The far-right Alternative for Germany’s victory in a regional election places the party on the horns of a dilemma: does it actually want to govern? Or is it content to remain the arch troublemaker of German politics, forever raging from the sidelines at the Berlin machine?
The AfD’s success in Thuringia, where it became the first hard-right party in Germany’s postwar history to win a state election, was a personal triumph for its leader in the region, Björn Höcke, a man at the radical end of a party that for years has been moving ever further to the right. Even some colleagues once tried to expel him as a dangerous hardliner.
“Höcke is the most successful campaigner the AfD ever had and at the same time he’s the most polarising figure, the one who publicly presents the most radical positions,” said Wolfgang Schroeder, a political scientist at Kassel University. “He basically wants a cultural revolution.”