It’s easy to see what the Alternative for Germany party is against. But not so simple to work out what it is for.
A bit like Donald Trump really, or Reform UK. Yet AfD received one in five votes during Germany’s General Election, overwhelmingly in the east of the country. Which is odd.
Because that was the home of the notorious Stasi and the one thing AfD is in favour of is more surveillance. You’d have thought east Germans had enough of that sinister kind of thing before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the two Germany’s were reunited the following year.
But apparently not. If you’re interested in what the Stasi got up to then I recommend a visit to the old Ministry of State Security HQ in Berlin-Lichtenberg and the museum there which chronicles the dreadful deeds of the East German secret police.
I defy anyone to come away from there without the conviction that it was a society to which they really wouldn’t want to belong. AfD are also against protests by lefties and climate activists which all sounds a bit Stasi like, too.
They are opposed to government subsidies for wind and solar farms, multiculturalism, gender studies and LGBT education in schools, Islam, diversity and raising the retirement age from 66 to 67 by 2029.
Which is all very well, but Germany’s population is ageing just like ours and encouraging people to work longer if they are fit, able and happy to do so is one way to offset the cost.
In Britain, there is now consideration being given to bringing forward a rise in the pension age to 68. It was originally planned for 2044-46 but may now take place in the 2030s.
As long as that is accompanied by a change in employment laws so older workers cannot be made redundant against their will before receiving their state pension this could have benefits all round.
Like Donald Trump and Reform, the AfD doesn’t like the EU very much and wants a cut in German financial contributions and less regulation. A German exit – Dexit – from the EU is on their cards.
Like Trump and Reform their main thrust is on immigration with strict limits from non-European countries and the mass deportation of rejected asylum seekers. They do not want to any refugee resettlement schemes either.
No wonder Friedrich Merz’s winning conservatives cannot see any way of going into coalition with them. But under Germany’s proportional representation voting system a coalition of some sort is almost always necessary.
This messy way of forming governments is why I’d like to keep our first-pass-the-post voting in place for our general elections.
I appreciate it’s not very democratic – Keir Starmer got just one third of the vote but that gave him two thirds of Commons MPs. And with a vote share of 20.8 per cent and 150 seats in parliament, it’s not very democratic to keep the AfD out of government either.
The Electoral Reform Society has done the arithmetic around a PR result for last year’s UK election. Labour would have been down to 228 seats instead of the 412 it holds now.
The Lib Dems would have won roughly what they did and have 73 MPs – they seem to have learned how to play the FPTP system to their advantage. The Greens would have 71 MPs and the Conservatives would only have done a little better than they did gaining 139 seats. Reform would have 100 MPs.
Forming a coalition out of that lot would be like making a pig’s ear out of a dog’s breakfast. Labour would most likely have had to get into bed with the Libs and the Greens.
If Labour couldn’t have done such a deal then the Tories would have needed to stitch together an alliance with Reform, Libs and Northern Ireland MPs. Do we really want that kind of mishmash running the country? Best, then, to keep things as they are.