR appear to be a sea of blue — the AfD’s color — on electoral maps, support for the party actually rose all across the country. As the AfD improved by 14 and 15 percentage points in the eastern states of Brandenburg and Thuringia, respectively, it also saw increases of near, or more than, 10 percentage points in several western states (Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Lower Saxony and North-Rhine Westphalia), including jumps of 11 percentage points in Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland. The far-right party pulled support from across the political spectrum, with the center-right CDU/CSU conceding the most, losing 1 million voters to the AfD. 

In other words, the AfD did not become the second-largest party solely because of its voters in eastern Germany. That claim not only misrepresents the reasons for the AfD’s popularity but also plays into a decades-long narrative of “east-bashing” in popular discourse. Having lived here for nearly six years, this attitude feels lazy and elitist; it also misdiagnoses the real reasons for the AfD’s menacing rise. 

Is a far-right party gaining ground among German evangelicals?

Elections in Germany are typically pretty quiet, according to Assemblies of God pastor Timothy Carentz.

Germans are wary of extremism, concerned about propriety, and committed to a principle of political privacy or “electoral secrecy,” which is enshrined in the German constitution. They don’t often put signs up in their yards or get into heated arguments about candidates at the pub.

But this year, following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's three-party coalition in November, things have been more heated.

“We’ve noticed people getting more and more vocal,” said Carentz, an American who runs Rhema Café, a coffee shop and ministry center in Kaiserslautern, in southwestern Germany. 

There are debates about the economy, which is floundering, and rise of rightwing nationalists in Germany and around the world. People are arguing about immigration and asylum policies, the war in Ukraine, high energy prices, and which politicians (if any) can be trusted to do something to help.

The conversations seem more divisive than usual.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen Germans so active, engaged and opinionated about it all,” Carentz said. “This year, people are putting up banners outside their apartment windows, leaving stickers around town, wanting to hand out brochures and pamphlets.”

Amidst it all, evangelical leaders told Christianity Today, they are focusing on God’s love for all people and the value of every human life—unborn and migrant, in Ukraine, the Middle East, and at home in Germany. And they are praying for Germany’s democracy.

After Angela: German Evangelicals Consider the Political Future

In 1987, then West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his party the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) ran a re-election campaign with the slogan, Weiter so, Deutschland. (“More of the same, Germany”), promising stability and security in the years to come. 

They ended up winning, but Germany—and the world—was drastically transformed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. 

Fast forward to 2021 and Germany and Kohl’s one-time protégé Angela Merkel is about to step down as chancellor after 16 years at the helm. A fixture of life and a living embodiment of weiter so, Merkel’s departure presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for change in German politics. 

“These elections are historic,” said Anna Klein, a 27 year old teacher and evangelical in the central German state of Thuringia, “we are coming off our first female chancellor and we have the opportunity to build on her legacy, to see if we elect a woman again and move in an even more transformational direction.” 

Until April, the consensus was that despite the profound quandary of a political party bereft of Merkel’s calm, disciplined leadership, her CDU and its sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria, would remain the dominant force in German politics. Even more weiter so, it seemed. 

But then, with the support of younger evangelicals like Klein, the Green Party seems to be pulling ahead in polls. It may garner enough votes to form a coalition government with the conservative bloc, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU).

Though the idea of a progressive party (the Greens) and a conservative bloc (CDU/CSU) working hand-in-hand to govern might sound strange, the environmental and protest party has shifted toward the mainstream in recent years, becoming part of Germany’s new, forward-looking political middle ground. 

There, at the heart of this collective of political compromise, one finds a wide swathe of evangelical voters whose values and varied priorities seem to pair well with a coupling between the Greens and CDU/CSU.