![Germany at Crossroads with Klaus Bachmann [PODCAST]](https://4liberty.eu/phidroav/2025/05/Liberal-Europe-Podcast-2024-9-1024x1024.png "Germany at Crossroads with Klaus Bachmann [PODCAST]")
Could the AfD party come to power in Germany? What would it mean for the German democracy and Europe? Why is the current historical narrative of the Bundesrepublik becoming useless? And what will be the identity of Germany in the future? Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Klaus Bachmann, Professor of Political Science at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS) in Warsaw, Poland. He is a political scientist and a historian, who specializes in issues of European integration, transitional justice, recent history of Central and Eastern Europe, and totalitarian movements.
Leszek Jazdzewski (LJ): Does the rise of the far right pose a threat to the German democracy?
Klaus Bachmann (KB): Yes, I think it does. It is a threat to the German democracy in two ways. First of all, because the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party does not respect the constitutional order in Germany and proposes to deviate from it if it gets enough power to do so. Secondly, it moves the whole state into a less democratic direction.
At the moment, there is a big discussion in Germany on whether or not to abolish or ban AfD. It is possible, according to the Constitution. It has happened already twice in the 1950s against the Communist Party and against the resurrection of the Socialist Reich Party. In both cases, it was quite efficient because both parties never returned to the strengths they had before the ban.
However, I have serious doubts whether it will be that easy this time, just because we live in a different world and today politicians and political parties can reach their voters and supporters directly through the internet, which was impossible back then. They needed the mediation of the media (of the press, television, and radio). They no longer need that. Moreover, the life after a ban would be quite different from what happened in the 1950s. But the problem with that is that it requires a lot of repression to exercise or to implement a party ban. And that, in itself, would make the German state much more repressive than it is now.
In this light, it is not so ‘black and white’ – one cannot say, ‘Oh, let us ban them!’ and the problem is solved. It is also not that easy to say, ‘Okay, then let us leave it like it is’, because in both cases the German democracy will be less democratic afterwards – no matter if they ban the party or if they refuse to do it.
LJ: If the AfD party continues on its current path and, hypothetically, was to become a part of the government in Germany in ten years, would this pose a threat to security in Europe? How would the country change? Or what will need to happen to prevent the AfD party from becoming a party of power?
KB: We are quite far away from the AfD taking power on the federal level, just because Germany is so decentralized. Several years ago, I had a discussion at the office of the Polish Ombudsman, where they wanted to know what would happen if something like the Polish takeover of the justice system would happen in Germany. And they said it is impossible because in order to achieve something that Poland achieved by taking over the position of the Minister of Justice and the presidency, you would need to win sixteen elections in Germany on the local level, on the regional level, the elections to the Bundestag – and you would need to do that twice, because in most regions we have elections every five years, so that would mean you would need ten years in order to do that, just to get over, for example, the terms of the judges that they have according to the Constitution.
All of this shows how complicated it is to take real power in Germany. Here, in Poland, we tend to look at Germany as if it was a second Poland – a central unitarian state where the Chancellor is the toughest guy in the room who actually runs the country, but that is not the case.
The politics in Germany is a lot about compromises and maneuvering between legal, political, and international constraints, which is not that easy. This being said, I can imagine a situation in which we will have an AfD government, or a coalition in which AfD is the bigger partner in some of the eastern regions, like in Thuringia, Saxony, or Anhalt-Saxony. That is, of course, possible. However, it would be very much constrained by the federal law and federal institutions, because in Germany, the federal law takes precedence over regional laws. As such, that is also an obstacle that would be difficult to overcome.
Now, let us imagine that we get such a government or such a coalition – for example, between the Christian Democrats and AfD on the federal level. That could most probably lead to Germany becoming totally unpredictable in terms of foreign policy and European policy, because AfD is very firmly against the European Union and against NATO. They are against any help for Ukraine. In this sense, they resemble some of the Republicans in the United States who are now saying, ‘Let us isolate ourselves from this conflict. It has nothing to do with us. Russia will never attack us. If they take over Ukraine or Poland, that is not our problem. We are going to negotiate that with them’. And they are, of course, also on a cultural or psychological level, very pro-Russian.
This is something that we usually do not see in Poland. People here, if they tend to be pro-Russian, they never praise Russia, but instead they criticize Ukraine. In Germany, you can do that directly. You can say that Putin is a great guy, that you support him and that Russia should win the war. And that is not too astonishing to anyone in Germany. I mean, I hear these opinions in the streets.
LJ: Is the AfD party truly revisionist in its approach or simply populist?
KB: Even if you regard AfD just as any other right-wing populist party, like, for example, Fidesz in Hungary, we need to look at what they are doing. Like the Russians in Ukraine, they are giving Hungarian passports to people in Slovakia, Ukraine, or Serbia, in order to be able to claim these territories and population as their own. They are spying on Ukrainian military positions in Ukraine. I wonder why would anybody other than Russia need information where are Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles positioned in Ukraine?
Hungary is a small country, they cannot afford to do that at the moment. But in a situation in which Ukraine is very unstable, where the Russian army is marching towards Kiev and Lavrov is calling on his colleagues in the West in order to get some kind of deal, Western Europe is forced to establish some kind of protection zone in Ukraine, which means basically not a legal, but a geopolitical division of the country. In such a case, I am absolutely sure that there would be some Orban getting out of the woods and claiming his part of Ukraine and he would be supported by somebody who says, ‘Germany first!’ and ‘Let us divide it and get our share too! Why should only the others get out their share?’.
LJ: Does German history put some constraints on the German political culture? Is the latter changing or evolving in any way?
KB: Yes, exactly those constraints that the AfD wants to get rid of. This is very interesting also because of a generational shift, as right now very few people remember the war. And I imagine that certain feelings might also be evolving for obvious reasons.
As regards the German political culture, I would expect it to shift. The public narratives about history, about the past, what in Germany is called for Vergangenheitspolitik, are imposed in a top-down manner. The official narrative, as we have it today, came into being somewhere between the end of the 1960s and the 1980s. That was a time when Germany was slowly becoming a multicultural society, but it was something that assumed that Germany is the country of the Germans – of the ethnic Germans, of the people who have lived in Germany, were born in Germany, who have ancestors in Germany, or maybe who in the 1990s had ancestors elsewhere, but they have always felt German. Now, this explains to a large extent, the focus on the Nazi times, the Second World War, the relations with Israel, and of course, later also, the relations to other neighboring countries, and so on.
In the meantime, we have become a society with one-fourth (or 25% to 30%) of people who either were not born in Germany, or whose parents were not born in Germany. This is a little bit strange German definition of somebody who has a migration background. [Just to make it even funnier, I do not have a migration background, according to this definition. My children, if they went to Germany and wanted to live there, they would be Germans with a migration background, because they were born abroad.] Moreover, more or less five to eight percent constitute foreigners, thus people who live in Germany but without having German citizenship.
Altogether, we can say that, statistically, there is no family in Germany that does not have at least one person with this migration background, right? For these people, it does not really matter whether they actually felt ‘German’ in the previous generation or not, because they all have their own stories, experiences, and opinions about the past. Therefore, it is difficult to, for example, require somebody whose ancestors actually spent their whole life in the Soviet Union (so they had never had a chance to vote for Hitler or support him, even though most likely they could have), who were some kind of victims of communism and the victims of the Nazi system too. Their children were born after the war. Still, with our official narrative in Germany we require them to commemorate the World War II and the Holocaust in the same way as it was established in the 1960s or 1970s.
That is just a moderate example because we can mention also experiences which go back to Latin America, Africa, or elsewhere. Let us take, for example, the people who are from Turkey. They come to Germany and the first thing that they are confronted with is that they have to change their opinion about Israel because they are now in Germany. Therefore, they have to wipe out everything they know about it, everything what we in Germany regard as propaganda, anti-Semitism, and become the same Germans as we are. This means they need to take over the whole narrative about the Holocaust, the Jews, and victimhood.
This narrative was useful after the war (in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s) because it helped Germany become an accepted partner in international affairs or to step on the red carpet in order to be recognized as a state and no longer be isolated as the culprit of the World War II. For that reason, it was absolutely perfect.
As a historian, I always say that this kind of history politics has nothing to do with history. It is not about the truth, nor is it about what really happened. It is about whether it is useful. And the problem is now that in a situation or in a society in which around 30% of people who do not share this background, who have totally different experiences, it is no longer useful. But we do not have anything else.
We have a historical narrative. We have memory politics that are enshrined in rituals, which did not change for the last thirty or forty years. And they are very strongly ritualized. Actually, the only country with a similar level of ritualizing memories or narratives about the past is Rwanda. For one week a year, they close down everything and commemorate the genocide. And they do it always in the same way, just like Germany does.
I mean, look at the rituals at the Bundestag when you have the liberation of Auschwitz or the end of the World War II, with all these speeches, the content of which does not differ very much from year to year. At the same time, there are many people who do not find their experience reflected in these rituals. And that is a problem. And slowly, slowly, we are starting to realize that.
One of the first signs that something is changing is probably recent criticism of Israel’s actions by Chancellor Merz. Because, actually, until recently, it was impossible for Germans (and especially Christiam Democrats) to do that.
LJ: Is it inevitable that Germany will become more multicultural? What future do you see for the integration and identity models of Germany?
KB: If one looks at the opinion polls, around 80% of the population accepts that a ‘German’ is somebody who has a German passport. There have been a lot of discussions about who gets a German passport, who should get a German citizenship.
We already have some administrative decisions confirmed by a lower-level court that anti-Semites cannot get German citizenship. This is quite interesting because, apparently, you can hate Muslims, you can hate Buddhists, you can hate Americans, Poles, Italians, or Roma people, but you cannot hate Jews if you want to become a German citizen – which is quite a funny construct. But it is one of the consequences of this narrative not adapting to the social realities on the ground.
Therefore, in terms of identity, the question is quite clear. The only party that actually deviates from it is AfD. And this is one of the basically three points which decide about whether it is constitutional or not and whether AfD can be banned or not. And the strongest point actually for a ban is that they do not accept this definition of identity because they talk about ‘biological Germans’ and about taking away citizenships from ‘people who do not deserve it,’ which could mean basically anybody.
When it comes to the ethnic German identity, even if one wanted to exclude immigrants from it, this would mean a huge number of several million of people who came to Germany claiming to be German, but actually came from Poland, Russia, Kazakhstan, or elsewhere. As such, it is impossible. And that is the problem of the AfD with that, not of Germans.
The problem is not that Germans do not agree who is German or who is not, but that no government was actually flexible enough to adopt the historical narrative about Germany to these realities, to this identity. Instead, we have a historical narrative that our governments have been trying to impose on the society for the last decades, which also assumes that all our ancestors actually were, well, bluntly speaking, Nazis, and everybody who lives on the German territory should be ashamed of that.
This seems very unconstructive, and it is not useful, because it fuels conflict – as we see now in the streets in clashes with the police and between people who emigrated to Germany after the war from the Arab countries, Russia, Poland, Belarus, or even Israel.
LJ: Does Europe still offer a solution to not just the identity problem, but to the position of Germany in the world, in Europe? Or does Germany have to first solve its own issues at home and only later could become a driving force for the European Union?
KB: It is impossible to disentangle that. After 1945, the idea was to build a state. That was not only the will of the Germans, but also of the Western allied powers that interfered strongly in the constitutional process. Nobody is actually reprimanding it or even talking about that, as this constitution is generally accepted by everybody.
The consensus was thus to build a state with various mechanisms that protect the citizens from the state and our neighbors from us. To both these goals, European integration was the answer. Because it means that a large part of the political and legal system actually is checked and constrained by the European law, and to some extent by the international law. Together with the internal checks and balances that apply this construction led to a strongly Europeanized German law, with some German influence on the European level.
This whole construction provides both – it protects us from abuse by the state, and it protects others from abuse by our power, by ourselves. That was the philosophy and that is still to some extent valid. However, I have the impression that – especially in our political elites or in the political establishment of Germany – there are more and more people who only see the constraints, but they do not see the advantages that these constraints bring for the protection of citizens.
Right now, everybody is talking about wanting to stop migration. Meanwhile, we are talking about a country that needs migration dearly and is not able to organize it in an orderly way to get the people they want. The whole problem consists in the fact that we do not get the people we want, and we do not want the people that we get. Needless to say, we cannot do what we want in order to stop immigration because that is against the international law, the European law, and the Constitution. In this light, these laws are viewed as something that binds our hands rather than provoke a discussion about the reasons why they are in place – that topic is not present at all in the ongoing discussions. Nobody thinks about what will happen if we give these powers to the government in order to regulate migration – for example, in the way Donald Trump does. If this was to happen, it might backfire and work against us.
If there is no rule of law with checks on every individual case, then not only may ‘this guy that I hate from the next corner because he is a Muslim or a Turk, or an Arab’ be deported, but I can be deported too. And that is something that is totally absent in the German discussion at the moment. All these constraints that were built up after the war in order to protect us from the state, they are now seen as something that only protects the others and binds our hands.
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.