The hunger for political change and a challenge to dominance of liberalism in Germany is unfolding and disrupting every sphere on life in the country.
Alternative for Germany (AfD), a political party founded in 2013 emerged second in the February elections and commands a sizeable number of seats in the Bundestag (parliament).
The rise and rise of the AfD political party is catching many Germans off guard especially considering its controversial founding principles such as being racist, pro-Nazi, anti Islam, against euro as the EU’s sole currency, and pro German nationalism.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany, for example, describes AfD as an “extremist party” that “embodies Nazi ideals.”
However, one would ask, how is the Germany media evolving in handling this rising and influential political movement.
A glimpse into Spiegel Germanys leading investigative media house shows how journalists are struggling to adjust to a new and disruptive normal.
According to Der Spiegel Editor-in-Chief Dirk Kurbjuweit, “We’re having a similar discussion in the editorial office. What should we report on, and what shouldn’t we?”
“We talk a lot about how to deal appropriately with the AfD, partly because the phenomenon of a powerful party on the far right is still relatively new. It’s only been playing a role in federal politics for almost ten years, initially garnering twelve percent, then ten percent of the vote in elections. In February, it doubled its result, ranking between the CDU/CSU and the SPD . The AfD as a governing party is no longer unthinkable,” said Dirk Kurbjuweit.
He explains that it is “a challenge for us, too. This is partly due to the way this party treats us. Our editors are harassed, threatened, and attacked at party conferences and online. On the other hand, as reporters, we face dilemmas that are not easy to resolve, perhaps even impossible.”
“We are a lively editorial team; we discuss a lot, we argue, including about how to deal with the AfD,” he adds.
“We see the AfD as a threat to the free democratic basic order as postulated in the Basic Law, with inviolable human dignity as the fixed point for all politics,” noted Kurbjuweit.
Kurbjuweit argues that for years, “we have seen and heard what the party’s officials are up to and what their ideology is. Many top AfD politicians have made no secret of the fact that they are racist and that they view the Nazi era with leniency. It seems they want to transform the Federal Republic into an illiberal democracy.”
Because the AfD is what it is, it poses questions that we aren’t familiar with from dealing with other parties. The search for answers sometimes leads to dilemmas. Here are three examples.
He also says that when government politicians criticize a newspaper here, they sometimes ask us this question: If Spiegel criticizes the coalition so harshly, isn’t it playing into the hands of the AfD? The intention behind it is transparent: they want to appease us. But this also addresses a dilemma that we ourselves recognize.
“Before the AfD, almost all parties in the Bundestag supported liberal democracy, the free democratic basic order, with a few transgressions here and there, for example, during the Spiegel affair in 1962, when Konrad Adenauer ‘s ( CDU ) government attacked press freedom,” he said.
However, he adds, “as a rule, the parties of the old Federal Republic supported the system, and we observed and commented on how they behaved within this framework.”
The AfD positions itself outside of this framework and attempts to establish “system” as a derogatory term, linking it to “system parties” and “system press.” It’s as if we were all in the same boat – CDU, CSU , SPD, Greens, FDP , SPIEGEL, “Zeit,” ” Süddeutsche Zeitung ,” “Stern,” and so on. We truly support the wonderful system of liberal democracy. The AfD does not. This is a relatively new situation for Germany. The older parties and a large portion of the media have, in a sense, a common project: to defend liberal democracy against the attacks of the AfD. This is vital to us because only this system will guarantee freedom of the press. Without freedom of the press, freedom of expression, which directly affects you as citizens, is inconceivable.
Our dilemma: If we frequently criticize the governing parties, it could make liberal democracy look bad and, in the long run, undermine it. Our traditional mission, to check the powerful, would contradict the new project of preserving liberal democracy. The newspaper critics mentioned above apparently believe we should give this project a higher priority.
We will not become lenient, nor will we relax our control over the powerful.
As a journalist, you’re used to dilemmas. The situation is often contradictory, rarely clear-cut. This, too, is what makes this profession so interesting. In our discussions, we agreed that we won’t become lenient, that we won’t let up on our control of those in power. That’s how it will stay, you can count on it.
