In many ways, Germany seems like a higher education paradise. Sure, the funding might not be as generous as elsewhere and career progression can be problematic—but basically, academic freedom is highly prized, as are continental connections across Europe, and policymaking within the system is highly consensual. You can’t have everything, but that’s quite a lot.
But as Germans are discovering, consensual decision-making only works if everyone agrees to the ground rules. And in recent years, a new political force has emerged in the country which seems bent on being anything but consensual, and that’s the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.
So, the question looming over higher education in the past months has been—how can higher education and indeed policymaking generally in Germany adapt to the rise of the AfD?
With me today is Jan-Martin Wiarda, Germany’s most influential educational journalist and blogger. I heartily recommend his website, WiardaBlog. He’s been watching the development of the AfD for a long time and has been covering the higher education sector’s reaction to the oncoming AfD wave, which became very real in September with the party making big gains in two state elections.
Today we chat about the AfD’s origins, its higher education policies, and whether or not the German system will fare any better than Hungary’s did when faced with a democratically elected government with decidedly illiberal views on the purpose of universities. But enough from me, let’s listen to Jan-Martin.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 5.5 | The AfD and German Higher Education
Transcript
AU: Jan-Martin, it’s not exactly a secret that the far right has been on the rise in Germany. Tell us about the Alternative für Deutschland. What are the historical roots of this party? What does it stand for?
Jan-Martin Wiarda (JW): Well, how long do I have? Let’s start with the roots of the AfD. It started in the early 10’s of this century, when there was a rising anti-Euro movement in Germany, and there was the feeling among some conservatives that there should be a stronger push against the Euro as a common currency – and this is where the AfD started out.
It started out as a right-wing party, not necessarily right-wing extremist party, and it was kind of taken over over the years by more and more extremist members, and some of the early party leaders were pushed out over time. So it became more and more extreme, but it started out as an anti-Euro very conservative party.
And the agenda of the AfD as it is today, a little bit depends on the German land – the state where you’re in. There are some parts of the AfD that are even more extremist than others depending on where you are. But what they have in common is that they’re very much nationalist, anti-establishment.
They have an anti-immigrant agenda. They have a … Well, their politics is about resentment, about distrust of institutions, they have narratives of national decline and … So it’s pretty much the same, Alex, I would say, like you would find at almost any right-wing extremist party all over Europe right now.
But it’s not the same because you cannot forget German history. That is not the same as other European countries have when it comes to right-wing extremism, so to speak.
AU: And how has it come to such a dominant position? I mean, it was, as you say, it’s a young party and it’s displaced other parties as, you know… it’s the number one party in some parts of the country. How did that happen?
JW: Well, that’s something that everybody tries to figure out, how that happened actually. I think that there are many reasons to that. One reason is the feeling that many people share that there is a widening gap between those who are well off and those who are lagging behind socially.
There is the feeling that the German welfare state doesn’t deliver its promises anymore. There is the feeling that there is this overwhelming international trend towards new technologies that many people don’t understand. They feel like they are not masters of their own fate anymore.
There’s also the impression that there are too many immigrants coming into the country, which maybe has to do with the fact that there were a lot of refugees, but there is not a positive sentiment in parts of society when it comes to refugees anymore. And so, I don’t think there is one single reason for that.
But obviously the established parties have lost maybe their connection to parts of society, and they don’t know how to deal with the fact that many people see them as, well, far away from their problems, and they don’t know what to do about that.
AU: So that sounds pretty similar to populist movements, again, in other parts of the world including the United States. So, I have to ask you, given this is a higher education podcast what are the AfD’s views about higher education and science? Is it similar, for instance, to the Trump administration in the United States?
JW: I would say so. In many degrees it is. First of all – there is this accusation of ideological capture when we talk about gender studies, when we talk about post-colonial studies, when we talk about social sciences, when we talk about climate research. So, the narrative is that there is no real science, no free science anymore, but science has been captured by ideologists.
And that the idea of the AfD, or the agenda of the AfD, is to bring science back to its roots, as they say. Clean it from ideology, what they see as ideology, and just to have pure science again, whatever, Alex, that is.
And we can talk about many, maybe, more European or German issues in there. For example, there were the Bologna reforms 20 years ago when in Germany the traditional study degrees were replaced by bachelor’s and master’s degrees. And so, the AFD wants to have the old German diplom back, wants to have that back, and they want to have the Magister back and so forth.
So, you will find some of the narratives that will be pretty much the same as you would see in the US or elsewhere and some of the narratives that are probably more of the German or European context.
AU: So the AfD is especially strong in Eastern Germany, you know, which of course has undergone a very long and difficult transition over the last 35 years. How much of the AfD’s views on higher education are actually a desire not to return to the Germany of 1990 to 2010, but a return to East Germany of 1945 to 1990? That was a more hierarchical system. It was an ideologically uniform system. Maybe not the ideology the AfD has now, but it was certainly more uniform. Does that play a part here at all?
JW: Maybe let’s first talk about the question if AfD is more of an Eastern German party or not, and I’m not so sure about that anymore. I think that in Eastern Germany the AfD has had a stronger start. And they got better results at the elections there in earlier years.
But in the western states, the western länder, they are also picking up pace, and they have 20% and plus. So, I think that the western states are just lagging behind when we talk about the success of the AfD. The overall pattern is pretty much the same. So, it might play a role that there is this GDR nostalgia among parts of Eastern German society that might speed up the process.
But I think that the underlying sentiments are the same in both parts of Germany, I would say, I’m afraid. And so, I can’t really say anything about the GDR system of higher education if they want that back, because I think that also most AfD politicians are too young. They are too far remote from that system.
They might think about or they might have a view of what was happening there, but they don’t know it by firsthand. Also … those people who are behind the strategy are mostly too young for that, actually.
AU: Interesting, okay. So recently, the AfD has come first in a couple of state elections in the last, well, since September. One was in Saxony-Anhalt and the other in Mecklenburg. The party hasn’t taken power in either of those states, at least at the time of this recording because they didn’t quite get a majority in either state.
Is the party likely to be able to strike the necessary deals in order to get a majority – in order to get a ruling coalition? How likely is it we’ll actually see an AfD-led government in these two states?
JW: I think it’s very unlikely when we talk about Mecklenburg-Vorpommern because there is the SPD, the Social Democrats, had a very strong outcome, almost as strong as the AfD, and they are enough other partners to form a coalition. So, I don’t think that we will see that in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the situation is even more complicated because AfD scored 44% there, and they are not far away from the majority in the parliament. And they just need a cooperation with a second party that is new in the German party landscape, which is called BSW, which is called after Sahra Wagenknecht, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, who was a former member of the Left Party, and left the Left Party because she thought that this one is not, it’s my words, not nationalist enough, I think.
And so, what we see there is that the BSW is an interesting blend of leftist ideas and nationalist ideas, which probably some people will remind them of something in German history, you know? National Socialists also combined those two narratives in a way. So, I don’t say that they are, like, even closer to traditional Nazi ideas, but there is certainly something in there.
And so, they also in the parliament in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, they say that they don’t want to form a coalition, but they also don’t rule out that they will cooperate in some way and that they will not stand against the candidate of the AfD when he will be elected, well, when he will run for prime minister in the parliament.
AU: Right. Okay, so let’s imagine that the AfD does take power in Saxony-Anhalt. What do you think the dynamic will be between government and universities? I mean, we’ve seen this happen before in Europe. We saw it under Orban in Hungary. It’s tough for public universities to resist an elected government, right? A democratically elected government. So, I mean, I’ve seen … for instance, in your blog – I’ve seen people from Saxony-Anhalt talk about, you know, fighting for autonomy and academic freedom and resistance. But how do you think that’ll actually play out?
JW: Well, the problem is the money, I guess. Because unlike universities in the United States, for example, there is almost no private money in the higher education sector, which means there are no tuition fees, almost no tuition fees. There’s not really a strong tradition of public-private partnership.
So, the money basically comes from the government, both the state and the federal government, and the universities are almost entirely financed by the state government. So, you can imagine that there’s an enormous pressure by the state government, or let’s say the state government can exercise an enormous pressure on the universities if they want just by talking about money and maybe withholding money.
And so, we don’t even have to talk about the constitutional protection in our basic law, in Article Five where the academic freedom is guaranteed, because maybe the safeguard is not such a safeguard if people … are afraid of losing money or institutions because they’re afraid of losing money, will back down.
And this is something, again, which we actually see in the United States when we talk about federal money.
And so in Germany, this could happen with state money, and the question is, what are the strategies of universities in Saxony-Anhalt against that? They don’t want to back down. They want to uphold democratic values. But I think that the pressure will be enormous.
AU: And what’s the protection that institutions do have in a situation like this? Is it, I mean, I’ve seen discussions, they can use lawsuits, you know, they can use judicial measures, that there’s enough protection in the national constitution that they will be able to fight back against the AfD. Do you think that’s realistic?
JW: First of all; lawsuits take a lot of time, and if you want to go through all the different courts up until the constitutional court, for example, this could take a while. And if you are lacking money, if they are taking money away from you right away, you might not have the time to go through this whole process. So, there is some pressure not to let that happen.
And the other thing is that there is something like self-censorship. Just because you expect certain things to happen, you may just change the names of study programs. You may invest in different disciplines because you think there you don’t have the same degree of conflict.
I think that probably we will see a lot of legal action at some point, but I think not as much as maybe we would expect because many things will change before that happens because institutions will adapt, I’m afraid.
AU: Yeah. That certainly seems to be the experience in the United States.
Jan-Martin, I wanna move to the national level now. And it has to do with how a change in an individual state or länder can affect matters at the national level.
There were fears expressed earlier this year that a single far-right government might actually be able to paralyze the whole system of decision-making because of the rules requiring federal and state unanimity in policymaking around things like research funding or BAföG student aid funding.
Tell me about these unanimity rules. How did this type of federalism come into existence, and how has that worked over the past few decades?
JW: So, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with just the financing of research. This is something that is pretty much true to all the different fields of politics. The idea behind it is that whenever in the Constitution the obligation or the responsibility of the länder has been touched or is being touched, then the länders have their say.
And whenever there is a common program with the Bund, with the federal government, then all the länder have to be – And, that’s part of the education and research system – have to be on board because there is something called the Kulturhoheit der Länder, which means the dominionship maybe, or I don’t know how to say that, of the states when it comes to education and research.
And so, when we talk about those jointly financed programs between the federal government and the länder, then actually one land could be enough to bring the whole thing down because of the system. And this has something to do with history because after World War II, when the federal system was worked out… I think it was mostly also because of the Allied countries that Germany got a very balanced federal system.
So, there’s always controls and checks, and there cannot be a strong centralized government in that regard. And that makes a lot of sense because if there would be some kind of dictator coming up on the federal level, he could not rule the whole country. There would always be the länder.
And so, it makes a lot of sense. But in this case, this leads to the situation just that just one land, just one AfD prime minister can really slow down or even stop the decision-making in research policy or in education policy.
AU: And so, I understand the rules then changed over the last years as those votes in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg came closer, they made changes to the unanimity rules in order to avoid exactly that kind of veto. What were the changes?
JW: Well, the thing is that, and I’m not sure if we should tell that here because maybe the AfD will hear that, but it can only be changed on a superficial level.
AU: Okay.
JW: Because whenever we talk about taxpayers’ money…whenever the taxpayers’ money of one land is touched, this one land can still say no to everything…cannot be forced to anything.
We are talking here about the decision-making process. So, let’s say there is a funding scheme for research institutions in Germany, and all the 16 länder pay into that and the federal government pays into it. And normally it’s like 50% of the federal government and 50% of the länder could be different percentages.
So up until now, they could not come up with a funding scheme like that if there was one land against that. They can now. That would mean that this one land would opt out basically so that the other 15 länder would still be in there. It could be 14 länder as well. It could be 13 länder or states, not fewer than that.
So that’s the line where it ends. But there we’re just talking about funding schemes. That doesn’t mean that anybody could force this one land to pay money into that scheme afterwards, because that is again, part of the decision-making of the parliament because the parliament decides about how to spend the taxpayer money.
But it makes things easier, you know, because now at least the other states and the federal government can act.
AU: But so it’s an opt-out, but it’s an opt-out without compensation. That is the… in the same way that the national government can’t force a länder to spend money in a particular area, a länder can’t force the national government to give it the money that it would otherwise get if it joined.
JW: Exactly. It’s even more complex than that, but basically that’s what it means. That up until now, one land could just have pretty much stopped everything when it came to forming new joint funding schemes. Now the federal government and up to 13, well, the minimum of 13 länder could just go ahead and come up with a new scheme.
But it’s still very complicated because our system is pretty much about consensus. It’s not good with if there is a player in the system who doesn’t want consensus, and not for justified reasons, but just because they want to bring disturbance into the system.
AU: Got it. One thing we tend to see in countries experiencing a rise in support for authoritarian parties is that other parties sometimes mimic the authoritarians a little bit, right? Try and take away their thunder and, you know, they’ll take stances to show they’re tough on various issues. Has that happened in Germany with respect to higher education?
Have the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats started to take a harsher line on universities or university autonomy in any way? Are any of the parties really friends of universities anymore?
JW: So first of all, I would say there’s a lot of mimicking going on, but not necessarily only in the field of higher education or education in general. So, when we talk about immigration laws and everything, we see that a lot. When it comes to education, higher education, research not too much so far, with a few exceptions.
One exception will be the gender question. In the German language, we gender a lot because of the structure of the language. So, there will always be a professor and a female professor. Those would be different words. And since you have the same discussion in Canada, since there is the idea of non-binary people as well, we try to make this part of modern German language, to form German language like that, and universities and higher education sector, they are doing that as well.
And so, what we will see is that conservatives, they will blame this as destroying our language, you know, this kind of gendering language. So, this is something that will happen, and actually will also happen to policy action that there are conservative governments in Germany that don’t allow their own bureaucracy to use this gender friendly language anymore.
But I would say this is pretty much it so far. So, it’s very much about symbols in a way, but not when it comes to serious policy. Sometimes you will hear conservatives, politicians who say, “Well, we shouldn’t overdo it with our diversity efforts.” But this is… again, it’s mostly about symbolic talk. There is no real change there.
AU: How do you think the university system in Germany will evolve over the next few years if the AfD continue to have success at the state level? In the United States, you know, some observers are starting to talk about red state and blue state systems of university government with decreasing mobility between them.
You know, red state universities can’t hire administrators from blue states anymore ’cause they might be tainted by diversity. You know, faculty in blue states won’t attend conferences in red states. Is that kind of fracturing likely to happen in Germany?
JW: Well, the thing is that the German context has been complicated before the AfD came in because of our system of civil servants, Beamte, which are employed by the states. So, if you are a university professor, you’re employed by this one state, and you would lose… it’s pretty likely that you would lose your pension if you would like to change from one university to the other.
There are ways to keep that, but it’s… The older you get, the less motivated you would be to change universities because that might hurt your pension in some way. So, it’s really complicated even to change from one German state to the other for that reason.
And there are always debates about that, how we can make that easier. By the way, that’s an even bigger problem if you want to change from one European state to the other. It’s even a bigger issue there. So, we don’t, in that regard, we don’t need the AfD to have a very complicated system there.
But what I think is true that we would see states that have a more liberal kind of university financing where they don’t try to impact the contents of research, and we would see other states where they would try to meddle with those disciplines they don’t like. I think we would see that very soon, very quickly.
AU: Hmm. I’ve been dwelling on the negative. What’s the best-case scenario for German higher education right now?
JW: I think the best scenario for German higher education would be the best scenario for the country altogether – that the winning streak of the AfD ends at some point, hopefully soon. That the traditional parties find ways to communicate with the voters again without mimicking the extremists, and that there is returning trust between the voters and the political establishment.
But, you know, and I don’t wanna dwell on the negatives either, but I don’t really see right now where this could come from. Well, what we definitely would need is an economic upturn. That would probably help. It always helps, I guess. And it would help if the overall sentiment in Europe would be different, but right now there is one right-wing government coming up after the other.
So there is this …Just today the Spanish prime minister announced that he has to call for election, I think later this year. And again, there is the danger of a right-wing government then. So, I think that the whole framework, the European framework, is not too much in favor of changing this winning streak in the near future.
But I think that things will turn around. The question is what the costs will be until things turn around.
AU: Jan-Martin, thanks so much for joining us today.
JW: It was a pleasure. Thank you so much.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Noah Arney, Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners and readers, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode or suggestions for future ones, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.
Join us next week when our guest will be Roger Smyth. He’s a consultant and former manager of tertiary education policy for the New Zealand government, and he’ll be joining us from Christchurch to discuss what’s on the higher education policy agenda in New Zealand in the run-up to November’s national elections. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
