| As campaigning picks up for Germany's national election on Feb. 23, just about everyone is bracing for a sharp rightward turn in the results. Bloomberg German breaking news editor Laura Alviz explains the role women are likely to play in that shift. Plus: The Elon, Inc. podcast discusses his attack on the US government, orange juice makers try to engineer a comeback, and a dot-com pioneer faces prison after promising an antigravity machine. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Women have long been a moderating influence on postwar Germany's politics, primarily backing centrist parties such as the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats and the Greens, even as men began drifting toward extremists on the right and left. That's poised to change in elections this month as radical views edge closer to the mainstream. A pair of extremist parties—headed by women—are making a concerted effort to boost their appeal to female voters, heralding a future of heightened division, confrontation and polarization. With women at the helm, voters are less likely to focus on the hostile, anti-immigrant policies at the core of the parties' platforms, says Lea Lochau of the Amadeu Antonio foundation, an antidiscrimination research group. "This can make far-right parties seem more harmless." While the voting will likely result in a governing coalition between the Christian Democrats and current Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD), polls show the latter falling into third place behind one of the newer parties, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD). The rise of the far-left Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) threatens to push the Left Party, a descendant of East Germany's communists, out of parliament. The BSW, which broke away from the Left last year, won 6% of the German vote in elections for the European Parliament last June, while the Left got less than half that—well below the 5% required to make it into Germany's Bundestag. The gender gap emerged about a decade ago, when men began abandoning traditional parties for the newly formed AfD. The trend was particularly pronounced in poorer parts of the former East, where less-educated men often feel stuck in places with few jobs. That has led to a sharp turn away from the established left, with combined support for SPD, Greens and Left now at the lowest level since reunification 35 years ago. "People are massively dissatisfied with the current government," says Ansgar Hudde, a researcher at Cologne University. There's little doubt that the AfD will see a surge in this year's election, with polls predicting it will receive about 20% of the vote, almost double what it got in the last national election, in 2021. But with its extremist views—some AfD members openly praise the Nazis—many women are reluctant to admit their support, so some observers are bracing for a stronger-than-expected showing. In 2021, only about 60% of the women who voted for the AfD told pollsters they planned to do so, Hudde says.  Alice Weidel. Photographer: Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images Although the AfD's leader, Alice Weidel, is a lesbian whose partner is an immigrant—born in Sri Lanka and raised in Switzerland—the party's nativist program says a woman's place is in the home, caring for her children. "Mothers only count in 'woke' society if they are employed and place their children in state all-day care, preferably as early as infancy," the AfD writes in its election manifesto. Wagenknecht's movement takes a less traditional view, seeking to appeal to women by highlighting its support for limits on immigration and focusing on criminality among immigrant men. Women, the party's platform says, "avoid certain streets and squares or outdoor swimming pools because they no longer feel safe there." After years of largely ignoring the rise of the AfD, the more established parties are finally starting to seriously address the shift toward the fringes. They have all said they wouldn't join a coalition with the AfD, and some are reluctant to work with the BSW. The growing strength of the two parties has spurred even the Social Democrats and Greens to take a harder line on immigration. And the Christian Democrats, after 16 years of drifting leftward under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, have begun to swing back to the right, in theory boosting their appeal to people who are flirting with a vote for the AfD. Nina Weise, a media consultant who works with the Christian Democrats, says the key to bringing voters back toward the center isn't to call the AfD out for its Nazi sympathies, but rather to highlight that while the party devotes a lot of attention to describing Germany's problems, it rarely offers viable strategies of its own. "It is very clear to me that the AfD is not an alternative," Weise says. "But you have to confront them on a policy level. That's the only way it works." |
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