The strong showing by Germany’s right in state voting signals a bumpy road ahead as national elections loom in 2025 and the country grapples with a party that tests the nation’s political consensus. For conservatives, though, the Alternative for Germany party’s tilt toward the fringe, in contrast with centrist moves by rightist movements in Italy and France, suggests a missed opportunity — as much for Germany as for Europe. 

The AfD’s missteps are all the more glaring compared with the progress made by Marine Le Pen in France and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, both of whom made a clean break with authoritarian and antisemitic elements. The German rightist party’s seeming failure to reform itself suggests instead a regression with dark historical echoes. For Germany, which bears blame for some of 20th century history’s grimmest episodes, those echoes resonate all the more.

In short, as much as the rise of the AfD is a dilemma for Germany — which has weighed banning the group — it is a conundrum for the rightist party itself, which faces a choice whether to drift toward dysfunction and extremism, or whether to trim its sails and adopt the discipline necessary to become a responsible political organization. The decision, the Financial Times observes, is between “radicalism or power.”

Does the AfD “actually want to govern?” the FT asks, or “is it content to remain the arch troublemaker of German politics, forever raging from the sidelines at the Berlin machine?” The party’s performance in the former East Germany would tend to suggest the latter, critics contend. Its leading figure in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, seems to embody the most problematic aspects of the AfD’s nascent movement. 

The FT describes Mr. Höcke as “one of Germany’s most notorious far-right politicians,” noting that two courts have recently fined him “for using banned Nazi slogans.” In 2017 he denounced Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame.” He proposes a “180 degree turnaround,” the FT reports, in “Germany’s apologetic attitude to its Nazi past.” These hardly seem like constructive policy positions to move Germany forward.

Mr. Höcke’s rhetoric, too, stands in contrast with the more moderate policy points put forward by the AfD’s co-chairwoman, Alice Weidel, who offers sunnier talking points.  She describes the AfD as “the party of freedom and entrepreneurship” and “the party of taxpayers in this country.” Of efforts to ban the party, she has asked “How undemocratic is it to simply exclude millions of voters who vote for us?” 

On that head, Ms. Weidel has sought to underscore “the irony of an effort to preserve German democracy by shunning a political party with growing popular support,” our Clara Preve-Durrieu has reported. Ms. Weidel also laments the refusal of Germany’s other parties to work with the AfD, which has constrained its influence. At the same time, a figure like Mr. Höcke playing a prominent role in the AfD is hardly likely to improve that situation.

Ms. Weidel argues that voters in Sunday’s elections have given the AfD a mandate for leadership, and warns Germany’s other parties “against ignoring this mandate.” She avers that “cordons sanitaires” attempting to box out the AfD “are undemocratic.” The baggage posed by rhetoric from figures in the party like Mr. Höcke — along with corruption allegations tying the group to Russia — serve to undermine her claim.

All the more regrettable, then, that Germany lacks for a cohesive conservative party along the lines of Signora Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. Her party, as our Rosario Iaconis has chronicled, overcame the skepticism of liberals and the hostility of the press by making a clean break with Italy’s fascist past. Ms. Meloni avers that she has “never sympathized with anti-democratic regimes, including fascism” and opposes “every kind of racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination.”

That is the forthright language needed on Europe’s right, especially due to the need to address the crisis of unchecked migration, which can all too easily take on a racially — and religiously — charged dimension. Europe’s right has a chance, too, to reverse the threat to liberty, economic growth, and national identities from the European superstate. The inability to do so in a responsible way leaves the field open to the left, and will consign Europe to failure.