Germany’s Conservative Challenge

The strong electoral showing by the Teutonic rightist party, Alternative für Deutschland, is the latest signal that Germany could use a Bill Buckley — and a Ronald Reagan — to straighten out its conservative movement. Decades ago, Buckley and Reagan purged America’s right of fringe elements like antisemitism, xenophobia, and conspiratorial paranoia. Germany’s AfD is faced with similar elements today suggesting the need for a Buckley-Reagan cleanup.“Seismic” is the word being used for the AfD’s performance in state elections in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt, where the party earned some 44 percent of the vote. The mainstream conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union, earned about 17 percent of votes. A coalition of the two right-wing parties would in theory seem logical. Yet Chancellor Friedrich Merz of the CDU is among those with doubts about the suitability of the AfD as a partner.This is a problem at the national level, too, as these columns have pointed out. The CDU, rather than aligning with the AfD in the federal parliament, has opted instead to form a coalition with the ideologically incompatible Social Democratic Party. The CDU’s hesitation might seem reasonable, but the result is to frustrate the German voters who handed a majority to lawmakers with a conservative agenda on issues like immigration. At first glance, the AfD could appeal to American conservatives and other responsible voters. The party’s chairwoman, Alice Weidel, is married to a woman of Sri Lankan origin and stresses that the AfD welcomes foreigners who want to “contribute to making Germany a better place.” The party’s leader in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, defuses with humor attempts to brand him, as Der Spiegel put it, “the most dangerous man in Germany.”“Of course I’m a radical,” Mr. Siegmund jokes, specifying: “Radically in love with Germany.” The telegenic Mr. Siegmund laments that “you’re already considered right wing as soon as you make a distinction between a man and a woman.” A darker element lurks in the AfD. Feature its chairman in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, who has been fined for using Nazi slogans and condemns Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as “a monument of shame.”Mr. Höcke demands “nothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance.” An AfD federal legislator, Maximilian Krah, has denied that all members of the Nazi SS were “automatically criminals.” The party openly tilts toward Moscow in foreign policy, and calls for the removal of American troops from Germany. That would undermine America’s security posture on the continent by threatening facilities like the Ramstein air base.Which brings us back to Buckley and Reagan. The AfD, we have said, “faces a choice” between tolerating extremism or becoming “a responsible political organization.” Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen have faced the same choice. The choice echoes how Buckley and Reagan pushed the GOP from extremism. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society that he saw ran the risk of fostering an “ugly, even Fascist turn,” as John Judis put it.Buckley came to see, too, that Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “populist demagoguery damaged the anti-communist cause,” Geoffrey Kabaservice has reported. Buckley’s “New Right” purged the GOP of what Mr. Kabaservice called “antisemitism, isolationism, sectarianism and associations with Nazism.” Buckley, too, barred writers “associated with antisemitic publications” from the right’s intellectual flagship, National Review, per Mr. Kabaservice.Reagan, Mr. Kabaserve adds, “championed Buckley’s ideas and put them into political practice, first as California governor and then as president.” The party’s ideological discipline led to electoral victories for the right, fueling the Reagan economic boom and the defeat of the Soviets in the Cold War. We don’t want to get ahead of our skis, but that’s a terrific template for the conservatives celebrating the AfD’s victory today.

Germany’s Conservative Challenge

Germany’s Conservative Challenge

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