Gilbert: In Germany, Trump's return and embrace of the far-right loom over Sunday's elections
- The upcoming German election is experiencing American intervention with U.S. politicians endorsing the far-right AfD party.
- German leaders from both the left and right have condemned the U.S. involvement in their election.
- The German election is marked by voter dissatisfaction, with no clear popular candidate and a large portion of the electorate undecided.
BERLIN – Months after American voters returned Donald Trump to the White House, the 2024 U.S. election is casting a giant shadow over the 2025 German election.
The parallels between the two are unmistakable: unhappy electorates, unpopular leaders, the politics of inflation and immigration, a struggling center-left party, an ascendant populist right.
But it is not just that Germany is hearing echoes of the U.S. election.
To the shock of many, it’s experiencing an American intervention in its election.
As Germans get ready to choose a new government on Sunday, the U.S. has effectively sided with a growing right-wing movement, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), against the country’s political and civic mainstream.
Vice President JD Vance dropped a bomb on the annual European security summit in Munich last Friday. Instead of addressing the war in Ukraine, he scolded the German establishment over the so-called “firewall” — its longstanding refusal to work with the nationalist, anti-immigration AfD, a party with historic ties to right-wing extremists and some Nazi sympathizers.
Vance suggested that the practice of treating certain political movements and speech as taboo is a greater threat to European security than Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which three years ago launched the biggest European war since Adolf Hitler.
“There is no room for firewalls,” Vance said. The vice president also met with AfD leader Alice Weidel, who praised him for an “excellent speech.”
Elon Musk endorsed far-right Germany party AfD
Weeks earlier, billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk endorsed the AfD, which Germany’s other parties have promised to exclude from any governing coalition. (One practical effect of the firewall is that the next government will almost certainly be a left-right coalition, probably led by conservatives).
While the country’s right-wing embraces these American forays into German politics, it’s hard to overstate how shocking they are for both the mainstream left and mainstream right.
“It is really irritating,” Eva Majewski, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told me as she was passing out campaign leaflets in Berlin last weekend.
“Why is this happening?” she said of U.S. efforts to promote the AfD. “The general perception in Germany would be that it is a far-right extremist party. You need to understand a bit of German history. This is not a normal party.”
A member of the left-leaning Green Party campaigning nearby called Vance’s comments “absolutely insane,” especially given the dire threat that many Germans see from Russia.
Top political leaders on both the right and left have rejected the vice president’s message and chastised him for both meddling in German politics and telling Germans how to deal with their own history.
That includes Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, who polls suggest is likely to be Germany’s next chancellor.
And it includes current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, leader of the Social Democrats (SPD), whose party is running no better than third in the polls.
“We will not accept outsiders intervening in our democracy,” Scholz said.
“This is our business,” Thomas Silberhorn, a conservative member of the Bundestag (the federal parliament), was quoted as saying in Munich after Vance’s speech.
German Bundestag member calls Elon Musk 'an unguided missile'
Shortly before the Munich Security Conference, Silberhorn sat down with a small group of American journalists (including myself) who traveled to Germany to get a firsthand view of the biggest democratic election since Americans went to the polls last November. He called Musk “an unguided missile” in his embrace of the AfD.
We heard even sharper reactions on the left, where the Trump-era alliance of billionaires and the populist right is a special source of alarm.
Our trip was organized and funded by Germany’s oldest political foundation, The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, which is affiliated with (but independent from) the Social Democratic Party. In that sense, it offered a window into some of the parallel struggles faced by Democrats in the U.S. and the SDP in Germany, into their shared state of shock over what President Donald Trump is doing and saying, and into the different lessons Social Democrats here are drawing from the Democrats’ defeat last November.
At a campaign event in the state of Brandenburg for an SDP member of the parliament, supporters lamented the outcome of the U.S. election.
“I’m afraid of the years to come because I think the policies of the Trump government are completely unpredictable, and democracy in the U.S. will be hollowed out,” said Iris Kalkbrenner.
What Social Democrats in Germany are taking from the U.S. election depends on whom you talk to. Some fault former Vice President Kamala Harris for relying too much on “vibes.” Some say she failed to project the sort of toughness that drew some voters to Trump. The closest thing to a common refrain is that Democrats were outcampaigned on social media, and Harris wasn’t focused sharply enough on pocketbook issues.
“All political parties have watched the U.S. elections very closely, especially Kamala Harris,” said Tim Herrman, a top campaign strategist for the SPD. “One of the lessons might be that she might have neglected ordinary people’s lives — the ‘overlooked,' how to put food on the table … bread and butter issues.”
Herrman acknowledged that just like Democrats in the U.S., Social Democrats in Germany have lost the support of working-class voters who view these parties now “less as a workers’ movement and more as urban elites. This campaign is meant to counter that.” One example: the party is handing out beer coasters tallying up the monthly dollar value of its spending proposals for typical families.
Metin Hakverdi, a Social Democrat representing Hamburg in the Bundestag, said his party faced the “same strategic dilemma that Democrats had in the U.S. — whether to focus on bread-and-butter economic issues or the threat to democracy” from the right.
In Olaf Scholz, shades of Joe Biden
The Social Democrats’ political struggles in this election would have a familiar ring to Democrats, as well. Like former President Joe Biden, Scholz has seen his popularity sink to the point where some in the party explored replacing him as their candidate for chancellor.
Perhaps even more than Biden and Harris, Scholz faces the burden of incumbency at a time when there’s been an energy crunch, a lack of economic growth and a growing appetite for structural government and economic reform. The SPD has been part of the governing coalition for 23 of the past 27 years.
Conservatives blame Social Democrats and the left for inadvertently fueling the growth of the AfD by not doing more to boost the economy and restrict immigration, and by stigmatizing frustrated voters drawn to the AfD as extremists. The left accuses conservative leader Merz of enabling the AfD by playing up the migration issue and recently floating an immigration measure in parliament with AfD support.
Polls here show the mainstream conservative party led by Merz ahead with around 30% of the vote, followed by the AfD at around 20%, and the Social Democrats and Greens around the mid-teens. In Germany’s increasingly fragmented partisan landscape, three other parties are hovering in the mid-single digits, with an unusually large slice of the electorate “undecided.”
Even though the “firewall” is expected to keep the AfD out of the next governing coalition, the party is capturing a higher share of the vote than ever before. It’s especially strong in the former East Germany, which lags behind the west economically and where there’s ongoing resentment over how the East has fared since reunification.
After starting out 12 years ago as a party campaigning against the European Union and the Euro as a common currency, the AfD’s chief target now is Germany’s high levels of immigration. The party's rise has been fueled by a string of fatal attacks carried out by migrants and refugees, unhappiness with the current three-party government, and fears about Germany’s economic future.
AfD can claim no responsibility for the country’s problems because it’s one of the few parties that haven’t been part of a governing coalition. Even critics of the AfD acknowledge that its voters represent a spectrum, from neo-Nazis and hard-right extremists to the more broadly discontented, including working-class Germans who used to vote for the SDP.
Comparisons between German and American politics come with some obvious caveats. Germany has a very different political system, a different political culture, and a history that hangs over its politics decades after unification and 80 years after World War II and the Holocaust.
But in both elections, immigration and inflation have played a central role, most voters are unhappy with their choices, and virtually no German political leader can be described as “popular,” producing what one analyst here called a “race to the bottom.”
Whether the intervention of American politics influences the outcome of the most important election in the world this year is unclear. It could add to the AfD vote, or it could influence which party anti-AfD voters believe will be the stronger counter to the hard right and to Trump as well, who is seen as making the U.S.-Europe relationship a more adversarial one.
Elke Teichert, a member of an organization called Grannies Against the Right, expressed a fairly common sense of alarm here about what Germans are seeing from the new regime in America.
“Watching (the U.S.) from this side of the Atlantic Ocean,” she said, “it’s just like, ‘Will this come over the ocean? Will it fly over to us?'”