Afd win poses challenge for German democracy

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1:11Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks. 24 hours ago, the word on many people's lips in Germany and well beyond was seismic as they greeted the news that the far-right AFD had scored such a socking victory in a statewide election in eastern Germany. If it was an earthquake yesterday, today it's been all about the continuing aftershocks. The AFD won almost 44 % of the vote, just short of an outright majority. Normally, given Germany's long experience of government by coalition, that would mean the AFD would have no problem about taking over the considerable powers that had devolved to German states.

1:56But because of a long-established firewall, as it's called, maintained by almost all other parties, certainly all the mainstream parties, that is not a given. The big question now is whether the firewall can, indeed should, survive. First, though, that shock I was talking about. You could hear it on the streets of the state capital, Magdeburg, today. It's not a given that the AfD would do any better. But they haven't even been given a chance to try yet. We can't forget that. And what's happened so far has been caused by the established parties, not the AFD, as people keep saying now. They're not to blame for what's happened.

2:35So I think they deserve a chance.

2:41I think it's absolutely dreadful. I didn't expect such a shocking result either. I was pleased to see so many people out and about going to vote, but the wrong ones were there too. And what lies ahead for us now is going to be terrible. And you could also hear the shock as hollow-eyed German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz from the centre-right CDU took to elect her today.

3:12I can tell you we are all deeply shocked. We did not expect it to turn out like this. We must, of course, accept it. Those are the rules of our democracy. But yesterday marked a turning point, not only in Saxony-Anhalt, but throughout Germany. And this election result will have consequences. It also has implications for the international situation. If one looks simply at who offered their congratulations yesterday, it shows the attention this election result is receiving internationally. As for the AFD, well, it is triumphant. And the party's deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch told the BBC she believes that the AfD will soon become the voice of the majority across Germany and an irresistible force.

3:54People are just tired of this leftist focus social politics. So it's not only for migration politics that people think we are the most competent. It's also on economics and all the other areas. This is the beginning. We will have another regional elections in two weeks and then there will be a huge debate about Mertz, our Chancellor. This is whether he can run the country any longer or not, because they realise that their numbers are breaking apart. So what of that question about cooperation now with the AFD? Is it time for a rethink? Andreas Röder has been urging one. He's Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Mainz and a long-time member of the CDU, the Christian Democrats.

4:36He resigned from a senior role in the party in 2023 over the issue. What's his argument for dismantling the firewall? I mean, what we experienced in Sachsen-Anhalt yesterday was that the electors blew up the firewall. And this marks not only a landslide victory for the AfD, the first real landslide victory for the party, but at the same time, it creates an identity crisis for the mainstream parties because the firewall has become something like a symbol of identity of the mainstream parties for years now. And so this creates an identity crisis and it creates a crisis particularly for the center-right CDU because the CDU is the pivotal party in the German political system and it has to react to this new constellation.

5:33the CDU was having a resolution of incompatibility with the AFD as well as with the far left party Die Linke. Understood. And I hear what you're saying about this sort of the idea that, you know, this and another unwieldy coalition would be rather incompatible for what most voters would like. However, you say voters blew up the firewall. A majority of voters did not vote for the AFD, and they knew very well that those mainstream parties have this policy of not cooperating with the AFD. So you could actually argue that most people voted not for the AFD to go into government. I would say it slightly differently, because the AFD won 44%, and the so-called Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht, The populist left-wing party won another 5.2%.

6:34And this is the party which announced in advance that it opposed the firewall and that it might be willing that the left-wing populists might be willing to support a right-wing populist prime minister of the state of Saxony Anhalt. And if you count them together, the Bündnis, Sarah Wagenknecht and the AfD, they do have a majority over all other parties. You could say there is a majority. So what about the issue of principle, though, for your party, the CDU? You're still a member. And obviously, you know, Friedrich Merz is the German chancellor. I mean, among the many arguments is that the AFD, in fact, the Saxony branch, the state branch of the AFD, has been classified as right wing extremists by Germany's domestic intelligence services.

7:26These are people with whom it is dangerous to cooperate. That is the argument. Yeah, this is what the service says. But at the same time, you do have to say this service is a political institution which gets its commands from the ministry. And apart from that, I would say we are having a problem in Germany in coping with the AFD because people are always saying that the AFD is dangerous, that it is counter-constitutional, that it does want to abandon democracy. But what people not do is to go to the constitutional court and to seek a judgment by the constitutional court, which would be the regular way in the German political system.

8:21And I would say if the AFD is really anti-democratic, anti-constitutional, clarify it by seeking a judgment of the constitutional court. But I wonder if people shouldn't just look at the evidence, the plain evidence in front of them. The fact that there are so many members of the AFD, senior members of the AFD, who flirt openly with neo-Nazi, either openly neo-Nazi members or neo-Nazi slogans who don't apologize for past behavior, who talk about close relations with Moscow. And indeed, the Russians, senior people very close to Vladimir Putin, seem to be rejoicing in what the AFD is doing. I mean, this is the plain evidence that the AfD is a threat.

9:12Which in part is true for the Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht and the party Die Linke as well. I mean, right-wing and left-wing populist parties do share those positions. And the question is, do voters vote for the AfD because of those attitudes or instead of them? And obviously, as far as we know, and if we look at the voters, not at the office holders of the AFD, of the functionaries, if we look to the voters, they seem to be so disappointed about mainstream politics in Germany. They feel to be not seen, not to be heard, so that they, instead of that, vote out of disappointment, vote for the AFD. And this is a problem of the mainstream parties.

10:00And that was Professor Andreas Roeder. The United Nations says about 19 million Nigerian children who should be getting an education are missing out more than any other country. One of the factors is the threat of school abduction. Some parents are simply too scared to send their children to class. Yamisi Adagoki has travelled to north-west Nigeria.

10:28So we've just arrived at the school and the senior girls are out in the courtyard. They're all wearing bright green uniforms and it's raining a little bit, but they're just carrying on regardless.

10:46One of the pupils singing and dancing here ahead of the end of school is Hanatu. Like many teenage girls here in Kasao, in northwest Nigeria, she's nervous about her exam results. The BBC has followed Hanatu's story closely ever since a shocking, life-changing incident. I remember it often. It makes me feel sad and I cry. Reports say a large number of schoolgirls have been abducted after gunmen stormed a government school and kidnapped them from their dormitories. This part of Nigeria has been plagued by motorbike-riding gangs of bandits who abduct people for ransom. In Zanfara State, almost half a million children are out of school, partly driven by fears over abductions.

11:35After the attack, Hanatu spoke to BBC Africa Eye.

11:41We heard gunshots, people crying for help and shouting. Here come the bandits. About five of us ran and locked ourselves in the toilet. There were about 350 students in the school, but only 32 of us escaped. Umu was another pupil at the school and was one of those abducted. She now studies early childhood education at a nearby university, but she was deeply affected by the incident. I heard a man's voice shouting, come out or I'll kill you. I was thinking that they would kill us. Nearly 300 girls were taken. They were eventually freed, but it's disputed as to whether a ransom was paid for their release.

12:30But the girls' school remained closed, threatening their futures. Nigeria already has one of the highest rates of out-of-school children in the world. Missing out on education can have devastating consequences, especially for girls. Here's Tovia Moy from the Ilimi Children's Fund. When you're not educated, you don't have a choice, you don't have a say in how your life, the course of your life. For example, if they say, oh, you need to get married, at that point, you don't even understand what marriage entails. After the BBC filmed with Hanatu and Umu, donors reached out via the Ilimi Children's Fund.

13:07They offered to help some of the girls affected. This allowed them to attend a secure school in the state capital. Both Hanatu and Umu now dream of careers where they can help others. I want to be a doctor so I can help the community and my relatives and the people that have supported me.

13:31I want to be educated so I can help people in the way I have been helped. I want God to grant me the ability to help people like my mum and other people in need. The attack on their old school changed their lives, but Hanatu and Umu are determined that it will not define them. And that was Yamisi Adegoki reporting from Nigeria. This is the BBC.

14:07coming up on news hour the weather forecaster who persuaded allied leaders to change the date of the d-day landings in 1944 the atmosphere was almost unbearably tense an irrevocable decision had to be made. I had long had at the back of my mind the tactical use of weather. I had hoped that just such a set of circumstances would come about. More on the man who shaped one of the big moments in World War II. That's coming up in just a few minutes. Our main headline, well, it's what we've been talking about at the top of the programme. Chancellor Mertz says he's shocked by the far-right AFD's decisive victory in state elections in Saxony Anhalt describing the result as seismic.

14:50And staff at the Eiffel Tower have gone on strike after management acquiesced to demands from a conservative Hindu organisation that the tourist landmark be a woman-free zone for their visit.

15:08This is NewsHour. It's live from the BBC with me, Tim Frax. Latvia, one of the former Soviet states bordering Russia but now in the European Union and NATO, is long warned about Moscow's malign influence, indeed since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine of the outright threat posed to the Baltic states. Today the Latvian government took its next step in trying to thwart that danger by banning the imported books and newspapers from Russia and its close ally Belarus. Bayna Braja is Latvia's foreign minister. Why has the government introduced the ban? Well, because we regularly look through the imports from Russia and Belarus and the dynamics of it.

15:53So this is not such a big type of import. We have also put it up for the EU's sanctions. So it's only 12 and a half million. So it's not a big number. But actually, 12.5 million, what, are you talking about the value there? Euros, so about 15 million dollars. Okay, right. So, but actually, you know, when we look at it, why would someone need to import books from Russia or Belarus, the two authoritarian regimes, or papers, newspapers for that? If there is a need to buy anything like that, there is sufficient stuff here locally or elsewhere in the EU. So that's the main thinking, because you can also have propaganda, you can have other security sensitive issues.

16:39So there is actually security aspect to all of that. Okay, but just to be clear, it's a blanket ban on all this material coming in. Is it all Russian books? Because I'm just wondering, I mean, you say, why is there a need to get any books from Russia? But I mean, you can imagine, obviously, Russia has a glorious civilization. You can be appalled by what the present government is up to. But I mean, if there were a sort of fantastic new edition of a Tolstoy novel or Pushkin poetry, would that… They can be published elsewhere. They don't have to be imported from Russia. Okay, so it's about the fact that they're coming from Russia.

17:17So I'm just trying to be clear about this then. Is this an economic embargo or are you concerned about propaganda? Because hence my question about Pushkin or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or whatever. Well, it's on the basis on specific customs codes. So those come the books from Russia, the books from Belarus. So it's not about authors or something. So it's just in the current conditions, you know, in the fifth year of the war, Russia is waging in Ukraine. That is pretty straightforward. But you will also be aware that, look, you know, there is a counter argument here, which is that a quarter of your country see themselves as ethnic Russians.

17:57You obviously very proudly see yourself, call yourself a democracy, which indeed you are. That this is there's something that feels a little sort of unfree and anti-democratic about when you get into at least the optics of banning books. No, we ban imports. We don't ban books. I'm sorry, there is a big difference. As for the Russians here, we don't divide Latvian citizens in some type of groups. They are all Latvian nationals. As for the Russian citizens, there is below 40 ,000 of those living in Latvia. And those are some who have been living here for a long time and some who have received shelter from us after the start of the war.

18:42as for languages and discussions and you know what people use in private life i can speak russian myself does it make me a russian speaker i don't know if people want to read books they're most welcome to read books if they want to read papers it's all available this is the freest democracy that is there well on that i mean and i you've already acknowledged that you you're hoping that this might be taken up by the rest of the european union because obviously you know, you can't close your border against imports from the rest of the EU. So were, you know, those Russian imports to win their way in from elsewhere in the EU, there's nothing you could do about that.

19:22But the other big thing, obviously, is that these days, lots of people gain access to printed information through the internet. People's private lives are people's private lives. But at the state level, we consider, I was an absolute majority of the parliament, that importing books from Russia or books from Belarus in the current geopolitical conditions is something that is not needed. The Latvian Forum is to Baiba Braja. Now, loath as I am to talk about national stereotypes, especially on the BBC World Service, I think you will allow me this, that one thing British people through the ages seem to love talking about is the weather.

20:06And this week's is a new film about what is a good claim to be the most important weather forecast in British history. It was the forecast that gave the go-ahead for D-Day on the 6th of June 1944, that huge, allied, amphibious invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The story behind that event, and the man on whose shoulders it fell, James Stagg, has been turned into a movie starring Andrew Scott. David Sillito went to meet him on board, a famous D-Day veteran. Fate of the war, thousands of lives. Hinge on this. It's a film about D-Day, but more specifically, one man's contribution. The atmosphere was almost unbearably tense.

20:49An irrevocable decision had to be made. This is the voice of James Stagg. I had long had at the back of my mind the tactical use of weather. I had hoped that just such a set of circumstances would come about. D-Day should have been on the 5th of June. James Stagg, an RAF meteorologist, told General Eisenhower to postpone the invasion. I need a forecast. If you invade tomorrow, they're going to be washed away. There's a reason this film is called Pressure. Why should I trust you? We must face the vats. The vats, however frightening they may be! 82 years on, I met Andrew Scott, the man now playing James Stagg.

21:31He appeared to me to be an extraordinarily interesting cinematic character as well as an unsung hero from history. I really enjoyed the way that he was not interested in ingratiating himself with anybody. He's a bit chilly. He's chilly. He's definitely very chilly and very forthright and very direct and completely obsessed with the weather and not afraid to speak truth to power. It's almost impossible to understand the level of jeopardy one man is under. Oh, absolutely. The stakes were so enormously high. It's wonderful that we can pay tribute to him in this way all these years later. 80 years later, suddenly he's a movie hero.

22:15Exactly. I don't think he'd have enjoyed that very much. I tried not to be afraid of the fact that perhaps at the beginning the audience might be like, who is this guy? And hopefully by the end we understand his motivations and his inner workings. What do you make of Stagg? Churchill says he's a genius. Men are too fond of that word. James Stagg's warning to the man in charge, General Eisenhower saved the day. But it wasn't what Eisenhower wanted to hear. Speaking truth to power is a big thing in this, isn't it? Yeah, huge, huge, huge thing. Might be a thing to take on board today. Well, that's exactly right.

22:55That's exactly right. And a celebration of experts. Yeah. And talking of experts, the film features archive material and employed a number of researchers, one of whom happened to have a familiar name. So some people were employed to sort through this archival footage and somebody came in and his name was Stagg and had no idea what the nature of the movie was. and he said, hold on, that's my grandfather. So completely serendipitously... He didn't know? He didn't know. He didn't know. So, yeah, he worked... You're doing research that worked towards the movie? Yes, yeah. Completely wonderful. There's something in the air there, isn't there?

23:34Something is in the air. So, yeah, that was really wonderful. While civilian Britain sleeps, history's greatest story is being written. And at the end, when D-Day succeeded, because of that prediction of a brief break in the weather, it was all over. A brief but intense moment in an epic struggle. Now the world of free men strikes in all its assembled might at the weakening chains of bondage. News report over the D-Day landings that were crafted by James Stagg.

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25:03Welcome back to NewsHour. Kiev is suffering more daily air raid alerts than at any time since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. That's according to our own BBC analysis of government figures. There was a brief pause in attacks over the weekend while USM boys were in the Ukrainian capital. But in recent weeks, Russia's round-the-clock attacks with new, faster drones have forced people to head for shelter many times a day. Our diplomatic correspondent James Landale has this report from Kiev. We've come to the scene of another strike right in the heart of Kiev. and it's a familiar scene. A building smoking, there's the fire caused by what we think was a drone, lots of security nearby, fire engines trying to put the fire out, crowds forming.