Jay's Notes: Q+A on the German Elections with Laura Krause, Executive Director of More in Common Germany (Part 1)
Summary: Jay’s Notes is a weekly (ish) space where our Executive Director, Jason Mangone, can sling his takes.
In Part 1 of my Q+A with More in Common Germany’s Executive Director, Laura Krause, we focused on what just happened in German elections. In Part 2, we focus on what’s next for Germany, and get her reactions to Vice President Vance’s Munich Speech.
Let’s look ahead four years from now, or potentially even sooner, when Germany has its next national elections, or just generally over the medium term. One way to break down the potential outcomes is either (1) the AfD continues to grow its vote share and at a minimum, a coalition government will require their support to form a government. Or (2) the AfD’s growth has just hit its peak.
Can you paint a picture of first, what would lead the AfD to continue its rise, and alternatively what does it look like if the AfD has just hit its peak?
How the political atmosphere will continue to evolve in Germany will come down to how well the Democratic Parties will do in really fixing the problems of the country. Because ultimately the strength of any populist party relates to the weakness of the others to really address problems, to paint big pictures for the country and to move it forward. Many say that the likely coalition between Conservatives and Social Democrats is a big (and potentially final) opportunity to do so and the pressure on them to come together in an agreement is very high, because it is the only coalition of center parties to form a government. Talks are already underway and are set to conclude by Easter.
What is positive about this likely coalition is that it feels familiar to Germans, whereas the past three years with the first three-party-coalition felt like a political experiment to many – and probably any three-party coalition would feel at this point.
One thing that clearly helped the AfD in this election campaign is that migration was front and center. I would advise policymakers to expand their focus and to talk about fixing the economy and giving Germans hope for the future. Because when you look at how people look at their personal outlook versus the country's outlook, Germans are actually not that negative on the former, but very negative on the latter.
A true gap where the personal outlook does not translate into the general mood, where the public debate is very much dominated by a sense of “everything is going downhill”, “Germany is losing its strength” etc., something we also see strongly pushed by the AfD as a narrative. I think this was especially powerful in this winter campaign, which is very uncommon in Germany (we usually vote in late summer). So I think addressing this mood and providing visions for the future be the big challenge.
One of the ways that we talk about ourselves at More in Common US is that we're at our best when people have “Aha!” moments. Those are usually the result of using our research to tease out narratives that make people who don't see themselves reflected in our national conversation feel heard and seen. The political conversation in the US is driven by the far right and far left, and when you can give voice in an authentic way to the vast majority of the voting public, it's really powerful.
Are there any data points, any polling snapshots, that you can give me that have given Germans such “Aha!” moments? I ask this in the spirit of understanding more specifically how the new coalition might speak to the German public.
Yes! One Aha-moment I would pick out is the assessment of people whether they think that Germany is a just or unjust society, which we have been polling since 2019. And since the beginning of the inflation crisis the sense of Germany being unjust has risen and it peaks at 80% of Germans who feel that their society is unjust, while (social) justice being a value very important to Germans. This very negative assessment is something that decision makers in Germany really need to address.
Along a similar line is a very interesting finding we had about how Germany felt divided to people. First, we asked people whether their country feels divided and then we asked them along which lines. And the top answer was that the country feels divided along Rich/Poor, a division that is usually not part of the conversation about polarization or bridge building, where people usually talk more about cultural aspects, or the left - right divide or rural and urban dynamics.
So what we call the “social question” is key in Germany moving forward. This is especially true as the people who consider themselves workers this time overwhelmingly voted for the AfD, an electorate that, of course, traditionally has been a social democratic group. I think putting this more at the center of the conversation of who do we want to be as a country, and how do we want to live together is super crucial to regain people’s trust and attention.
This of course has connections to questions on migration, such as who we are as a country that is built on solidarity. So who does this solidarity extend to? Who's allowed into our quite strong social welfare system? etc. I think those are super important, super valid conversations. But we cannot have them if we do not factor in the social question in general or avoid addressing it.
I’m going to shift gears quickly. One of the things that we've been fascinated by in the US is that, to my knowledge, Germany uses paper ballots and is also able to get returns very quickly—my understanding is within a matter of hours.
In the US, we use largely electronic ballots, and some states aren't able to call their elections for several weeks. Not to stereotype, but why are German elections procedurally so efficient?
So I think one explanation for our smooth ballot counting is that there's a standardized system across the whole country. Of course, different candidates are listed on the local ballots, but the ballots look the same across every precinct in the country. Standardization simplifies counting for sure.
Also, you can also vote by mail in Germany, but your ballot has to arrive before election day. So it has to get there previous to that Sunday. There's no postmark rule and I know that's quite different across the US, where often so long as your ballot is postmarked by election day, it counts. The reason our mail-in ballots must arrive before election day is that everything is counted on election night, another reason why we have results quite quickly.
And then, I don't know how big precincts are in the US, but we have rather small precincts and a lot of them, who at max serve about 2000 voters per location. So it's small and agile, and so that's why we're quite fast.
You just spent six months in the US.
Four, four.
Okay four. Thank you for being so accurate. And you’ve spent a lot of time here over the course of your life. You spent a year of high school in California. Based on your experience, what do Americans get most wrong about Germany and German culture?
I will start with politics, because it's easier. I do think that the nature of the German multi-party systems and what come with it is, of course, quite foreign to American politics. Also the fact that parties in Germany are more formed and institutionalized is often lost. For example German parties are membership based, so people join officially and pay membership fees. In return, we do not have the concept of registering as Democratic or Republican – and that would be quite foreign to Germans. So to summarize: German parties feel more structured than what I've seen from the American parties and the multi-coalition dynamics of course are quite different. So we use the same words for them, but they're quite different in nature.
And about culture, okay. I will say the biggest misunderstanding Americans have about German culture is that Germans are perceived to be negative. Maybe because we are quite direct or like to poke holes into things. But once we're in, we are all in. German language is also often not as elevated as in the US, for example, when we give compliments or comment on things. We are a bit more reserved in how we show our emotions. But they're there.
I'm going to close with a couple questions about our Vice President's remarks in Munich a couple weeks ago. For the first part of the question, I'm going to engage our Vice President in good faith, and then I'll get to his more sinister motive.
In his Munich speech, the Vice President remarked, “I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis that it faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together is one of our own making. If you're running in fear of your own voters, there's nothing America can do for you.”
Taking the Vice President in good faith, one way to read what he said is “people are angry right now, and institutions are rigged against the will of people.” To be very generous to the Vice President, one example of this phenomenon in the US was the phrase “abolish the police,” or “defund the police.”
Ideas like this were in the zeitgeist in the late 2010s and early 2020s and seemed ubiquitous, but no one in the communities that that would have been affected by such a policy actually believed these things. Big elite institutions glommed on to such phrases, but such sentiments were out of step with the median voter. Are there areas where the center of German politics is simply out of step with a lot of its voters?
So I think JD Vance got a few things wrong about Germany and Europe. One misperception – or where he got it wrong – is that the German party system reflects a lot of different opinions because we have many different parties within parliament, something I am actually quite proud of in our system.
Take the AfD who have support of about 20% of the voters. Any party above 5% is able to enter parliament, they get public funding, they even get taxpayer money to set up a party Think Tank, just like every other party. So even extreme opinions in Germany are hardly silenced.
On the contrary, even the AfD, that is classified as rightwing-extremist by domestic intelligence services currently gets the same democratic rights as other major parties in Germany, which are quite generous. The AfD currently enjoys all the privileges of what it means to be a political party in Germany, including getting a lot of money because of our system of campaign reimbursement (where every party gets the same amount of money per vote) as a result of the recent election.
So I think it's really important to not buy into this idea that there's no free speech, or voices are silenced, in Germany or Europe. It is frankly rather disappointing that claims along these lines were made. I think that on the contrary, the German political system makes it quite transparent where people here stand and broad peoples’ opinions currently are. Like I said, we almost had seven parties in the parliament and last time we had six. So there is a lot of political diversity in Germany and I am not sure the US-vice president picked up on that.
And then to take the more sinister interpretation of the Vice President's remarks. He was obviously tacitly supporting the AfD. And of course, Elon Musk very openly supports AfD.
In the US, one trick of the populist right is to take an issue most Americans agree with. A good example is that most Americans, including most Latino and Latina Americans, want a secure border. Most Americans believe in the value of order and rightfully want security. The populist right takes these things that everyone wants, and then they use extreme language to clarify how much they believe that point.
You can point to a litany of such cruel examples, like our Vice President, when he was on the campaign trail claiming that Haitian migrants were eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio. The trick they play is that then if you're just a normal person who claims the simple facts, i.e. “No, Haitian migrants are not eating their neighbors’ pets,” the populist right uses that as a pretext to say, “See! You believe in open borders!”
So they use your opposition to an outlandish claim as a pretext to say that you hold a far-left position, when in fact you don't. Are there ways in which the AfD plays this trick in Germany as well?
Yes, for sure. I think this is probably what might be getting confusing from an American perspective, because the AfD is actually using a lot of the Trump playbook, including allusions to say “Make Germany Great Again” but adjusted for the German context. Or how the AfD copied his strategy to claim that all other parties are “mainstream” and that only the AfD is speaking for “the people”.
As I laid out, the AfD is far from being cancelled – their opinions are very much out in the marketplace of German public opinion. But they are still painting a picture that insults political opponents and pretends that they are all in the same camp, as if there was not a lot of nuances (and conflict!) within the party spectrum. This is a gaslightling strategy that I think we have seen in the US as well. The AfD even has openly said that it wants to “destroy” the Conservative Party, which is thriving in Germany and by the way, very willing to speak about migration or to call for more restrictive border controls.
The AfD wants to be respected but if it ought to be treated as a normal party then they also have to acccept to get under scrutiny themselves for things where they don't make sense, or where they flip flop on issues – which they do plenty, but they're not called out for it yet, because they're kind of treated as an anomaly.
We can’t do this without you!
MIC regularly conducts research that sheds light on both cross-group misperceptions and common ground. Consider supporting our work by making a donation.