310. The rise of Germany’s far-right

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0:20Welcome to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastak Campbell. And we're going to go European Rory. Absolutely, Anastak, so we are going to begin with Germany, Austria and France. So Germany and Austria, headline use, is some big advances by genuinely very disturbing far -right parties. And we're going to get into what that means. France, the battle for a new Prime Minister. And then in the second half, we will look at Israel, Gaza, the Kingdom of Hostages, the protests, the ongoing war. And then we will finish with a bit of discussion of domestic UK politics and school inspectors.

0:57But over to you, firstly, on your sense of Germany. So Björn Hucka is the leader in Turingia of the AFD, alternative for Deutschland. And as expected, he came top in the regional elections. The Lender, there are 16 Lender, which are their states. And they have much, much, much more power than, say, like France, where French regions have far less power than the Lender. In fact, under Germany's constitution, all law -making rests in the hands of the state, unless it's actually otherwise stated in the basic law. So you're talking about in Turingia, one of the smallest Lender, Turingia about two million people, a state including Weimar, sort of writing very middle of Germany, but former East Germany.

1:44Is that right? Yeah. So where these elections were at the weekend, Turingia and Saxony, former East Germany, the hardwriters always done proportionately better than the rest of Germany. But this is taken it to a level that's never reached before. So over 30 percent, unlikely that Hucka, who is a very, very, very hard right guy, I mean, even Le Pen, finds him sort of detroit, be interested to see whether Nigel Farage has anything to say about him and his politics. This is a guy who basically thinks that Germany should stop being ashamed of its past, that there shouldn't be a memorial to the Holocaust in Berlin, disabled kids shouldn't be taught alongside, able body kids.

2:27I mean, he's got some very hard -line views. And there's also been some interesting research by German journalists suggesting that a series of neo -Nazi articles written about 10 years ago under another name look very much so they were written by Hucka. And it also seems at the moment to be legal in the German courts to basically call him a Nazi. I mean, he's tried to challenge it and the courts have upheld this. You can call him a fascist without the court coming back at you. He also, and what we talked about him before it, I don't even remember, because it was sort of confronted an interview with a load of statements.

3:01Some of them came from his book and some of them came from Hitler's mind camp and even he seemed to struggle to differentiate between the two. So even though they try to, like the hard -right parties everywhere, they try to sort of pretend that they're just about, you know, health and education and immigration and all the sort of day -to -day issues. You're talking here about something really quite serious and I think that given that we've later this month, we've got an election in Brandenburg, another of these 16 states, which is also in the east, it's the one that kind of surrounds Berlin. Berlin is a state on its own.

3:34And that also looks like it could go the way of the AFD. Now, they probably won't form a government because to do so in their PR system, they will have to form alliances with some of the other parties. The main parties have made it clear they won't do that. The one thing you've got to watch is because the other, they're the populace of the right, there's also a populace party of the left and that is something called the the Buntnis -Zara -Vagen Connect. And this is a party named after an individual. Sara -Vagen Connect, who was in Delinca, the very hard left party. She set up her own party literally in her own name and she's come third in both elections.

4:13There's one possibility is that she forms an alliance with the Christian Democrats, which would be very weird because the Christian Democrats are basically like our conservatives a bit more sensible. And she's very hard left, anti -the war in Ukraine, basically pro -Russia. There's a line running in some of the German media that if you put the AFD and the BSW together, that you're talking about Putin's fifth column, I mean that is a line that gets run against them. Yeah, the numbers together are very striking. So if you put the two of the votes together, it's a very substantial vote. So 33 .5 % for the AFD, which is you point out as a neo -Nazi party, and then you add her vote onto that.

4:52You're looking at about half the vote in the state going to those parties. And again, for listeners, the reason why that's important is that often the far right parties in Europe have been down at the sort of 15, 20 % of the vote. And people have tended to say, have they been optimistic? Well, yes, there's always 15, 20 % of the population prepared a vote for these people, but in the end, it's never quite enough to really form a threat. Once you start getting to a full third of the population, and then the other thing, I mean I share that article with you just before we got on this morning, looking at the youth vote.

5:29I mean, the almost twice the number of people 18 to 25 are voting for these far right parties, voting for almost any other party. And you're seeing something which I think is much more worrying. And I think just to follow up again on this point about Ukraine, the leader of the AFD in Saxony is on record giving infuse back in 2016 saying he doesn't believe Ukraine is a real state. Putin, of course, has made very favorable comments towards the AFD. And somehow this issue of Russia, Ukraine has got tied in with immigration, has got tied in with anxieties about employment anxieties about a sense that East Germany is being colonized by West Germany.

6:10And tell me a little bit about that because you get people in East Germany saying, and as you say, these elections, East German elections, that in the end, it's West Germans who are running the businesses, it's West Germans who are running the universities, it's West Germans who are running the military, that the sort of sense in East Germany that yes, okay, economically they've benefited a lot since reunification, but they feel they're somehow colonized. Well, one of the arguments that's run about these particular results, and of course, you're talking about relatively small numbers, populations, I think Saxony is about 4 million and Turingia just over two.

6:44So you're talking relatively small populations, but I think one of the things that might be happening is a sense of the East asserting its own political identity. The Ukraine issue I think confuses things because people imagine that that's to do with a fondness for the old East, but it's very hard to equate Putin with the old East because Putin has become essentially a dictator with many, many kind of leanings towards what we would define as very right wing politics. But I think what is happening with this point that you can make about young people. So, proportionally, there are fewer young people in the East because a lot of them have moved to the West, but where they are in these towns, and you hear the same phrases we heard during Brexit, and as you hear during the American debate as well, about communities which quote, feel left behind.

7:32Do you have these communities which feel left behind, which are wide open to somebody like Hucka, who's, you know, he's not the most, I don't find him particularly charismatic. I don't think he's as ineffective as communicators say something like Farage or Trump, but he is able to give them this sense that their problems would be, it would be eased if only they went with somebody who projects himself as strong pro -German anti -immigration anti -climate, you know, the whole climate movement that was very, very strong in Germany at one point. Now, I think where this leads is to some real soul searching for the main parties because the truth is that all three of the governing parties in the coalition, the SPD on the shalts, the Greens and the free Democrats all did very, very badly, and there's no getting away from that.

8:22Even though they were starting from low bases, they all did badly. Now, where that goes to the election next year is obviously going to be something of concern. I think there's a point just worth dropping in here about UK politics as well because I think that what the German experience I think has shown is that people are willing to give you the time and the space to put together a coalition to try to make the changes you say you're going to make, but if then you don't deliver, I think modern politicians have very, very little time, and I think they're being a little complacent if they think that this is just a particular problem in the east and that once they get to the general election next year, a kind of normal politics will resume.

9:02As you said, you're talking now about a populist party of the right and the populist party of the left and the centre not holding and that for Germany is a huge problem. So let's just jump across the border into Austria where there's also been very strong performance from far -right parties and Austria is a story of, on the one hand, incredible sort of success. I mean, I think Vienna's third year in a row, most livable city in the world, its economy is doing very well, but on the other hand, it has been a place where there has been a lot of immigration. It's been a very dramatic change, for example, in the western population in Austria quite recently.

9:40Partly because I think when people began moving Syrians and Afghans began moving during the Syrian war, most of the countries before Austria refused to follow the law on how to treat people claiming asylum. So, Hungarians, Croatians, Greeks either blocked people or moved them on and it was once they arrived in Austria that they were able to settle. So suddenly you end up with quite large numbers of Syrians, Afghans, Bosnians. And this has produced these strange slogans produced particularly by Kekil, this very, very intelligent, or steer, very sinister figure. I mean, he's an odd replacement because his predecessor was brought down with an amazing kind of British fake -shake style sting where they managed to take him out to the Beether and pretend to be Russians who were going to take over a kind of newspaper and offer him bribes and got all this on camera.

10:33The successor is not up to that kind of stuff. He's a really talented communicator, and I don't mean obviously I agree with his slogans, but a bit like your kinder, very, very talented communicator. And producers, he's produced one that I came across, but I think you've come across others, Dahimstadt Islam, home instead of Islam, which has been everywhere. The cover of their manifesto for the election is fortress Austria, fortress of freedom. Yeah, and actually, I mean, really disturbingly, in their manifestos is talk of mass expulsion, and really clear anti -Muslim rhetoric. I mean, in this case, the Austrians are probably more extreme than almost anybody in terms of what they're talking about.

11:14Can I just hand over to your Austria a bit? And I guess they're two Putin and Russia. Oh, the FPIR, because they've got an omel out on the two main parties that both got omel outs on the ur. So we've got the FPO, which is the far right freedom party, headed by this guy, Kikol. I love the way you pronounced Kikol. It made it sound much more serious, the Kikol. And the government, the party leading the coalition, they've got some great names. He's called Karl Nehama. He's got Nehama and Kikol, kicking lumps off each other. And by the way, they don't get on. It goes back to a time, because the FPO have been in government coalition before.

11:52They've had three periods in coalition. Austria has got a much more established acceptance for one to be better word of far right politics. Don't forget that Jörg Heider was one of the drivers, one of the initial drivers of this kind of hard right politics that's spread around the world. If you think he played a big role, all band that we've talked about before has played a big role. And Kikol is very much somebody who, in part, models himself on all band. The election is later this month. It's the 29th of September. And I think it is something that we'll come back to, because the rest of Europe is I think pretty worried about this, that it is going to take another turn further to the right.

12:30Austria is also a place where quite a lot of the kind of the key hard right Brexit people in Britain, some of the Trump people have cut their teeth a lot in Austria and the kind of networks that are there. I'll give you another another slogan, Rory, that they've used during the European elections where the hard right freedom party came top, not massively, but they came top. And their slogan was stop the EU madness. And it was illustrated by a picture of On the Line and Zalensky kissing. And generally in a kind of sort of romantic kind of way, and then around them, they had these words, corona chaos, communism, eco -communism, asylum, the drive to war.

13:11Very much I would argue some of the sort of Putin AFD talking points. Now, that being said, they're not talking about coming out of the European Union, but they are with with all ban with with Fiso in in Slovakia. You're talking about this possible growth of a far right, Esnone nationalist grouping that will become more powerful within the European Union if they win in the election. And as we move on to France, of course, Le Pen pretty much part of that group. So the story would be you've got AFD Germany, you've got this happening in Austria, you've got Slovakia, you've got Hungary, you've got Selvini in Italy, but maybe not Maloney, and then possibly Le Pen, not maybe not Maloney, not actually at the moment on this.

13:57Le Pen is a said earlier, not slightly queasy, I think, about some of the AFD positions. By the way, we shouldn't get, you know, before we get ahead of ourselves, the polls are very, very, very tight. So if you go about the European elections, the far right party won 25 .4%, the more conservative, but still pretty right wing party, the OVP, the Fox party, they won 24 .5, and the Social Democrats 23 .2. So they're all in the same sort of place, and it would lead again to some sort of coalition. And the thing is that the conservatives have had a coalition with the freedom party before, so that's not as it were, it's not like an AFD situation, this.

14:35Yeah, well, it's nice, but as far as we transition to France, I mean, this brings us to the really big question of constitutions and a debate that you and I often have about whether proportional representation systems or first pass the post systems are better guarantees against the rise of these kinds of extremists. So on the one hand, obviously, if a party manages, and 33 % of the vote, which is what the AFD's pulled off into ring ears, basically what Kierstammer pulled off and got an enormous majority if properly distributed in Britain. So if it goes wrong, the first pass the post system could give a party with a third of the vote, a lot of power.

15:12On the other hand, generally speaking, they've been pushed into coalition. I suppose the optimistic story is a Netherlands, Hattvilders does well, but in the end, he doesn't have enough votes, so he's part of a relatively strong parliamentary tradition. Austria, where are you, as you say, they're likely to get a quarter of the vote. And even in Germany and in Turinia, there are some complicated things that could happen. They could get their hand on, I think, the parliamentary president position, which could give them some indirect leverage over the state premiership, but as you say very unlikely, the AFD will actually take control at the moment, interingering it would take quite a lot of constitutional wrangling and oddities.

15:48But then you have the completely different question of France, which under the Fifth Republic has this enormously powerful kind of monarchical precedent with a very weird relationship to the Prime Minister and Parliament on which overdue. So, monarchical is one of the words that keeps getting applied, because so we had the the surprise election when he dissolved the parliament and said that it was going to bring clarity by challenging the country to say whether it wanted a hard -right government or not, and we've had the two rounds of the election and there has been no clarity, nobody, essentially nobody won, clearly.

16:25And since when, I think we're over 50 days now, since when there has been this sort of, you've got Gabriella Teller staying as the Prime Minister as a transitional figure, he is, by the way, the most popular politician in France at the moment. So if only background could find a way to say, can't we just keep him? I think the public would quite like that, but the votes just don't work for that. So then you had the left wing, the popular front that came together to try to beat the hard -right and did a pretty good job. Can I quickly do a quick reminder to solve the results and then straight back to you?

16:57So 577 seats in National Assembly, and there are many different ways of counting the votes, but the Ministry of Interior count, the reason lots of different ways of counting the votes is who's in a party is, is it ambiguous? Anyway, Ministry of Interior reckons, the new popular front got 182 votes, so that's a sort of they're a public count got either 45 or 56, depending on how you count it, but the basic point is that any of them are struggling to make it up to 200, and they need nearly 300 to have a majority in parliament right back to you. Yeah, and because this kind of left alliance of hard left, soft left, socialist party greens, because they've got the biggest number, I think they then overstated their case, they went down, so well that means we have to have the Prime Minister, and they put forward this woman, Lucy Castell, who's a kind of an official from Paris, and I think was pretty absurd, and Macron just, he went through this process of interviewing various people, he's still going through it now, he saw three more yesterday, and he was never going to accept her, but since rejecting her, the left have now said, and they're calling for people to take to the streets, this is trampling on democracy, we won the election, etc.

18:16Now the truth is they didn't win the election, if you actually look at the numbers more carefully, it would probably be more justified to appoint a Prime Minister slightly to the right rather than to the left, but the politics of that are very, very difficult. So what he's trying to do now is find a Prime Minister that he can appoint, and it is his job to appoint the Prime Minister, find the Prime Minister that can command some sort of either minority government that doesn't get a budget voted down, and the budget has to be passed early next month, has to be voted on, and he's proving very, very, very, very difficult, he even had Sarcosian O 'london yesterday, not to offer them the job, but just to sort of try to bind them in to the process he's going through, and all sorts of names have been flying around, this guy Zavier Bertrand, on the right, Kazanov, who's a former Prime Minister under O 'london, but who left the socialist party, he was the hot favourite of the weekend, waiting to see Macron yesterday, then it came out now, and now we've got this new name in the frame, Cheri Budi, who until he has today, I confess I had never heard of, I think I had that in common with a lot of French people, he runs this thing called the the the economic social and environmental centre, very much from civil society, he would be interested in this, he was he was part of the team that oversaw the citizens assembly on the right to die, so he's from that sort of space.

19:45Fascinating, is that because what you've got there, you were slightly saying it's a bit absurd to think about Lucy Kestay, I mean Lucy Kestay is the sort of, as you say, is a director of finance in the Paris municipality, but he also is not a front -ranked politician, and then there are other people out there saying they should have, they're never going to do it, but they should think about former PMs like Edward Filipp and these sort of people, so it's a sort of question of what, what's going on, why are they having to reach for these relatively obscure think tank and sort of senior official types rather than going for politicians?

20:18The reason for that, and I watched a bit of French radio yesterday, and there's a lot of French radio and they talk about politics a lot, but you just have these, the minute a name pops up, you find these different voices coming in to say why they're unacceptable, what was interesting about Bode yesterday was actually quite a lot of people go, I said, yeah, I could see this, but then by this morning, there's one, there's one to say that the, one of the papers say that the whole Bode thing is de Gaulnflur, it's sort of the wind is going out of it now. Now, let's see where it goes, but you can't have a situation where this goes on and on and on.

20:56Can we just for British or American listeners? I mean, is this guy like, you know, in Britain, Paul Johnson at the IFS or in a US context, I don't know, for read's our career, I mean, who is he? He's like, oh, he's not as famous as he's not like a big geopolitical commentator. No, he, I think he'd be very well known in political circles, and it transpires that Macron has been, has seen him a couple of times recently. Is he the kind of Torsten Bell of your... I was going to say maybe more of a Torsten Bell, although Torsten Bell is now an MP, which confuses things a bit, but yeah, he's somebody who, it's not even a think -tank, they do very kind of detailed reports on the state of France.

21:32I think he's seen as civil society, he's big into the mutualization movement, he's a sort of policy, a bit of a policy won't, you're looking at a picture of him, he's, you know, he's classicly kind of, he's not a guy you're going to notice too much if you're sort of walking down the street. And then you've still got this strange thing going on in France of the, certainly from a British eye looking at it, echoes of the old French elites. So Lucy Castet, on the one hand, you can describe her as being a, you know, a senior official in the Paris -Minus party. On the other hand, she went to these extraordinary elite schools, Siens -Paule, the economic administration, she worked for the World Bank, she worked in the French Embassy, she speaks Chinese, in Beijing, I think, and speaks Chinese, or maybe Shanghai.

22:19So it's incredibly sort of hypersophisticated, she's gay, she's a mother, she's in her late 30s, so many ways she's sort of central casting Macron style glamorous young person. One thing I know is that she's not going to be the prime minister, right? And that is because, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. His view is that Macron should have allowed this foreign popular, they should have, he should have said, yeah, okay, let's give it a go, because on the very, very first vote she would have fallen, because Melanchion, this hard left kind of Corbin plus figure, who's very significant within the left, he would have made her insist on some of Macron's major reforms just falling immediately, and he's not going to let that happen.

23:06So he's trying to find the person, I think a key to this, the Le Pen party have gone very, very quiet. As you say, they've got 143 way fewer than they thought they were going to get. But ultimately, their abstention will become key. So if you have a budget, essentially he's trying to find somebody that parts of the left and parts of the right are going to say, well, yeah, we can live with it. He's not going to get anybody that everybody wants. It's got to be somebody that people are going to live with. And again, the two of the problems going on here, one of them is that although the far right, the Pen's party didn't get as many seats as people predicted, that was because of the two round French voting system and the decision of the left to drop 134 candidates and Macron to drop over 80 candidates to make sure that Le Pen didn't make it through.

23:53So the result is she probably, you know, in the first round, got about a third of the vote again, but like the FD and in Turingia now. So that's one problem. I think the second problem is the question of what all the policies of these parties are, which is why Parliament's so difficult, was so difficult governing for them. I mean, the left really ran on a manifesto platform. I can hear my bellets about to go behind the apologies, but they ran on a manifesto platform, which was going to take the retirement age down to 60. They were going to increase the minimum wage by 15%. They were going to recognize Palestine as a state.

24:28They were going to freeze prices. They were going to ban bank financing for fossil fuels. And they were going to introduce proportional representation. That was all part of the of their platform. On the other hand, on the far right, they also are trying to get rid of a lot of Macron's reforms and get retirement age down, but they're very against Palestine and pro -Israel, and of course, very strong anti -immigration. So how on earth do you hold these people credibly, passionately difficult, fused together? I don't know. Well, that is why those who consistently have said that this snap election was not a good idea.

25:00Now, Macron might argue that actually the government is ticking along perfectly well. Atal is popular. The Olympics have given France a sort of, I mean, I was there, as you know, in the power -lumpics now, which in some ways look even better. Team GB, amazing, by the way, Rory. Second only to China in the middle of the table. So there is this sense of France has kind of discovered a sense of positivity, but one of the reasons for that is that politics has not been part of the debate. Now politics has come back slap center stage, but in a rather ridiculous way, with Macron sitting in the Alize, like some kind of later day reality TV show host, who's wheeling these people in, and then we'll have operation.

25:46He'll have people talking to all the parties. He'll be like, is it a classic whips operation? He's talking to Tieri Bode, what do you think? And then you know, we'll get them. Not sure about him. And then there'll be literally doing a numbers game because they have to get the budget through. So this is very, very, very, very tough politics. The thing that I think links it to Germany, but it's interesting what you said about about the UK with Kierstahn, we're getting pretty much the same share of the vote and massive majority. There is part, a strand of the debate going on about how not long ago Britain looked like a complete basket case, and now it looks sort of relatively stable while Germany and France now have this problem where, but if you have, if let's say you get a situation where a point, a Prime Minister, they'd narrowly get a budget through.

26:31The politics can carry on being pretty macro -n East. Then people are going to start to say, well, why did we vote in the first place? And likewise, if the AFD, if all the other parties continue to say there's this brand of malice, there's a firewall against any cooperation with the alternative for Deutschland, if that carries on, if you had both in France and Germany, sort of people saying, what's the point of voting? That has its own sort of dangerous dynamic as well. And right at the heart of this is the question of immigration and whether the parties, particularly if the kind of centre -right, managed to really provide a credible challenge to these stories about immigration.

27:09So in Germany, I think there have been 360 ,000 asylum claims. Asylum seekers in Germany are distributed across the country so they do often end up being put in hostels and accommodation in these East German states where the elections are happening. And it's really important, I think, that all these governments balance two very difficult things. Labour shortages. So Germany's really short of labour and it really needs immigrants in order to keep its economy going. How do you make sure that you bring in, not not just skilled people, actually, just even people working in restaurants, working in normal text challenges is very short of people.