Earlier this month, the far-right, anti-immigration, and anti-LGBTQ rights political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured 44 percent of the vote in an election in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. Paradoxically, AfD is co-led by Alice Weidel, who is a lesbian married to a Sri Lankan immigrant.
To understand what AfD’s victory means to Germany and Europe, we spoke with Dr. Samuel Clowes Huneke, associate professor of history at George Mason University. He is an expert on Nazi Germany and the author of I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany and States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany. He joins The Gaily Show the second Monday of each month to discuss fascism, politics, and history.
Watch our conversation
AfD’s Electoral Breakthrough
AfD’s win is a historic, though unwelcome, moment for far-right politics in Germany.
“[AfD] won about 44% of the vote,” Huneke explained. “Now that to an American might not sound like so much. But this is incredibly striking. It’s very close to 50%, which is almost unheard of in German politics because you have so many parties running around.”
According to Huneke, AfD launched as a Eurosceptic party but found its footing in 2015 when then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed nearly one million Syrian refugees who were displaced from the vicious years-long civil war under the country’s long-term dictator.
“It was a remarkable show of solidarity,” said Huneke. “And a kind of holding fast to Germany’s sort of pledge to itself after World War II to be on the forefront of guaranteeing human rights […] but this gave a huge amount of ammo for far-right politicians, commentators, so on and so forth.”
Germany uses a parliamentary majority system, meaning that if a party doesn’t win at least 50% of the vote, then they must create a coalition government with other political parties. Historically, German politicians have pledged not to join a coalition with AfD.
But this time may be different. Huneke said, “it seems likely that they will essentially form the next government of this federal state, which will give them a kind of toe hold in German politics that they so far haven’t had.”
The Queer Leader Paradox
One of the most perplexing aspects to AfD, and frustrating to queer communities, is that AfD’s co-leader is Alice Weidel. She lives in Switzerland with her partner Sarah Brossard, a Sri Lankan immigrant and Swiss filmmaker. They are raising two children.
Huneke said Weidel is “a poster child for hypocrisy,” noting that “everything that she preaches politically, she does not practice in her own life.”
Huneke explained that queer people wanting to rise in far-right movements do so by engaging in anti-trans politics.
“It’s the sort of LGB without the T folks,” he said. “It’s people who are basically able to punch down and thereby try to graft themselves onto the dominant heteronormative reality that they wish that they were a part of.”
It should be noted that the Nazi party also had queer leadership in the form of Ernest Röhm. A close friend to Hitler, he led the Sturmabteilung (SA) which was the Nazi Party’s first paramilitary wing. Ultimately, Hitler betrayed Röhm. In the infamous Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered Röhm’s murder, along with the deaths of Hitler’s numerous political rivals.
Where does AfD fit into Germany’s fascist history?
“Right after World War II, there were really three main parties,” Huneke said, identifying “the center left Social Democrats, the center right Christian Democrats, and the centrist Free Democrats.”
In the 1980s the Green Party formed. After the fall of the Soviet Union and Germany’s reunification, Die Linke became the successor to the East German Communist Party.
Huneke explained that the circumstances today are different than what Germany faced leading up to the 1930s when Germans started voting for the Nazis.
“The Nazis come out of this sort of horrible stew of resentments after World War I,” Huneke said. “It certainly didn’t come out of nowhere.”
Today, however, Germany is not coming off of a humiliating military defeat as they had after World War I. But, Huneke said, “there’s a lot of similar resentments about Germany’s place in the world, in this case, Germany’s place in the EU.”
Concerns for Germany’s Future
Huneke explained that the risk for Germany isn’t that AfD will attempt to create a dictatorship in the immediate future.
Instead, he expects AfD will use this moment to begin to experiment with policies that would undermine democracy.
“Much as how Republicans taking over state governments in the US starting in the early 21st century, they started experimenting with lots of undemocratic policies that we now see being replicated on the national level,” Huneke said. “It just really paints a bleak picture for the next federal election in a few years.”
Another example to look to, according to Huneke, is how far-right parties are governing in European countries such as Italy. He noted that they immediately attempt to bargain.
“They make nice with the elites, with the military, with industrialists, with bankers,” he said. “But when it comes to women, to queer people, to migrants, people of color, other minority groups, that is when their kind of fascism really shines through. And we’ve seen that in Italy already.”
To learn more about Huneke’s work and to order his books, visit samuelcloweshuneke.com.
