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Was Hitler elected?
The notion that “Hitler was elected” is sometimes used as evidence that voters can’t really be trusted. It also implies a certain mental image of how the Nazis came to power that I don’t believe is accurate.
In this widespread image, you see a society and economy in crisis, and the crisis continues until, eventually, the majority of the population goes over to the Nazis.
It is true that in the late twenties and early thirties, the majority of Germans did not actively resist the Nazis.
It is also probably true that a majority supported the regime between, say, the mid- to late thirties and some point in the war, maybe until the end. (Nazi Germany wasn’t exactly a place where you’re going to conduct a reliable poll.)
But the Nazi party never won a majority of the vote in a free election. Here are the results:
1928 = 2.6 percent (9th place)
1930 = 18.25 percent (2nd place)
1932 (July) = 37.27 percent (1st place)
1932 (November ) = 33.09 percent (1st place)
1933 (March) = 43.91 percent (1st place)
This last election, which occurred after Hitler was already chancellor and after the Reichstag fire (but a few weeks before the “Enabling Law” that established the dictatorship), was not an election that one can describe as “free and fair.”
Police were ordered to fire on political opponents at demonstrations, for example.
Even in that election, the Nazis could not win fifty percent of the vote.
I am saying all this not because I want to talk about the question of German guilt. (“Why didn’t more people protest?” “Why did even 43 percent vote for the Nazis???”)
Also, I do not want to talk about whether right-wing politicians today are “the same as” Hitler, and I do not want to look at the little electoral timetable I made above and then try to figure out which year we are in. No one can say, like the climate scientists, that we are x-number of years away from the fascist takeover.
I don’t want to raise or address analogies with the 1930s at all.
But…
I do want to challenge the notion that democracy gets toppled because people go crazy and “elect Hitler.”
The majority is not going to elect a Hitler now (I think). And they didn’t even elect the actual Hitler back then.
So if you are watching European (or American) politics for signs that this will happen, then not only are you looking for something that is not relevant, but you are probably making yourself unable to understand what is relevant.
Americans in particular, because we are used to a two-party presidential system (which on top of it all creates the impression, thanks to the Electoral College, of huge majorities that don’t really exist), are susceptible to downplaying the real dangers when they look at European multi-party systems and see election results or poll numbers that don’t seem all that impressive.
I say all of this by way of introduction to today’s news, which is that the German state of Thuringia held elections yesterday, and the right-wing AfD party came in second place with just under 23 percent of the vote.
Why is this bad?
This is bad for a few reasons:
the AfD is led in Thuringia by one of the true ultras of the party, Björn Höcke;
that a state-level party led by a figure like Höcke could do this well emboldens extremists in the party;
violent types will also be emboldened and more likely to commit terrorist attacks and assassinations, like the attack on the synagogue in Halle and the shooting of CDU official Walter Lübcke;
the geometry of the results in Thuringia will make it very hard to form a stable government there; and
the CDU is going to be under even more pressure — and this is a theme I keep mentioning — to take actions that could lead to its breakup, which would be beyond bad.
Here are the results from Thuringia:
Left Party = 31.0 percent
AfD = 23.4 percent
CDU = 21.8 percent
SPD = 8.2 percent
Greens = 5.2 percent
FDP = 5.0 percent
How to read these results: Three important points
The previous government, a coalition of the Left Party, the SPD, and the Greens, no longer has a majority.
The old “mainstream” parties, the CDU and the SPD, could only manage thirty percent of the vote between them;
There is no possible majority without either the Left Party or the AfD.
Every party has pledged not to form a coalition with the AfD.
But the CDU has also pledged not to form a coalition with the Left Party because the Left Party is the successor to the East German Communists.
If the CDU broke its pledge regarding the Left Party, you could build a coalition of all the “democratic parties” against the anti-democratic AfD.
This is the kind of thing that has happened in France to stop the National Rally (previously National Front) from winning the presidency.
But this is not France.
Some unknown number of CDU voters and officeholders in Thuringia are already uncomfortable with the anti-AfD pledge.
The only thing keeping them home might be the (false) equivalence that the party leadership is drawing between the Left Party and the AfD, between the “extremes” in both directions.
Remember that the AfD was created by conservatives fed up with what they saw as the liberal drift of the CDU under Angela Merkel.
What if the CDU broke its pledge regarding the AfD? Well, that would be a very interesting day in German history.
In this case, it also still wouldn’t create a majority in the Thuringia legislature unless the FDP (free-market liberals) also participated.
One option might be a minority government led by the Left Party and tolerated by the CDU.
This would also provide a rationale for rightists in the CDU to leave, but not as much as active participation in a Left-led government would do.
If no government can be formed in the state, then new elections will be held.
Who is Höcke, and what does he want?
In case you feel that there has been a certain amount of “crying wolf” by journalists who write about Europe these days, let me assure you: Björn Höcke is the wolf.
The AfD itself wanted to kick him out, but failed. Now the faction he leads — “The Wing” — is clearly in the driver’s seat.
A German court recently ruled that you can publicly refer to Höcke as a fascist.
Höcke has said he’s not a fascist, but not because fascism is bad — he calls it a “serious attempt to overcome the liberal crises” in the early part of the twentieth century.
No, the reason he’s not a fascist is that “we Germans don’t need it: we have Prussia as a positive model to follow.”
He has called for a “180-degree turn” in the way Germans remember the Nazi era.
He has suggested that “unpleasant” scenes will have to occur when the AfD takes power and removes immigrants from the country and that Germans who resist this will also become victims.
He has also speculated that the AfD could take power in rural areas and then create unconquerable centers of power that would lead to civil war and the breakup of the country.
Part of his discussion of what would happen if the AfD came to power is worth quoting at length (this is from his book Never Twice in the Same River, which consists of conversations between him and an interviewer):
Q. “Gangrenous limbs can’t be cured with lavender water,” as Hegel put it.
A. New political leadership will have to endure difficult moral tensions: the new leadership would be obligated to the interests of the native population and would very probably have to take measures that go against the leader’s own moral feelings.
Q. You mean measures taken in the framework of removing migrants that cannot be integrated?
A. Yes. Besides the protection of our national border and the European external border, a major “re-migration” project will be necessary. And I fear we won’t have any way around a policy of calculated cruelty (wohltemperierte Grausamkeit), as Peter Sloterdijk calls it. That means we won’t always be able to avoid human hardship and unpleasant scenes. Therefore, one should, when using the instruments of the state’s executive power, proceed as humanely as possible but also as forcefully as necessary.
You read this passage a few times and you think it over. Then you scroll back up to that list of yesterday’s election results.
23.4 percent.
Is that a lot? Is it too much? Does it scare you?
Or do you comfort yourself with the fact that the Left Party was the “winner” of the election (although the only age group where they led was 60+), and 76.6 percent did not vote for Björn Höcke’s AfD.
Then you scroll back up a little bit higher, to the election results from November 1932, when 66.91 percent of Germans did not vote for Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.
Now, the vote in Thuringia was not a federal election. In two different surveys conducted on October 26, the AfD was at 13 percent and 14 percent nationally.
So Thuringia is just one state.
It also happens to be the state, where, with slightly different borders during the Weimar Republic, a Nazi party politician became a member of a state government for the first time.
But that’s neither here nor there.
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