AfD in Germany and Okamura in Czechia: the far right becomes part of the establishment

Last Sunday's election in Berlin saw nearly four in ten voters back parties that, in one way or another, echo the darker pages of German history. Chief among them is the pro-Russian AfD, founded in 2013: the party won convincingly in two German federal states and now leads national polls, and its Czech ally is widely seen as Tomio Okamura, who currently chairs the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech parliament.

Not just the migration crisis

In the 1990s, Germany went through reunification and all the upheaval that came with it without any noticeable rise in political extremism — the Bundestag at the time still seated the same parties as in West Germany, with only the addition of the post-communist PDS, itself politically isolated. That raises a question: was it really the 2015–2016 migration crisis that brought such parties their votes?

"Not quite," says political scientist Aleš Michal, an extremism researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences. According to him, the AfD emerged in 2013 as a protest against Angela Merkel's remark that Germany had "no alternative" to helping Greece and rescuing the euro. The migration crisis and the Covid pandemic certainly helped the party, but it draws its strongest support precisely in those parts of Eastern Germany where people have had no dramatic experience of mass migration at all. Instead, the AfD tapped into a broader mood that, alongside migration and Covid, is also tied to the issue of Ukraine — an erosion of trust in the state and its capabilities.

This is partly understandable: once the share of foreigners in a country exceeds roughly 10 percent, a natural unease sets in that proves stronger than the rules meant to contain it, and aggression grows — especially where integration is not entirely successful.

Sládek and Okamura: teacher and student

Political extremism was present in Czechia throughout the entire period before the 1989 revolution. The founder of this genre in recent history was, in 1990, Miroslav Sládek, leader of the Republican Party, which won up to 8 percent of the vote in the 1996 election. His themes were strikingly similar to today's: rejection of migration — back then mostly from the former USSR and Yugoslavia — hostility toward Roma and Sudeten Germans, and protests against Czechia's accession to the EU and NATO, which the country was heading toward at the time.

The key difference, notes Aleš Michal, was that Sládek remained a thoroughly isolated figure — no serious politician wanted anything to do with him, so he simply had no chance of holding any constitutionally significant office. In 1998, the "Sládek camp" fell out of parliament after mainstream parties, chiefly ODS and ČSSD, had co-opted some of its themes.

It was only 15 years later that a former normalization-era censor was succeeded by another leader of a similarly atypical stripe for such parties — Tomio Okamura, who at the time headed the Dawn of Direct Democracy movement. Back in 2013, when it first entered parliament, it was dubbed "Sládek-lite" — but since then, in the consensus view of observers, Okamura's movement has far outstripped its predecessor in influence.

The question remains open whether Europe's future belongs to parties born of protest that feed on public frustration and the mistakes of "traditional" parties, whether a share of power tempers extremists, and who will succeed Okamura, who by all appearances has already reached the peak of his political career.

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz