“As a German, I am very ashamed,” sighs Katharina, a 43-year-old high school teacher who is waiting for the S-Bahn to Munich at Hallbergmoos train station, about 30 kilometers from the Bavarian capital. A few weeks before the elections in this state, the second most populous in the country, Katharina and the other 9.4 million voters who called for the elections this Sunday learned that their current vice president and leader of the Free Voters Party, Hubert Aiwanger, was an admirer of National Socialism in his youth. “The worst thing is that it is known and nothing happened. Even more people will vote for him than before. “I can not understand.”
What Frank Schneider, 52, an accountant in a small business, doesn’t understand is the excitement that has arisen. The scandal has become a central theme of the campaign, with the approval of the immigration authorities. “It’s something that happened 40 years ago, kid stuff. “The Left waged a campaign against him,” he says confidently in front of Munich Central Station. “He is one of the few politicians who speaks clearly, they are afraid of him and they want him out,” he adds, repeating the line of defense that Aiwanger has put up in recent weeks.
At the end of August, the influential Münchner Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the leader of the Free Voters distributed and probably wrote an anti-Semitic pamphlet in the mid-1980s, when he was still at school. Its horrifying content sparked immediate calls for resignation from prominent public figures in both Munich and Berlin. Aiwanger was slow to give explanations that were not clear and refused to leave. The Bavarian President Markus Söder, chairman of the CSU (sister party of the CDU), kept him in his office. Both parties have governed in a coalition since 2018, when the poor results of the CSU, once the hegemonic power in Bavaria, forced Söder to find a government partner.
The episode revealed an uncomfortable reality and opened a nationwide debate about the health of the culture of remembrance, the much-admired zero tolerance of Nazi revisionism in Germany. The Jewish community warns of the danger of a muted reaction to the events in Bavaria at a time when the culture of remembrance is threatened by the extreme right, which is demanding a final rejection of German guilt. Politicians of different sensibilities, such as the co-chair of the Green Party, Ricarda Lang, warn them: “It’s not about 17-year-old Hubert Aiwanger, but about how the 52-year-old deals with his past.” He presents himself as a victim and takes no responsibility. […] “This shakes our fundamental democratic consensus.” The debate also flares up when cracks appear in the Cordon Sanitaire against the extreme right.
For the historian Jürgen Zimmerer, the Aiwanger case did enormous damage to the culture of remembrance, to the consensus of German society about how it should openly deal with its past. “The German public has praised itself for its critical self-reflection, but this case shows several things: that this self-criticism was not as widespread as we believed in the 1980s, and that it was anything but voluntary, committed by a prominent politician “We can take our responsibility in the mid-2020s and that our voters celebrate it,” says the professor at the University of Hamburg. And he comes to the conclusion: “This is a moral catastrophe for our culture of remembrance.”
The consensus among Germans is not so much that the current generation is responsible for the events of 80 years ago, but rather that they should remember them, notes writer and journalist Stefan Cornelius. “It is this consensus that is now eroding,” he says at the headquarters of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, where he is head of politics. The dangerous thing, he adds, is that Aiwanger’s party wants to draw a dividing line between what happened then and what is happening now. The Free Voters candidate assured that he had not been anti-Semitic “since he was an adult” and denied being the author of the brochure. When asked by foreign correspondents in Munich, to whom he told that he would not say anything about his school days, he assured last week that the Bavarian government was promoting the culture of remembrance and that this was “a priority” for his party.
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Aiwanger’s party was not harmed by the scandal, but rather benefited. The Free Voters, a right-wing populist group that cries out against “the elites,” rose from 13% of voting intentions in August to the 15-16% that polls now give them. The party is fighting for second place with the Greens and the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD). The situation in Bavaria is an example of what is happening in the rest of the country: the progressive fragmentation of voting rights and the growth of right-wing populism. Although it is usually highlighted as a phenomenon in eastern Germany, where polls predict the AfD’s victory next year in three eastern states with more than 30% of the vote – compared to 21% nationwide – when the Bavarian results are included, it is supported the AfD and the Free Voters, the proportion is also around 30%.
Voters in Germany’s largest state are electing a new parliament this Sunday after an unpleasant and angry election campaign with constant attacks on the three-party group of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals led by Olaf Scholz in Berlin and particular cruelty towards the Greens Markus Söder considers them to be guilty of pursuing a policy “against the people”. The CSU has ruled Bavaria almost continuously since the end of the Second World War, although with increasingly less solid support. The 37.2% in 2018 was the worst result since 1950. The latest survey by public television ZDF predicts a similar result this Sunday.
Newly founded right-wing populist parties have shaken up the status quo in this election campaign and taken advantage of the uncertain situation in Germany. The war in Ukraine has impacted a country heavily dependent on Russian gas that has had to seek new energy sources for its industry while hosting more than a million Ukrainian refugees. The economy is mired in a complicated transition to renewable energy and is stagnating, and although unemployment and inflation are being kept under control, the outlook is bleak.
In this breeding ground, AfD leaders claim to be persecuted and report being threatened or physically attacked. Tino Chrupalla, the party’s co-leader, was hospitalized this week after suddenly feeling unwell before a rally in Ingolstadt, Bavaria. The AfD and its associated reports quickly spread on social media that he had been attacked with a sharp object and that a foreign substance had been injected into his arm. Neither the police nor the prosecutor’s office see any signs of crime and the toxicology analysis revealed no abnormalities, but the party continued to insist on the theory of the attack. Although cautious, other groups have criticized the attempt for political gain. The Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Hermann (CSU) described it as “notorious”.
The other co-leader of the Ultra formation, Alice Weidel, was involved in a similar incident a day earlier, also in the middle of the Bayern election campaign. At the last minute, he canceled a rally allegedly for security reasons: the criminal police had recommended that he not appear in public because of the alleged threat of attacks. Two days later, the German weekly Der Spiegel revealed that he was actually on vacation with his family in Mallorca, and police denied making this recommendation.
The result of the elections in Bavaria holds no surprises: Söder will win and repeat the coalition with the Free Voters. He himself has ruled out the Greens as potential partners and cooperation with the AfD is completely out of the question under German legal protection. However, if the 2018 results deteriorate, he will be questioned and his chances of a possible Conservative candidacy for chancellor in 2025 will decline.
No turnaround is expected in Hesse, the small state in the middle of Germany with the financial metropolis of Frankfurt, where elections are also taking place this Sunday. There, the CDU’s Christian Democrats have governed in a coalition with the Greens for a decade, and polls suggest they could repeat the alliance.
The CDU is the clear favorite with around 32% voting intention, well ahead of the 17% that the Social Democrats could achieve. The SPD has nominated Scholz’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, as a candidate to boost the party’s popularity with a familiar face across the country. The news will not be who will win, but who will come second, disputed between the SPD, Greens and AfD, which arrives with 15-16% of voting intention. For the Ultra team, a second place finish in a western state would be a moral victory.
In total, almost one in four German voters – around 14 million people – will go to the polls this Sunday, in a kind of political mid-term test for Chancellor Scholz’s three-party government. The coalition will be two years old in December. If public opinion does not change, it will happen in an atmosphere of dissatisfaction: almost eight out of ten Germans are dissatisfied with the government.
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