Why the European Right Keeps Rising

The four-and-a-half-hour interview that Björn Höcke, the AfD leader in Thuringia and enfant terrible of German domestic politics, gave to the German podcaster Ben Berndt was treated by much of the German press as an event somewhere between a public hygiene crisis and a constitutional emergency. By comparison, an interview with Friedrich Merz, the actual Chancellor, attracted a fraction of the same attention. That asymmetry alone speaks volumes: Höcke is the figure the German political class has most consistently tried to render unsayable, and yet he commands attention in a way the Chancellor of the Federal Republic does not. Maybe the “firewall” is also working as a flare, drawing attention to those the political establishment would like to silence. 

What is rising across Europe, in Germany, in Austria, in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy, is not a single party but a recognition by an every growing number of citizens: That elections, in the form they have taken since the 1990s, have stopped producing the changes voters keep asking for. The British political scientist Colin Crouch described this condition twenty years ago in a book called Post-Democracy. Although the formal rituals continue – people going to the polls, watching the debates, not studying the party manifestos – all the substantive decisions most people see as existential priorities like migration and energy, are made elsewhere: At the European level, in supranational bodies, in NGO networks supported by public money, and in administrative organs accountable to nobody the voter can remove. The state, whose representatives often speak about “saving democracy” these days, actually likes this pattern.

A recent German example illustrates this in a stark way. The Bundestag has formally requested that Lars Klingbeil, the SPD finance minister and vice chancellor, disclose how many millions of public euros are flowing to NGOs that describe themselves as defenders of democracy. Klingbeil has refused to provide the figures, citing administrative difficulty. The columnist Jan Fleischhauer noted recently that this is one of the more flagrant violations of parliamentary budgetary oversight in recent memory, and yet the political consequences are minimal, because the press does not consider this a story. The party officially designated as a threat to democracy is the one demanding transparency about taxpayer money flowing to organisations dedicated to fighting that party.