Transcript: How to Stop Trumpism From Rising in Germany and Europe

Mainstream parties in Germany are making the same mistakes they did in the United States and other countries in fighting the far-right, says historian Thomas Zimmer.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: And we’re going to talk about politics in Germany. I think people probably know that the far-right party in Germany just won an election, or won about 40 percent of the vote in an election there. We’re going to talk about what that election on Sunday means, both for German politics, European politics, what this is about the United States, what this is about far-right politics. So Thomas, thanks for joining me. Great to see you again.

Thomas Zimmer: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be talking about far-right extremism on this side of the Atlantic.

Bacon: On this side, yes. You and I met when you were here in the US, and you were one of the earliest and most prescient observers of what was happening in the far right here. And so I guess, first of all, AfD, because we’re talking to an American audience—talk about how is AfD, and how is it unlike kind of the Trumpian Republican Party?

Zimmer: Yeah, if you approach it as the German equivalent to MAGA, that gets you actually pretty close. It gets you very much in the correct direction. It’s make Germany great again. They definitely share the same enemies. They’re similarly fueled by this sort of sense of radicalizing grievance, right? It’s defined by this sort of resentment towards a society that has been moving away from them, right?

In a sense that this is of this desire to restore dominance over those who they deem lesser somehow. And who they deem lesser—that’s very much—or who they deem deserving, right, of a sort of a higher status in society. That’s very much racialized and gendered. It’s the grievance of predominantly white male people who are consumed by this feeling of having been deprived of their rightful place at the top.

So it’s very anti-egalitarian more than anything, anti-pluralistic. And I think it’s also, just like the MAGA movement, not at all conservative, right? In no reasonable sense of the word, in conserving, preserving, is this a conservative movement. They’re all in on radical measures. They talk about revolutionary change. They’re extremists.

And it’s best described, I think, as a kind of radical revisionism or revanchism, right? It’s defined by this idea, we need to wipe away all these developments over the past few decades that have deprived us of our rightful place at the top.

Bacon: OK, so very—and anti-immigration, anti-multicultural, all the—OK, so very similar. All right.

Zimmer: No, it’s fundamentally ethnonationalist, in the sense that they want a Germany only for what they call, quote-unquote, “biological Germans.” So you can already tell that’s where the wind is coming from with these people. There’s no subtlety here. There’s no more dog whistling with them. They’re now more openly, more aggressively embracing that sort of very openly ethnonationalist, anti-gender-egalitarianism, anti anything they call deviant behavior, right? Queer people. That all needs to go. These people need to be pushed out of the public sphere.

Again, I think, if someone wants to figure out, what is the agenda, what would Germany look like if those people actually got to be in power and got to do what they want to do? Think what MAGA wants to do to America, and it gets you pretty close. It’s not a coincidence that the AfD, they’re all big Trump fans, and the Trump government and the MAGA movement also very much AfD fans. That’s not a coincidence. It is because they’re fundamentally engaged in the same project.

Bacon: So now, what I know less about is Saxony-Anhalt. And I’m not a German expert, so you may have to pronounce it better for the audience as well. But there are 16 states in Germany, so give me a sense of that area and what it’s like, with maybe a US comparison as well.

Zimmer: Yeah. So it’s in Eastern Germany, so on the territory of the former GDR. Germany has 16 states. It’s a federal system with a lot of similarities to the American system. This is not a direct comparison, of course. But Saxony-Anhalt is a small state. It has a population of a little over two million. That’s about the ballpark of Nebraska, or New Mexico, or Idaho, right? That sort of thing. It’s also been, for quite some time, a stronghold of the far right in Germany.

So this was a state election for the state parliament, which also is for the control of the state government, because this is a parliamentary system. If you get the majority of seats in the state parliament, you get to be the state government. So they barely missed out on an outright majority of seats. They got about 44 percent of the vote, which is exactly as much as all the democratic, small-D democratic parties together, right?

What you have now in the incoming parliament, state parliament, is a sort of stalemate situation. No one has an outright majority. The AfD is three seats shy of an outright majority. None of the democratic parties—so this is a multi-party system. You have a conservative party, a green party, a social democratic party, a more what you might call a democratic socialist party. And then all of these parties together are exactly as strong as the AfD.

And then there’s a weird sort of kingmaker faction. It’s called the BSW, which is an offshoot of the sort of democratic socialists to an even pretty extreme far left kind of position. But mostly defined by a kind of grievance towards the liberal system, towards the mainstream. And they’re very pro-Russia, which the AfD is also. They’re all Putin fans.

And they have five seats. So the most likely scenario, if the AfD is to manage—if they manage to get a majority of the seats, they probably get it by getting two or three of those far left candidates to actually support them. But that is all very much up in the air. So the immediate sort of political ramifications of this are, it’s a very volatile situation, and honestly, no one knows exactly what’s going to happen there.

Bacon: So this is going to sex me a little bit, just in terms of what it’s like. I guess I’ve read, even though the population is fairly anti-immigrant, it actually has a fairly low immigrant population. It’s working class. Or is it, in terms of, is it like the places in the US that have been drawn to Trump, in terms of being economically struggling, more white, less educated? Does it have some of those same demographic and economic characteristics as the places in the US that have been drawn to Trumpism?

Zimmer: Yeah. So, it’s definitely, you might say, economically struggling, low growth, a relatively high unemployment, relatively old population, and so the population is shrinking. So a lot of young people, especially, are moving away from the state.

That already sounds quite a bit like—and then also, even more so if you look at the characteristics of who actually voted for the AfD in this—this was a very high turnout election, by the way, like almost 80 percent turnout, so this is very high turnout. And the AfD has managed to mobilize among people who have previously been non-voters far more than the democratic parties. Once again, that is sort of what Trump also managed to do, right?

And the social profile is—got to be careful with this, this is mostly still based on exit polls. Exit polls in Germany are a little more reliable than American exit polls, generally speaking. But still, it’s exit polls, which means it’s self-assessments mostly, right? So, careful. But it aligns with what we know from other elections across Germany.

Relatively high support among people who describe themselves as workers, so working class. Significantly higher among non-college educated, stronger among men than women, stronger in rural areas than in urban areas. So yeah, a lot of similarities to the profile of what we think of as the sort of core Trump supporters, or the people who vote Trump. Definitely in this sort of 2024 coalition, yeah.

Bacon: So the next federal elections to decide who runs the government in Germany are not till 2029, correct?

Zimmer: Yeah, if the current coalition holds up until then. Because this current coalition government is a coalition between the conservatives and the social democrats, and the conservatives are in charge. So the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is a conservative from the Conservative Party, so Angela Merkel’s party, right? And the chancellor is remarkably unpopular, right? No one likes him.

Absolutely no one likes him, and he’s been doing an absolutely terrible job. Not just in terms of actual policy—in terms of, he himself has proven remarkably struggling with the job of being chancellor, including the politics of it, right? Just communicating with people. So no one likes him.

And this, of course, is more than anything—the strong result of the AfD is the result of a disastrous result of the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party, compared to four years ago in Saxony-Anhalt, has lost over half of its voters. So it’s shrunk to, I think, 17 or so percent in Saxony-Anhalt. That is a disaster for the Conservative Party.

In the next state election, also in East Germany, that’s coming up 10 days from now, the Conservatives are polling at 6 percent. This is supposed to be Germany’s by far strongest, biggest party, and they’re just being decimated. And mostly decimated because, like I said, the AfD were very successful mobilizing among non-voters, and the other sort of big reservoir of voters that they’ve tapped into is conservative voters moving to the far right.

And so there is a lot of talk right now about maybe the Conservatives just also need a change at the top. And that might mean that—who knows—but that also might mean that this federal government, I would not bet a lot of money on them actually making it through the end of this regular term. But yeah, you’re right. If they go through the end of the term, it wouldn’t be until 2029.

Bacon: This is also a US equivalent, in that some of the people I know who write about European politics, what they argue is that you’re seeing the mainstream Conservative party, like in Britain, lose votes to the far-right party. And in the US, what happened was the sort of Mitch McConnell—since we only have two parties—the Mitch McConnell wing sort of lost votes to the Trump wing. But to say, if we had four parties, you’d probably see a similar kind of pattern.

Zimmer: I think that’s exactly right. This is both a key parallel and a key difference between either side of the Atlantic. So what happened in the United States is basically a far right faction managed to take over the Republican Party from within, right? Move to the center of power within the Republican Party. Whereas in Germany, what you saw was, basically when the AfD was founded in 2013, you had the right wing of the Conservative Party splitting away from the Conservative Party. They founded their own party.

And so it’s as if you had—it’s as if Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015 and had said, “Hey, I’m actually not going to run as the Republican presidential nominee. I’m going to do my own party. We’re calling it the MAGA party,” and that’s what’s happening. Which, of course, in the American system doesn’t make sense, because of the political system. But the German system, because it is a multi-party system, a representative system—so basically it means if you get 10 percent of the vote, you get 10 percent of seats in parliament, right?

So you don’t have to win your district outright. And so in this sort of representative system, smaller parties make sense, or it makes sense for smaller parties to do their own thing, which is why Germany has this sort of multi-party system. And that’s what happened, right? We basically have a separate MAGA party, instead of this faction, this wing or this coalition, attempting to take over the Conservative Party from within.

Bacon: Now, the good thing in Germany has been, up to now, is none of the other parties will work with AfD. So they can’t be part of a coalition, because the center-right party and all the other parties have—and talk about why that’s happened, where the center-right party will not work with them. Which is not—if the McConnell faction had stopped working with Trump, we would never be here. So the Germans did something different than the US did, right?

Zimmer: Yeah. No, absolutely. So far, in Germany, this has been discussed under the term firewall. It’s, we’re holding the firewall against the far right. And so far, you have to say Germany is more or less the only country in Europe where the other parties of the mainstream, broadly speaking, have so far refused to work with and cooperate with the far right.

Everywhere else, this sort of firewall has already fallen. Sometimes it has fallen long ago. France, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, wherever, right? Everywhere, basically, usually the mainstream conservative parties have given themselves permission to work with the far-right parties.

That has not happened so far in Germany. The reasons for that are mostly historical. Coming out of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship, it became the sort of foundational national myth, right? The foundational myth of national identity in post-war, first West Germany, and then after reunification in 1990, of this sort of reunified Germany, has been this thing that, OK, we cannot let that happen ever again, right?

We’re going to draw a very strong line here, and we’ll keep those people, we’ll not normalize them, we’ll not make them respectable. And again, this was always more of a sort of elite consensus, elite political, elite sort of published opinion sort of consensus. It was never a broadly shared, everyone, the entire population on board. That’s not the case. But it was, until recently, a fairly clearly shared elite consensus in Germany.

But I think what’s happened here—and this is why what is happening now, and even though this is just a small........

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