Why Germany's Green Party is surging

It's not all about the rise of the far right

A Green Party convention.
(Image credit: AP Photo/Jens Meyer)

For the past several years in Europe, the dominant story in politics has been the crumbling center. From Britain to Hungary, right-wing populist and nationalist parties — and, to a lesser extent, left-wing populist parties — have surged at the expense of the traditional parties of the center left and center right.

Nowhere has that narrative been more alarming than in Germany, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged from nonexistence to third place in last year's election. As Angela Merkel's government has tottered, and her Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union (CDU-CSU) coalition has been pummeled in regional elections, there's been every reason to fear that right-wing populism could soon triumph in Europe's most powerful country and the one whose history should surely have inoculated it against the return of that particular plague.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.