On September 6, the far-right German party Alternative for Germany (AfD) made a historic breakthrough. 100 years after Hitler’s official reorganization of the Nazi Party, a group that has openly strategized and worked with neo-Nazis won a plurality of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt and is on the precipice of forming a government there. 14 days later, they won a plurality again in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. This is the AfD's strongest electoral result yet, and the closest a far-right party has come to a majority in postwar Germany.
In a country with numerous safeguards against right-wing co-option – from a 5% minimum threshold to enter the Bundestag to bans for undemocratic parties – this democratic victory of a far-right movement shook the country to its core. Whether AfD is able to make up the handful of seats it needs in coalition agreements to form governments in both states isn’t the point; AfD’s stock is on the rise, and at this rate, they will likely continue to win at both the state and federal level. Even if Chancellor Merz’s coalition government can start delivering for the increasingly underemployed and isolated German people, by all signs, far-right support will only continue to increase.
How Immigration Shaped the AfD
AfD has its roots, similar to the American Tea Party, in fiscal responsibility. Its origin is traced back to the German bailout of Greece’s economy in 2010, but similar to its American counterpart, its driving philosophy quickly evolved into nativism. Syria’s civil war began the year after the bailout, and in the decade that followed, 1.2 million refugees arrived in Germany. At the time, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming immigrants was known as Wir Schaffen Das, or We Can Do This, but politically, they could not. The correlation is stark: AfD’s public support has increased every year Germany’s foreign-born population has, except for one.
While Syria’s civil war might have ended in 2024, the age of mass migration has just begun. Even if the rate of immigration continues to slow incrementally, there were still 235,000 more people who moved to Germany than left last year, and in part because of that, further AfD victories at the state level look increasingly likely. If the rate of immigration from the Middle East once again shot up, recent polls and electoral history suggest they would win a plurality, and then likely a majority, in the Bundestag.
Climate Migration Impacts Everything
For years, climate-worsened extreme weather has led to increased migration around the world, from the Dry Corridor of Central America to Southeast Asia to the Middle East. Southern Iraq, specifically, is becoming the new forefront of drought-caused displacement. The worst drought in a century there has caused decreased river flow, irrigation-induced salinization issues, and agricultural failure. This is resulting in unprecedented internal displacement, but as this worsening drought-to-displacement pipeline pops up across the region, in addition to increasing political instability in Iran and Palestine, there will be fewer places for migrants to flee to internally and region-wide. As climate drought worsens, which it is every year, political and natural forces will direct waves of displaced persons into Europe. Meteorological data, recent migration patterns, and the impacts of worsening El Niños reinforce the likelihood that another wave of mass migration is coming soon, this time prompted by the worsening climate crisis.
The scariest part is that there is almost nothing we can do about it. Even if we halted 100% of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere today, this warming, and its corresponding drought and aridification, is already baked into our climate system for years to come. While robust climate mitigation and its corresponding cooling could prevent an even worse hundred-million-person wave of immigration and democratic decline next century, there are few things that can prevent this in the short term.
What Democracies Can Still Do
Methane and carbon removal technically could limit impacts on a shorter time scale, but the industry isn’t even a fraction of the way to necessary scale. Climate interventions are currently being researched to limit immediate warming, specifically to prevent climate tipping points and feedback loops that would result in an increasingly rapid decay of our climate system. Speculative proposals to pump seawater onto glaciers to stop West Antarctic ice shelf collapse are one of many being studied. The most impactful thing humans could do right now, however, for short term harm-reduction, is to temporarily increase the Earth’s reflectivity.
From the 1950s to 2020, sulfate aerosols from ship fuel reflected a small portion of the sun’s incoming solar radiation when it got to the atmosphere. This had the unintended effect of cooling the Earth, at the exact same time carbon emissions began warming it. Over the last six years, in an effort to mitigate sulfur dioxide’s contribution to air pollution, international treaties began to phase sulfur out of ship fuel, helping fight pollution, but unmasking warming that was already happening. Added together, all of human aerosol emissions’ reflectivity has temporarily cooled the Earth by between 0.4 and 0.8 degrees Celsius. This is between a quarter and a half of all warming caused by humankind since the Industrial Revolution.
If we could restore the Earth’s reflectivity to what it was a decade ago, without emitting harmful aerosols, we could reduce warming in the short term, saving not just millions of lives and tens of trillions of dollars, but keeping hundreds of millions of people in their homes. Research on climate intervention and increasing the atmosphere’s reflectivity should be immediately and thoroughly studied by the world’s democracies, with governance and human welfare at the forefront. If democracies in heavily refugee-receiving regions wait too long to take action, or rely exclusively on traditional mitigation methods that take too long to be felt, they might cease to be democracies. Then who will be taking action on the climate crisis? It sure won’t be the AfD.
Jake Schwartz is a climate advocate and policy expert. He has served as the Climate Voters Engagement Director for the Harris-Walz campaign and on the International Elections team at the National Democratic Institute.
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