Immigration tends to be thought of as a cultural issue more than an economic issue. And the question of whether you’re going to meet the voters on their economic concerns or their cultural concerns is obviously a live one. Are you suggesting that the way to do it is to meet them on their cultural concerns?
I think there was a sense that the government had lost control over immigration. So people, especially in Saxony-Anhalt, where there’s a constant shortage of workers, can understand that you need immigrant labor, but what they want is that the state controls who comes in and out of the country, and that people who’ve committed very serious crimes, like murder and rape, will be deported, or at the very least detained. I think the key issue has been that the government has kind of said, “Well, we can’t control the borders, what can we do?” And, since 2015, that kind of lack of control from the state has been acutely felt in areas, and also rural areas for the first time.
I was under the impression that the German center right had moved to the right on immigration policies. Is that not true?
It is true, and migration numbers have gone down massively all across Europe, but you still have people coming in every year, and the government is still not really entirely in control over who’s coming in and who’s not. People are telling me that what they want is control over this. They have absolutely no problem with a worker coming in from Turkey or wherever. But nearly half of all people who receive social welfare in Germany are non-citizens as well.
You yourself said earlier that you thought Germany needs these people for economic reasons, no?
It does, but it needs people who actually have qualifications. This is exactly the difference that people want to see, I think. The government needs to separate asylum migration from labor migration, and this is something that, I think, for too long, the parties haven’t done. And the AfD takes an extreme stance on this, which I’m not entirely convinced that all of its voters share. Some do, but I think there’s an increase recently that you can’t explain just through sheer extremism.
Do you think it is accurate to say that the AfD is further to the right than other right-wing European movements?
That’s definitely accurate. They have a very strong and large wing of people who define Germanness on ethnic grounds, and they say that the German people are dying out. That’s the kind of language that you get from them, and the way they push for this more homogeneous society is something that’s, I think, quite different from other European parties. They want to restore Germanness through “remigration,” as they call it. And you can also see this in the way that, for instance, the French far right have actually stopped collaborating with them and have distanced themselves from the AfD, because they’re too extreme for them.
When the French far right won’t collaborate with the German far right, you know the German far right has gone too far. But I want to understand what else you think the mainstream parties should be doing in terms of coalitional politics. Separate from trying to meet more voter concerns, do you think they should be working with the far right?
I haven’t got an easy answer for that, I’m afraid. I don’t think people calling this election an earthquake are wrong, or that these descriptions are overblown. The AfD has grown so large that any attempts to control them or try to get them to be moderate are tricky now because the establishment parties can’t really dictate terms. The center right got less than half of what the AfD did on Sunday. I think the only thing that I can see that counters this trend is in England, where I live, and where we’ve seen quite an interesting shift now, with Andy Burnham coming in as a new center-left Prime Minister. He is much more popular than Keir Starmer. And that’s immediately had an effect on the working-class vote, with some of that shifting back to the center left.
Yes, although it seems mostly like Burnham is getting that support from the Greens and parties to the left of Labour, rather than from Reform and the right. If you add up the Reform and Conservative vote in the polls in the U.K., it seems like right-wing support has remained pretty constant, both before and after Burnham.
Yes, that’s true. But the point is that once you get credible leadership back into the centrist parties it can make a real difference, in the sense that people might feel that they can actually get the change that they crave from the mainstream parties. In Germany, that would be quite a painful shift for both the S.P.D. and the Conservatives, because they would effectively have to admit that what they’ve done in the last few years, possibly even ten years or so, hasn’t really worked, and that they’d really have to come up with quite a radical shift. Sweden is a good example as well, or Denmark, where the center left has managed to reclaim some ground with new leadership and new messaging.
Germany does have a couple of far-left parties, and a particular far-left party, called the B.S.W., which has gone to the right on immigration. If this issue is the motivating factor, why haven’t they done better?
Yes, the B.S.W. kind of split off from the other far-left party, which also still exists. I think their problem was always that they have one leader, a very charismatic woman called Sahra Wagenknecht, whose ideas entirely dominate the Party, and that’s why they’ve come up with this really idiosyncratic mix of being socially conservative, as you say, tougher on immigration, but also being left-wing on economic issues, and being extremely pro-Russian. And I think that combination appeals only to quite a small section of voters, because it is very distinct to the woman who set up that Party, which they’re named for Wagenknecht as well. And that’s why I think they kind of failed a little bit as a political project.
I first became aware of your work when you wrote a book called “Beyond the Wall,” about East Germany. It was somewhat controversial, because some people thought you were too positive about East Germany. Without getting into that, I did want to ask about whether now, when you see some form of neo-fascist politics rising in East Germany much more than in what was formerly West Germany, has this changed anything about the way you think about East Germany, and the values it instilled in its citizens?
