How a quiet regional poll turned into a debate about Germany’s past and future

The writer directs the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution

The upcoming elections in Hesse and Bavaria on October 8 had looked practically tailor-made for Germany’s centre-right Christian Democrats to prove their vigour and resilience. Both are large western states run by conservative minister-presidents favoured for re-election. In Wiesbaden, the CDU has governed in discreet harmony with the Greens since 2014. In Munich, its sister party the Christian Social Union has been in power since 1957; it has been sharing it with the Free Voters, a libertarian-ish local party, since 2018. 

Hesse and Bavaria have deeply traditionalist voter bases. At a time when hard-right groups are besieging conservative parties across Europe, this fact has helped keep a surging, radicalised Alternative for Germany at bay in both states. (The AfD is polling at or over 20 per cent nationwide, but only at 16 in Hesse and 12 in Bavaria.)  

Coming at the halfway point between general elections, these two state votes were expected to work like midterms in the US: as a protest against the unloved “traffic light” coalition headed by chancellor Olaf Scholz. In an ideal conservative world, they would not merely return the two minister presidents to office but burnish their chances — and the party’s — for national leadership in 2025. Hesse’s Boris Rhein is still a relative unknown; but Bavaria’s Markus Söder has made no secret of his conviction that the place for a man of his stature and ambition is Berlin. 

But in late August, Hubert Aiwanger, the Free Voters’ leader and deputy premier of Bavaria, had to admit the accuracy of newspaper accusations that he had been found in possession of copies of a leaflet with hateful jokes about concentration camps as a schoolboy in 1987; a number of fellow students subsequently accused him of making antisemitic quips and the Hitler salute.  

And with that, a quiet and seemingly predictable regional election campaign turned into an explosive national debate over Germany’s treatment of the Holocaust, its much-vaunted “culture of memory”, the future of the country’s centre-right, and the character and judgment of its conservative leaders. 

It could have been so easy. Aiwanger could have immediately expressed remorse, apologised and atoned. Instead, he remarked thinly that the pamphlet was “disgusting and inhuman”, but he had not written it; shortly thereafter, his brother said he had been the author. A few days later, Aiwanger did aver that he was sorry. Yet his afterthoughts — that he had not been an antisemite “since becoming an adult”, and that he was the victim of a media vendetta — did not help matters. (Aiwanger has flirted with AfD tropes like the “silent majority” and “taking back democracy”.) 

The director of the Dachau concentration camp memorial noted that the pamphlet, far from being a schoolboy’s angry rant, was carefully composed and “full of extreme right codes”. It also reflected an unusual depth of knowledge about how the Nazi machinery of mass murder worked — at a time when a not inconsiderable number of Germans still claimed such nasty details were allied propaganda.

The 90-year-old Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and leader of the Jewish community in Bavaria, said that she had not accepted Aiwanger’s apology. There were nationwide calls for Aiwanger to resign, or for Söder to fire him. 

Remarkably, none of it happened. The obdurate Aiwanger is filling beer tents across Bavaria, cheered by supporters who know that the gifted populist is their party’s single viable candidate. Söder — faced with the realisation that the Greens, whom he has vilified, would be his only alternative — clenched his teeth and said that while he was deeply unsatisfied with Aiwanger’s responses to questions, letting him go now would be “disproportionate”.  

Friedrich Merz, the CDU’s national leader, who himself is trying to shift his party towards a more hard-edged conservatism and has referred to the Greens as the “main enemy”, applauded Söder for his “brilliant” handling of the situation. The political fate of the three men is now interlocked; and all three already appear diminished by this sordid episode of lessons from history not learnt.  

The voters will deliver their final verdict on October 8 — but there are some warning signs already. The Free Voters’ poll numbers are ticking up, while those of the CSU are slipping. In the last election, in 2018, Söder had himself toyed with an “AfD-lite” discourse. He was punished with the CSU’s lowest vote share since 1950: 37 per cent. The latest poll has it at 36. But more is at stake than the future of Germany’s last big-tent party.

Correction: the state capital of Hesse is Wiesbaden, not Frankfurt, as incorrectly stated in an earlier version of this article

Letter in response to this article:

Parochialism of politicians — yes, in Germany too / From Anselm Baltzer, Edinburgh, UK