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Five Things Equality Activists Can Learn from the German Election

Election Far-right Germany Politics and Government

February 26, 2025

“When Germany sneezes, Europe catches a cold”¹

We’re in the grip of a worldwide inequality crisis and growth in support for the far right. The two are inextricably linked and share common features – which means there’s a lot we should learn from this week’s elections in Germany. 

The election saw a historic rise in support for the far-right AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland)  and a massive drop in support for the established parties of German politics, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD). These aren’t new patterns – we’ve seen them recently in the Netherlands, Italy, America, France – but Germany had been seen as a stronger bulwark against the far-right with a historically strong economic and social model. So what happened?

Our systems are different, but the same currents that have radically changed German politics run through the UK. There are serious warnings we should take from this election, as well as points of hope. 

The centre is struggling to hold

The centre-right CDU has historically been one of Europe’s more moderate conservative parties, especially under the long leadership of Angela Merkel. However, facing rising support for the far-right AfD, they chose to fight this particular election on a platform of being as close as possible to the AfD policy on immigration. This included the CDU’s leader, Friedrich Merz, making a big display of co-operating with AfD to pass a motion calling for a draconian tightening of immigration controls, the first time in German post-war history the far right has been utilised to win a parliamentary vote.

This approach may sound familiar because it’s often used by parties of the centre left and right under names like triangulation, meeting voters where they are, and cutting off the oxygen of the far right. 

However, in reality, choosing to spend your election campaign talking about how immigration is an “influx crisis”  is liable to make voters think “hmm, yes, that is a problem, and I’ll vote for the party I most trust to tackle it” – the far right party.  Indeed, this is exactly what happened in this election, as the CDU underperformed their polling and scraped into their second-worst ever result while AfD’s support only grew throughout the campaign.

What we need to learn from this is that you can’t trick voters into supporting you by pandering to the far right – but you absolutely can convince a lot of voters that the concerns raised by the far right are valid. 

A sense of stagnation and anxiety pervades Europe

Exit polling from Infratest dimap found that among voters with poor economic situations, the AfD won 37% (up 18 points)  compared to 18% for the CDU, and 12% for the SPD (down 15 points). Like many other developed countries, the growth in far-right support may be coordinated by the richest, but it’s winning support from people who feel like they’re falling behind.

Germany’s economic model has relied on exports and domestic investment, but this has begun to rapidly erode. Their industrial production for 2024 was 90% of the level it was in 2015, while Poland’s expanded to 152%. High energy prices and an aging population are sapping Germany’s ability to create sustainable economic growth, but the most familiar issue to a UK audience will be the austerity programme that has prevented state investment.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Germany introduced a constitutional debt brake that restricts deficits to 0.35% of GDP, which requires a two-third majority of the Bundestag to remove. What happened next may shock you: the constitutional amendment to massively limit a government’s ability to spend has turned out to massively limit the government’s ability to spend. The result is 15 years of austerity that has starved Germany of investment in infrastructure and services and, although there’s a growing consensus that the debt brake has deepened Germany’s crisis, getting to two-thirds of the Bundestag to reform or remove it will be difficult.² The UK government’s similar fiscal rule is, at least, much easier to change if our politicians choose to do so.

A constitutional amendment to limit spending on services and decisions not to tax the richest have, like almost all developed countries, led to a rise in inequality since the 1980s. Another strong parallel lies in the massive regional inequality; the UK’s deindustrialised North and Midland regions that have been left behind by financialised economics and soaring wealth inequality are strikingly similar to the East German states that have struggled since reunification in 1990. While the AfD did well everywhere, it swept every state in East Germany.

The parallels are difficult to ignore. Facing our own rising far-right, we need to be able to offer some kind of future to left-behind regions, let alone basic public services and social security. 

The far right is gathering support from disengaged people

The biggest source of new voters for AfD was people who hadn’t voted in the last election, with the party drawing in an estimated 1.8m votes from first-time voters and previously non-voting people. That’s nearly 2 in 5 of all their new votes, and nearly half of all the votes from people who didn’t vote last time went to AfD. Similarly, the third-largest party amongst previously non-voting people was BSW, a populist party with similar views on migration and cultural issues, who pulled in an additional 400,000. 

The left and centre failed to mobilise non-voters in the same way. Despite the surge in support for Die Linke – we’ll get to that – most of their new supporters were already politically engaged and had previously voted for the Greens or SPD, although the 290,000 new voters they won was still a much better mobilisation than the 250,000 managed by the much larger SPD or the 110,000 new voters that chose the Greens.

Evidence strongly suggests that inequality and the sense of unequal power is a strong factor in why people disengage from politics. The good news is that the greatest cure here is prevention: people will be less vulnerable to far-right messages if they feel that they’re able to participate in the political system. The bad news is that in both Germany and the UK, we’re a long way from that.  

Campaigning bluntly against billionaires works

Die Linke (literally “The Left”) formed out of a merger of the former East German communist party and a group that split out of the SPD in protest of the way that the SPD, like most social democratic parties in the 90s and 2000s, moved towards neoliberalism and away from social democracy. Like a lot of left populist parties in Europe, it peaked in the early 2010s, then gradually lost momentum and support; after left-nationalist party BSW split out of it last year, the decline seemed terminal. Polls had it as low as 2%, well below the threshold for winning seats in the Bundestag. Instead, a last-minute surge pushed it to nearly 9% and doubled their parliamentary representation. How? Bluntly campaigning against billionaires.

In their plan for Germany, Die Linke stated very simply that “We believe there should not be any billionaires.” They proposed 5 steps to tackle the super-rich, including one-off and recurring wealth taxes, inheritance tax, and progressive taxes on capital gains. The surge in interest itself seems to have been kicked off by the party leader’s strong speech against the CDU-AfD migration bill, arguing against the far-right’s beliefs about race and immigration. 

Where other parties sympathised with or outright mimicked the AfD approach to immigration and lost support to them, Die Linke’s simple and clear statement of belief was a hit with young voters. Die Linke won the largest share of the 18-25 vote with a massive swing, as well as winning a plurality of votes in Berlin.³ So many members joined that Die Linke is now at its largest ever, despite losing a big chunk when BSW split. 

That’s not to say that they’ve solved it; they’re supported by fewer than 1 in 10 voters and, although they’ve replaced lost working class voters with young voters, they’re struggling to be heard outside their niche. But young voters have proved to be big supporters of far-right challengers to mainstream politics in many countries, and Die Linke prove that a strong, inclusive, pro-equality voice can win mass support.

The UK needs to change course fast

We’re not immune to the traps that German politicians have fallen into. Just yesterday, our government announced the abandonment of one of its own manifesto pledges (returning overseas aid spending to 0.7% of GNI, after it was cut during the last government) and introduced a policy from Reform UK’s manifesto (to cut aid spending further and give that money to the defence budget). That approach backfired horrendously in Germany and other recent European elections,⁴ and it could well backfire here. Telling voters struggling with the cost of living, who feel powerless and excluded from politics, that the far-right are correct is a dangerous game.

But stepping back, why are people in that situation in the first place? In Germany and in the UK, the economy and society are structured to benefit the richest few and, over the last few decades, people have been asked to accept that in return for an increasingly poor quality of life. We know that education, health, and happiness suffer in unequal systems, and we recently found evidence that environmental damage goes hand-in-hand with it too. Across the world, it’s getting harder and harder to win majority support for that deal, leaving space open for the far right. 

We need to change course fast. Pandering to far-right beliefs without changing the bad deal we’re asking voters to accept or the underlying inequality that created these conditions has proven a disaster too many times. The only route out of this crisis is creating an inclusive, sustainable, more equal society that curbs billionaires and invests in people. It’s all doable! Alternatively, we could continue as we are. But we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Dario Goodwin, Senior Digital Engagement Manager