The AfD has stunned Germany – but this was no surprise victory

Events of the past few days in Germany are a chilling reflection of political atrophy and our collective amnesia. A little more than a week ago, a brutal mass stabbing at a local festival in the western city of Solingen left three people dead in what prosecutors believe to have been an act of Islamist terror. The alleged perpetrator of the attack is a Syrian asylum seeker. Reaction to the outrage has felt like a mirror image of a previous event in Solingen 31 years ago – an image turned on its head, with the same reductive rhetoric dominating public discourse.
Because when I think of Solingen, a bleak chapter of German history comes to mind. It is a symbol as much as a city. In 1993, after five women and girls of Turkish origin were murdered in a far-right arson attack, the then chancellor, Helmut Kohl, chose not to attend the memorial, dismissing other politicians’ decision to go as “condolence tourism”. The term was striking in its bluntness, suggesting that sympathising on the loss of these victims was performative rather than a genuine expression of grief by the country’s leaders.
The 1993 attack marked the peak of racist violence in the years after reunification. That violence was without a doubt fuelled by an aggressive debate over migration and asylum. Only three days before the fire, the German parliament had passed an amendment to its Basic Law, known as the “asylum compromise”, which restricted the constitutional right to asylum, particularly for refugees from so-called “safe” countries.
Within hours of the Solingen knife attack, calls for deportations and stricter asylum laws again flooded the media, in effect blurring the lines between Germany’s established political parties and the far right. Björn Höcke, the extremist leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Thuringia, posted a video of the attack on X, asking: “Germans, Thuringians, do you really want to get used to these conditions? Finally put an end to the misguided path of forced multiculturalisation!” Another AfD representative in Brandenburg demanded a ban on asylum seekers at all public events.
But instead of striking a substantially different tone, key figures in Germany’s centre-left-led ruling coalition echoed a similar narrative. From the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to the agriculture minister, Cem Özdemir (a Green), liberal politicians quickly appeared to endorse deportations as a logical response to the stabbing, framing them as effective tools for the prevention of violent crime. In doing so, Germany’s leading liberal parties may have hoped to curb the AfD’s rising power, humiliated as they were after the party finished second nationally in June’s European elections.
But on Sunday, the AfD achieved historic successes in key state elections in Thuringia and Saxony. In Thuringia, where Höcke is the party leader, for the first time ever the AfD became the strongest party in a state election; in both states, it garnered more than 30% of the vote.
Germany’s security services class Höcke’s chapter of the AfD in Thuringia as confirmed rightwing extremist. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2017, he claimed that “the big problem is that one presents Hitler as absolutely evil”. A German court found Höcke guilty of knowingly using the phrase “Everything for Germany” in speeches – a motto engraved on the daggers of the SA stormtroopers, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing. In 2019, another German court ruled that it would not be libellous to call Höcke a “fascist”.
Höcke’s hard-right anti-immigration stance clearly became amplified after the Solingen knife attack. Yet, rather than rejecting the AfD’s arguments, established parties have been busy reinforcing a narrative that also fuels a dangerous strain of ethno-nationalist politics. It does this by painting the deportation of rejected asylum seekers as an urgent security measure.
Scholz reacted by emphasising the need to limit irregular migration, announcing tightened border controls and talks on the matter with the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In an interview with Der Spiegel, Scholz declared: “We can choose who is allowed to come to us and who is not.” A remarkable statement, considering that it further undermines the individual right to seek asylum. Germany’s Greens released a paper calling for a “Zeitenwende” (turning point), repurposing a term coined to describe Germany’s military new era into a call for deportations as a means to tighten domestic security.
Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in a commemoration speech in Solingen on Sunday – election day in Thuringia and Saxony – declared that limiting migration should be a “priority” of politics in the years to come. The CDU’s leader, Friedrich Merz, went further, calling for a de facto rejection of all asylum requests from Syria and Afghanistan. Amid this escalating debate, and despite strong criticism from human rights groups, 28 convicted Afghan men were hastily deported to Afghanistan. One of these convictions reportedly related to a minor drug offence in Bavaria.
Germany’s latest rightwing drift has been building for months. After violence erupted on New Year’s Eve 2022, a liberal-conservative alliance stirred public opinion against migrant youth in Arab-populated parts of Berlin’s Neukölln district. Similar debates followed focusing on open-air swimming pools, painting migrant-heavy Berlin districts as dangerous. Gaza was another flashpoint. When solidarity with Palestinians erupted across Germany last October, Der Spiegel questioned Scholz about “Israel hate” and antisemitism among people with “Arab background”. His answer: “We must finally deport on a grand scale.”
For years, the AfD has pushed a narrative of intolerance to foreigners and migrants as a supposed threat to Germans’ security. This has taken hold among a wider German public, not least because it has been legitimised and echoed time and again by liberal, conservative and some leftwing politicians and journalists.
The AfD’s staggering victories in Thuringia and Saxony are a crude reflection of the liberal centre’s strategy of accommodating rightwing talking points. Law and morality aside, the strategy isn’t working. State elections in Bavaria in late 2023 reflected the same drift, with the AfD winning nearly 15% of the vote.
Part of the responsibility lies with the media’s grip on public debate. Days after the Solingen attack, the mass tabloid Bild ran a story targeting a female lawyer who represented the attacker in his asylum request. The Welt newspaper echoed the story. The former Spiegel columnist Jan Fleischhauer wrote: “The solution is simple: parliament abolishes the right of asylum and replaces it with controlled immigration.”
Rather than accommodating the far right, politicians and media outlets in Germany would be wise to genuinely isolate it. The fragile, yet still-upheld, cordon sanitaire or political firewall against doing business with the AfD should now go beyond mere party alliances and start to address the AfD’s content. Currently, the political demands of nearly all established parties on immigration have become disturbingly similar, partly indistinguishable; the main difference being that the AfD openly agitates against all forms of immigration, not just the “irregular” type.
Many Germans, particularly in the former GDR, are worried about rising costs, high rents and cuts to social benefits. And just like in the early 90s, many are channelling their frustration through bias and hatred directed at non-ethnic Germans.
One historic lesson of Solingen should be that pandering to racism is not only no answer to economic insecurity; it is an incitement to scapegoating minorities. If the misguided thinking behind it is to win back voters from the far right, that strategy is today in tatters.