Germany

Germany’s establishment parties appear totally incapable of slowing the AfD’s surge in popularity across the country and may soon have no choice but to scrap their ‘firewall,’ which forbids cooperation. In some areas, especially in the eastern parts of the country, this policy might not matter soon anyway, with the anti-immigration party looking close to entering government.

Mainstream parties are increasingly allowing the far right to set the agenda, researchers in Germany have found, describing it as a shortcoming that had unwittingly helped the far right by legitimising their ideas and disseminating them more widely.

The findings, published in the European Journal of Political Research, were based on an automated text analysis of 520,408 articles from six German newspapers over the span of more than two decades.

The Berlin-based researchers found that as the far right moved from fringe issues in the late 1990s to topics such as integration and migration, mainstream parties had increasingly reshaped their communications to respond, boosting the spread of these ideas and signalling to voters that these ideas and stances were legitimate.

Someone inform the Guardian the AfD is the mainstream.

The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has crossed the 40% mark in a regional poll for the first time—an unprecedented result that signals a major political shift.

According to a survey conducted by the INSA for the news portal Nius, the AfD would achieve 40% if state elections in Saxony-Anhalt were held this Sunday. This represents a ten-point increase since June and the highest level ever recorded for the party in any German state. The governing CDU follows at a distant 26%, losing eight points, while the Left Party stagnates at 11%. The SPD and the left-wing nationalist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) stand at 6% each. The Greens and the liberal FDP would fail to enter parliament with only 3%.