Berlin’s Firewall Comes Tumbling Down

In his Valentine’s Day Speech in Munich, Vice President J.D. Vance said there is "no room for firewalls" ahead of German elections. Our guest Mr. Csaba Stefán writes from Europe explaining why.

In his Valentine’s Day Speech at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance said there is "no room for firewalls" ahead of German elections where political parties have vowed to not work with AfD even though millions will vote for the anti-immigration party. Today, our guest Mr. Csaba Stefán writes from Budapest as a researcher at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs about why this firewall was erected, and why it must now fall. He is grateful for the assistance of Szabolcs Helmeci. We are pleased to offer his essay paywall-free at Postliberal Order.

The political elite in power has failed to provide adequate and effective responses to the European crises of the last decades (the financial crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, migration crisis, Russo-Ukrainian war, etc.). Their failure to manage these crises has led to the rise of a number of political parties across Europe deemed “radical” by the elite, but which they themselves have enabled through their failures.

The distinctions between different traditional parties have become increasingly blurred as each of these parties vying to fill the void are increasingly articulating the same messages with only nuanced differences. See, for example, the alliance between the Social Democrat Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL) in Romania, or the grand coalition between the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ).

The parties which European elites label as “radical,” however, are attracting voters because they propose solutions that go beyond the messages formulated by the elite, which have proved ineffective. They develop innovative approaches to the problems they face and take a critical stance towards certain turns in European integration or towards EU institutions. This positioning reinforces the perception that the elite only serve the interests of those who stand to gain most from the status quo. The result is that a growing number of voters across Europe are looking for their own return to greatness.

This is not the first time in history that so-called radical right-wing parties have gained strength, but it is also clear that, unlike in the past, these parties are gaining real strength on the ground — these are no longer “flash in the pan” populist movements soon to lose their significance.

This likely has something to do with the continuing erosion of the power of mainstream parties, which have been seemingly powerless in the face of the prolonged spiral of crises in Europe. In most cases, the rhetoric of the “radical” parties has not become less radical, and in many places the fact that they have retained their underlying anti-establishment sentiment has made them even more successful. The mainstream parties (and the elite) first tried to marginalize these groups and then, in response to their growing support, introduced a political quarantine against them. Although the aim of the political quarantine is to keep these political parties out of power, its nature is not uniform and varies from country to country. Thus, from Spain to Central Europe, several parties can now be identified as being isolated from power and isolated in parliament. There are also states where these parties end up being domesticated by the political mainstream—indeed, elites make them junior partners in governance precisely to moderate their radicalism, which they hope will, in turn, erode their popularity. Similarly, it is also not uncommon for the mainstream elites to take messages from them or start collaborating with them in some way in order to diminish the threat they pose.

When a party is placed under political quarantine (cordon sanitare in French-speaking countries, and Brandmauer or “firewall” in German-speaking countries), the justification is usually that its radicalism is a threat to democracy. Put another way, they envisage an attempt to overthrow the democratic order in the policies of the party to be barred. The “threat” posed by each radical political formation to those currently in power varies from country to country, and so the responses to it vary. There is little similarity in the way political quarantine is set up across countries, as exclusion is not based on a general, objective framework but is rather a reflex that emerges in specific domestic political contexts. Political quarantine has nevertheless become a common practice, although it can only work so long as the quarantined party cannot win an absolute majority to govern alone or break the quarantine by forcing cooperation with one or more traditional political formations.

Cracks in Berlin’s Firewall

After Germany lost the Second World War, a democratic governance was established in the country to prevent the return of radicalism. In practice, this meant two things. First, a ban on certain radical symbols, a concrete ban on radicalism, and the right of citizens to take any action, if necessary, against groups that want to overthrow the democratic system. Second, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), or Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, was created in order to investigate, monitor and in some cases infiltrate-and-disrupt radical groups from within. In addition to changes in the institutional framework, there was also a social change: after the war, it became a moral crime to engage in nationalist politics.

As a result, political discourse was primarily concerned with economic issues, and the völkisch element was lost. Political discourse thus sought to express German nationalism and patriotism not in terms of the strength of the nation or people, but in terms of economic performance. Until the rise of AfD, there was only one occasion on which a radical right-wing political formation caused a major scare: in 1969, the neo-Nazi Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German National Democratic Party, or NDP) achieved 4.3% in the Bundestag elections—the threshold was 5%—and was elected to several parliaments in the state elections. Therefore, a firewall was erected against the party, although according to the logic of the political quarantine at the time, time was all it would take for NPD to lose voters. There were also several attempts to ban the party, but the Constitutional Court rejected them on the grounds that a significant part of the party leadership was, in fact, made up of undercover agents of the BfV — a federal operation.

After the decline of the NDP, no radical right-wing party was able to gain a serious foothold in German politics until the late 2000s. One of the main reasons for this was that the two major parties, the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and the SPD (Social Democratic Party), were seen as credible by a large part of society, so that when one was weak, voters tended to put their trust in the other. However, a major change was brought about by the eurozone crisis. There are several reasons why this proved to be the turning point. The crisis, and the broader global economic crisis, intensified anti-elitist sentiment because of the elite’s technocratic but incompetent behavior, coupled with their neoliberal “moral high ground,” which thus caused the mainstream parties (CDU and SPD) to lose significant public trust. The establishment of the Alternative für Deutchland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) can be primarily linked to this development.

In April 2013, Bernd Lucke co-founded the AfD, a party that initially defined itself in terms of the eurozone crisis. In Lucke’s opinion, the introduction of the euro was a historic mistake for Germany, and the German government handled the crisis poorly. Lucke thought, in particular, it was a bad for Germany to help Greece and other countries out of the crisis. The party thus set the goal of regaining national sovereignty and citizen control over monetary policy, and this message impressed many conservative, CDU and FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei, or Free Democratic Party) voters. In the 2014 European Parliament elections, the party had a breakthrough, winning 7.1% of the German vote and over 10% in East Germany.

In the end, Lucke didn’t win the day, and he didn’t set the AfD’s ultimate course. Yet precisely as a party, the AfD became a rallying point for those who felt politically unrepresented and perhaps even held extremist views. Within the party, a group called Der Flügel (The Wing) formed, who based their ideology on völkisch nationalism. The so-called Erfurt Declaration is associated with The Wing, which sets out now well-established AfD positions, such as the defense of German identity, anti-immigration policies and the protection of the family and the nation. Several prominent AfD members were associated with The Wing, such as Björn Höcke, who led the AfD to victory in the recent state elections in Thuringia. But by 2015, after the traditionally conservative Bernd Lucke also lost influence in the party’s leadership and resigned, the AfD shifted further right.

By 2020, The Wing was officially declared “far-right,” and so contrary to the German Basic Law — so they were placed under surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution — all in the name of freedom and democracy. The previous leadership of the AfD was disbanded by the group, but these members, with the exception of two former leaders, were not expelled from the party. By some estimates, one in five AfD party members were once a member of The Wing — so there is some continuity with what was once forbidden.

Despite all of this, the AfD’s rise is now undeniable. It is driven by two things:

First, a new feature of the political trend in Germany has become of the movement of mainstream parties towards the center of the political spectrum and defense of the status quo. Resentment towards this “centrist” trend, however, only fuels anti-elite messages, as some voters see these parties as being in a crisis of their own making (especially migration), thus serving, according to some, the interests of the elite rather than the nation.

Secondly, and relatedly, the refugee crisis that started in 2015 unquestionably made the AfD popular among a significant part of the electorate. Over the years, the Wilkommenskultur and failed German integration policies led to considerable frustration and social distrust among the electorate, with Germans fearing that they could lose their identity and their country as a result. Doubts and issues associated with migration have not gone away—the 2025 snap elections in Germany were caused by an economic crisis, but migration dominated the political discourse.

The AfD has been very successful in using these problems to promote its own message. In the 2017 parliamentary elections, it won 12.6% of the vote, making it the third strongest party. In the 2021 elections, they only gained 10.4%, but the political quarantine imposed on them did not succeed in notably diminishing the party’s significance. Current opinion polls predict that the AfD will emerge as the second strongest party after the CDU in February’s snap elections, with around 20% of the vote. The AfD’s political messages have remained largely unchanged since 2015. Most of the messages continue to be based on the discontent of their people, and their desire to stand against liberal elites and their failures.

The majority of the party’s voters are people who didn’t previously vote, and they are joined by voters who are disillusioned with all the other ruling parties. This is happening in equal proportion on the left and the right, which may suggest that the AfD will eventually become a Volkspartei (a People’s Party). People’s Party voters are not defined by age, gender or social position, but by an ideology. The transformation is further demonstrated by its results in some of the provincial elections: although mainstream parties are adopting anti-immigration positions, the AfD is not losing voters. So, a significant proportion of AfD voters are not simply punishing mainstream parties but instead feel a sense of loyalty to the party based on mature political views. This reinforces the sense that AfD is poised to gain greater strength still going forward.

The quarantine imposed on the AfD is an attempt at total isolation. Until the 2025 snap elections, no party was willing to cooperate with them on any issue—if they did, the “perpetrators” were severely beaten by the political leadership. Such was the taboo of accepting AfD support that in 2020, when Thomas Kemmerich of the FDP was elected as head of government in Thuringia with the support of both the local CDU and AfD, the national CDU elite, still led by Angela Merkel, was so outraged that Kemmerich and the local CDU leadership had to resign within a few days. A serious change, however—and some say the all-out demolition of Berlin’s firewall—was brought about by a vote in the Bundestag in January 2025. The CDU/CSU coalition led by Friedrich Merz accepted the AfD votes, and for the first time in the history of modern Germany needed the support of the radical right to pass a proposal. The context behind the vote is that between 2024 and 2025, there were several knife attacks in Germany by individuals with immigrant backgrounds, and Merz wanted to respond by getting a package of proposals passed in parliament before the elections to build political capital for his party. Once it became known that Merz would accept the AfD’s votes, the vote was no longer really about migration but rather about the firewall, although the proposal voted on would not have been legally binding anyway. Merz’s logic was that he was only following the tradition of parliamentarianism, “not looking left and right but forward”and that the “right decision does not become wrong just because the wrong people agree with it. It remains right.”

Left-wing parties opposed to voting with the AfD accused Merz of tearing down the firewall. Merz defended himself afterwards by saying that he had only accepted votes andwould never officially cooperate with the AfD. It says a lot about the case that the left-wing MPs hardly spoke about the bill itself in their criticism and were instead outraged only by the fact that the CDU/CSU coalition had accepted AfD votes. If the left had tried to criticize some of the elements of the bill (banning family reunification, etc.), they might have gained the attention of the electorate, but instead of standing up for their values, they were more concerned about who was voting with whom and why.

Will this continue to be the case? The Austrian example shows that if a right-wing party wins first place in elections because of the fragmentation of mainstream political forces, the collapse of the firewall could easily result. This same fragmentation is a feature of German politics, which makes it more difficult to form a government, or form a coalition between the parties that have the potential to form one. This problem is particularly acute in East Germany, where the AfD can reach up to 30% of votes in state elections. In Thuringia, for example, after the most recent regional elections, a government could only be formed by creating a blackberrycoalition in which the CDU, SPD and BSW (Das BündnisSahra Wagenknecht - Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit, The Alliance of Sahra Wagenknecht — Reason and Justice) had to join forces in order to keep the AfD behind the firewall. The BSW, however, is a far-left party that has exactly the same political positions as the AfD, such as lifting sanctions against Russia. Sahra Wagenknecht herself calls the firewall “stupid,” although at other times she stresses that she would not form a coalition with the AfD, either.

The firewall could lead to a serious political crisis if the AfD or other extremist parties gain a blocking minority in the Bundestag in the coming elections. They could block any two-thirds law, forcing cooperation if a crisis situation calls for large-scale reforms—and such a situation is already unfolding in Germany, with a decision needed on whether to abolish or reform the debt brake.

The Case of the Austrian FPÖ

In Austria, as in Germany, the post-World War II years were characterized by relative calm with the two major parties, theaforementioned Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP) and Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ), in a grand coalition government. Even after independence, constitutional measures were taken to prevent the return of National Socialism: the 1947 Verbotsgesetz (Prohibition Law) and the 1955 constitution both prohibit the establishment of national socialist parties. The far-right National Democratic Party, which existed for twenty years but never managed to enter parliament, was banned in 1988 on this basis. In the years following the war, the law was relaxed, allowing former Nazi officials to return to politics under different colors. This allowed the formation of the nationalist Pro-Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) in 1956. The party gradually moved towards a left-center orientation during its first thirty years of existence but never managed to achieve more than single-digit results in federal elections. The turning point came in 1986, when the charismatic Jörg Haider took over the leadership of the FPÖ, which under his leadership returned to nationalist, anti-establishment politics. The Haider era saw the FPÖ grow stronger, with its president becoming governor of Carinthia—in a coalition with the ÖVP at the head of the state parliament—but his statements led the major parties to erect a firewall against him. Once the provincial SPÖ and ÖVP joined forces against Haider, he was removed as governor after less than a year in office, but his party later emerged as the third largest party nationally in the 1990s.

The Haider-led FPÖ reached its peak with the 1999 elections, which resulted in the internationalization of the firewall, and whose immediate aftermath can be compared to the situation in the autumn of 2024. The FPÖ’s “Contract with Austria”program, which emphasized anti-immigration, anti-corruption and increased social benefits, successfully appealed to voters, especially working class voters who were tired of the inward-looking grand coalition government. Decades before the European immigration crisis, Haider built his policy on stopping “over-immigration” to the country and deporting migrants, which, despite the concerns of the establishment parties who equated Haider’s rhetoric with the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime, brought the FPÖ up to second place behind the SPÖ. After the failure of the grand coalition negotiations, the possibility for FPÖ-ÖVP negotiationsopened, the success of which would normally have meant Haider’s election as chancellor. In response, the SPÖ and the Greens (Die Grünen) launched a nationwide protest, and the then fourteen other EU Member States imposed unprecedented diplomatic sanctions against Austria. Under these sanctions, in the event of an FPÖ-led government, no member state would conclude bilateral treaties with Austria, support Austrian candidates for positions in international organizations or cooperate with Austrian ambassadors on anything other than technical issues. In the face of the protests and sanctions, Haider finally realized that his persona was an obstacle to the formation of a government and stepped back. He resigned as president, failed to secure a position in the cabinet, then left the party, and the chancellorship was given to Wolfgang Schüssel, who came third in the ÖVP elections.

The political quarantine against the FPÖ was therefore ineffective, and for the first time in its history the party was able to enter government, but only without its controversial leader. Without Haider, who left a void in his wake, the FPÖ’s popularity initially plummeted. Its former leader tried to return to politics by founding a new party, the BZÖ (Bündnis ZukunftÖsterreich - Alliance for the Future of Austria), but he died in an accident in 2008. After Heinz-Christian Strache took over the leadership of the FPÖ in 2005, the party was able to stabilize and gradually improve its federal election results. When the party changed its isolationist stance in 2014 by joining the European Alliance for Freedom and in 2017 entered into a coalition with the ÖVP as a minor partner, the reaction was not as strong as in 1999.

After Strache’s fall in the corruption scandal known as the Ibiza affair, Herbert Kickl took over the party in 2021 as a rising political star unafraid to provoke the firewall against his constituents deaire for change. By the 2024 elections, the FPÖ had its own network of media, changed its image and built entirely around Kickl under favorable conditions. These favorable conditions paving the way for FPÖ’s historic success included the loss of popularity of the ÖVP, which under the grip of the Green Party coalition had only been able to push its right-wing policies to a limited extent, after the fall of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the SPÖ’s inability to reinvent itself, general pessimism caused by the ailing economy since the COVID crisis, rising Euroscepticism, increasing criticism of the policy that sacrificed decades of German neutrality in favor of Ukraine and the immigration issue, which remained a high priority. In September’s election, the FPÖ became the most popular party in Austria with 28.9% of the vote, capturing 600,000 voters from the ÖVP.

In Austrian politics, the creation of a political quarantine is therefore more a matter of the perception of the leader of the party: the “presentability” of the current FPÖ president decides whether the parties will cooperate with him. The removal of Jörg Haider from the chancellor’s office set the precedent for the president to put the question of governability ahead of the people’s choice when it comes to naming a chancellor, but international pressure was still needed to successfully erect a firewall.

The current FPÖ, which sits in the Patriots for Europe political group in the European Parliament, does not face this threat, and Kickl has succeeded where his predecessor did not—he has effectively become the most popular politician in the country. The crisis faced by the major parties further weakens the firewall, and it thus ended in failure at the beginning of 2025. The lesson to draw from the case of the FPÖ is that the party is dancing on the brink of political acceptability and depends on the leadership of the other parties, especially that of the ÖVP, to determine where it lies. In autumn, Kickl was outside the boundaries of acceptability, now he is within them. One of the biggest questions at the moment in Austrian politics is whether he can stay there.

From Radicalism to Realism

In the run-up to the federal elections in Germany, it is difficult to make predictions about what to expect in terms of coalition negotiations. The Austrian example shows that, regardless of the election results, these negotiations can significantly redefine the positions of the parties. What is certain, however, is that both the AfD and the FPÖ will be extremely successful in terms of the tools they have at their disposal and the message they are putting forward. What is also certain is that the problems and social phenomena in reaction to which these parties have emerged are yet to be resolved by the political elite in power. The more the elite seeks to isolate these parties or their leaders, the stronger they become. This may mean that they will at some point become inescapable actors within European governance.