Germany has swung to the right. What does that mean for the country – and Europe? Our panel responds

Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU may have won the German election, but all eyes are on the far-right AfD after its huge gains. Fatma Aydemir. Guardian Europe columnist and Berlin-based journalist, novelist and playwright. Now is the time to move closer together. The historic success of the far right in Germany’s federal election is a threat not only for all disadvantaged groups in this country – including women, immigrants, queer people, people of colour, Jewish people, disabled people – it is a threat to democracy that should concern everyone.

Still, it is those groups that will be most affected by a mood shift that comes with the reality that one in five voters are in favour of a party whose leader announced last night on live TV: “We will hunt them down!” Echoing a warning once proclaimed by a former AfD co-chair in 2017 when the party first entered parliament, this was ostensibly a warning to other political parties, but her intentional wording of course provokes all of us who the AfD sees as opponents. And it doesn’t even cause a scandal any more. We know who they are and what they are up to. The question is: who else will join them in rhetoric and actions?.

On Sunday night when the counting of the election results had just started, I stopped by an “election party for the plural democracy” in Berlin. The non-partisan event billed as a “public screaming” took place only a few metres away from the chancellery. Gathered under the umbrella of an antifascist consensus, artists, activists, journalists and academics came together in short panels to share their hopes and fears for the coming years, while the audience was having pizza and dancing to hip-hop band the Swag’s uplifting performances in between. It felt good to be among people who dressed up and left the house, instead of mourning at home. The victories of conservative and far-right parties had been widely expected, so we celebrated the small victories instead: the pro-business FDP and the anti-immigrant populist party BSW didn’t make it into parliament; the Left tripled its votes since polls from December, from 3% to almost 9%.

The important conclusions of the night were: we have to organise and strengthen our resistance against the right-leaning majority, we have to spread this energy outside Berlin and we have to watch out for each other and leave all bitterness arising from intra-left conflicts aside. The priority has to be to protect our civil and human rights. None of these strategies are new, of course, but it’s important to reassure each other again and again, especially after a night of results that felt like a turning point for progressive forces. And it certainly helps to do so under a giant disco ball.

Katja Hoyer. German-British historian and author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990. Germany’s election could almost convince outside observers that consensus politics is alive and well in Berlin. There is a clear winner: the conservative CDU/CSU, whose leader, Friedrich Merz, looks set to be the next German chancellor. The incumbent, Olaf Scholz, conceded immediately and congratulated his challenger. There were no concerns of civil unrest nor suspicions of electoral fraud.

But underneath the surface, deep cracks have torn into Germany’s political landscape. After the second world war, the conservatives vowed that there must never be a successful party to the right of them. Now, it’s obvious that they’ve failed in that ambition. The anti-immigration AfD has doubled its support from 2021, coming second with about a fifth of the vote share.

The AfD leader, Alice Weidel, was visibly elated. Understanding that this electoral breakthrough has made her party impossible to ignore, she toldreporters: “We’re now firmly anchored as a Volkspartei” – or “people’s party”, a term once used exclusively for the CDU/CSU and Olaf Scholz’s SPD as the big beasts of German politics.

Weidel didn’t hold back in demonstrating what will likely become the AfD’s strategy: breaking down the so-called firewall that’s keeping it out of power. All other parties have vowed never to work with the AfD. As Merz begins the difficult task of assembling a coalition that forces his centre-right party to turn to a centre-left coalition partner, Weidel reminds him that her door is open too, “so that the will of the people might be implemented”.

She was alluding to Merz’s election promise to restrict irregular immigration, which is something polls say the majority of Germans want. His likely coalition partner, the SPD, is very uneasy about that, not least because the AfD might vote with it, which many see as a breach of the firewall.

Meanwhile, as the main opposition party, the AfD won’t have to dirty its hands with messy election results and compromise politics. It doesn’t have to find answers to complicated questions. All it has to do is point to conflict between Germany’s centrist parties in their quest for solutions, knowing a fifth of the German electorate lends a lot of weight to the battering ram hammering the firewall.