Over the past year, right-wing parties across the West have been sweeping elections. Donald Trump in the United States, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and now Germany.
On Sunday, 83 percent of Germans went to the polls—the highest turnout since the Cold War.
The Christian Democrats, the country’s center-right party led by Friedrich Merz, won. But that’s not the big story. The big story is that the right-wing populist party, the AfD, came in second place with nearly 21 percent, the strongest showing since WWII.
There is a single reason why. It’s not the economy. It’s not the war with Russia. It’s not climate change. It’s immigration. And I’m not talking about jobs or wage deflation. I’m talking about the fact that over the past decade, Germany has seen a net migration of 5 million people, with more than 1 million of the new arrivals coming from Syria and Afghanistan.
And the rifts have been palpable. And here, I’m choosing two examples from just last week: An Afghan migrant suspect rammed a car through a crowd of people. Thirty-nine people, including several children, were injured. Just the day before the election, a Syrian migrant became the lead suspect for a stabbing outside of the Holocaust memorial. This all fundamentally tests the limits of assimilation and multiculturalism.
The dynamic here is the same that has characterized many Western nations. The center-left and the left have ignored the problem. And the right has named it—and filled the vacuum. As Michael Sandel has put it: “Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.” If there’s a line that captures the politics of our era, it is that.
Last week, the very question of whether migrants can adopt pluralism and Western ideals was also put to Australians, after two Sydney nurses went viral when caught on camera saying that they would kill Israeli patients that came into their hospital. One nurse was an Afghan refugee.
Here to unpack it all is Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon, Democratic fundraising powerhouse Brianna Wu, and the founder of Quillette, Claire Lehmann.
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