The truth-seeking press is appalled by the gains made by the AfD party in Germany’s state elections. But no one has explained to their readers and listeners what is behind those gains. Thus, the Norwegian press’s coverage of the elections has ended up as a collective depiction of misery.
– What went wrong in Germany?
The question was asked on NRK’s Studio 2 on 7 September in connection with the election in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.
The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party received an impressive 43.8 per cent of the vote and became by far the largest party, an increase of no less than 23 percentage points since the 2021 election.
For the most part, this came at the expense of the Christian Democrats, CDU, which received 17.2 per cent, a decline of 19.9 percentage points. But the Free Democrats also suffered a blow. They lost 3.8 percentage points and fell below the electoral threshold, with 2.6 per cent.
The Social Democrats, SPD, remained at a stable low of 9.3 per cent, while some voters probably moved from the Left Party, Die Linke (equivalent to Rødt/SV), which fell 2.4 percentage points to 8.6 per cent, to the Greens, ‘Die Grünen’ (equivalent to MDG), which gained 3 percentage points, to 8.9 per cent.
From NRK, which swears by point 1.1 of the Code of Ethics of the Norwegian Press (Vær Varsom-plakaten), which reads: ‘A free, independent and truth-seeking press is among the most important institutions in democratic societies’, listeners learnt nothing other than that something had gone seriously wrong in Germany.
– Shakes Germany
Dagbladet’s editor-in-chief Gunnar Stavrum must have been pleased with this teaser, as it appeared both on the day of the election in Saxony-Anhalt, 6 September, and the following day, then with the addition ‘and Europe’.
Readers who opened the link on election day were met squarely in the face with ‘– Total crisis’ in screaming headlines. The following day, readers were told that the election was also shaking Europe.
The language bears witness to an editorial staff in shock. It made no attempt to explain to readers what is behind the dramatic gains made by the AfD. What readers are told is that ‘The Far Right is advancing’.
‘The Far Right’ – this is the code term for fascist in both the indefinite and definite plural forms: fascists and the fascists.
In its coverage the day after the election, Dagbladet confines itself to writing the following about the AfD’s gains: ‘It is fuelled by opposition to immigration, industrial closures, the high cost of living, the absence of economic growth, EU scepticism or opposition, indifference towards Ukraine, and culture war and opposition to what we tend to regard as “the modern”’. Dagbladet’s editorial staff either will not or cannot go any deeper in its search for the truth behind the result of a democratic election in Europe’s most populous country.
– Germany’s Nazi past
Dagbladet journalists Ingvild Tvervang and Håvard Steffensen write entirely uncritically about the ‘firewall agreement’ (Brandmauer), which is a consensus among the major parties not to co-operate with the AfD, after the party was elected to the Bundestag (the federal parliament) in 2017.
The journalists add the following: ‘This is a question of backbone in a country that 97 years ago – in 1933 – invited another far-right party into government. AfD is a party with parts of its ideology and identity linked to Germany’s Nazi past’.
Dagbladet thus states in black and white what it meant by ‘the far right is advancing’.
How Dagbladet arrives at 1933 being 97 rather than 93 years ago, only Dagbladet knows.
That Elon Musk congratulated them on X and wrote that ‘Germany can once again become a place worth investing in’ greatly offended Dagbladet’s editorial staff.
Labour politician as expert commentator
To understand what is going on, Dagbladet brought in Jette Fugelsnes Christensen as an expert commentator. She sat on the Labour Party’s central executive committee from 2015 to 2021. In this context, she is presented as a political scientist, author and former Member of Parliament.
She was once exposed as the source for then VG commentator Fridthjof Jacobsen during the proceedings against Trond Giske. At the much-discussed ‘sausage party’ held by Giske’s rival, Hadia Tajik, Jacobsen and Christensen were revealed to be a couple, which resulted in Jacobsen having to resign as a VG commentator, only to reappear as a DN commentator a few months later.
Incidentally, Dagbladet’s political commentator Marie Simonsen was at the same sausage party, together with large parts of the Norwegian press, to celebrate Trond Giske being stripped of all his party positions.
– Unlike other anti-democratic parties on the right that have grown recently, AfD has become radicalised. The more radicalised they become, the more voters they attract, Christensen told Dagbladet.
Nor does she offer any explanation for the dramatic gains made by the AfD, beyond saying that ‘the established parties have not managed to find a strategy that works in confronting the party’.
She reiterates the assertion that the AfD is anti-democratic, autocratic and has links to the far right, and believes that Germans need a rescue operation to save democracy.
A democratic election had, after all, just been held in which the people had their say. It is therefore unclear what kind of ‘rescue operation’ the former Labour politician envisaged. Nor were the truth-seeking journalists at Dagbladet curious to find out.
– Wolf in sheep’s clothing
When the truth-seeking newspaper VG was to comment on the election, it brought in its expert witness from the left-wing think tank Agenda, Astrid Sverresdotter Dypvik, who has been debate and opinion editor at Klassekampen.
– Siegmund is funny and has broad appeal, but he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, she tells VG. She is referring to the AfD’s lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund.
She calls the party’s programme for government radical, partly because it calls for tighter immigration policy and remigration. She, too, avoids telling readers why more than 4 in 10 voters want such a thing, leaving the impression that German voters have been deceived.
‘This is Germany’s most dangerous man’, the state broadcaster NRK declared a week later. NRK quoted Der Spiegel, and once again it was about Ulrich Siegmund. Once again, it was about his winning manner.
Siegmund’s friendly, informal and accommodating manner was portrayed as a trap that could fool Germans into becoming Nazis again.
‘Don’t make Germany extreme again’
The depiction of misery was a recurring feature across all the established Norwegian truth-seeking press outlets. The message was the same. No readers or listeners were told what lay behind the new political reality in Germany.
The truth-seeking newspaper Aftenposten simultaneously published a series of similar articles, uncritically peppered with terms such as ‘far right’, without offering a single explanation of why Germans had become so ‘far-right’.
Fear in the Norwegian truth-seeking media mounted ahead of the next state elections, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin on 21 September. The day before, Aftenposten commentator Halvor Hegtun prepared his readers for the worst with the hope that the outcome would ‘not make Germany extreme again’.
Even though he was the newspaper’s Berlin correspondent in the 1990s, and presumably follows German politics more closely than the average Norwegian, he too offered no explanation for the reason behind the election result he feared would occur.
Instead, he brought Trump into it. He acknowledges that the election result in Saxony-Anhalt two weeks earlier was ‘so hard to swallow’. He had visited the glass dome of the Reichstag. ‘It is intended to symbolise openness, transparency and closeness between voters and elected representatives. Not least, it is intended to mark a break with Germany’s past regimes’, Hegtun writes, building towards an anticipated disappointment.
He lists: ‘Industry is stagnating. Purchasing power is not rising. Electricity prices, petrol prices and the influx of foreigners, however, are, much of it because of the war in Ukraine. All of this erodes confidence in the political class, which is struggling down there in the chamber beneath the dome.’ But he fails to tell Aftenposten’s readers why Germans want it this way.
He omits the mass immigration from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, and its economic, social, security and political consequences. That same day, a highly critical article about former Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared in the British newspaper The Times, ‘Angela Merkel was the true extremist of our age. History will judge hyperliberals as the vandals who dissolved our borders and ignored Putin’s threat’.
Document assumes that Hegtun has not read it, since that article explains what no media outlet in the established Norwegian press has managed to do – namely, to tell readers, viewers and listeners why Germans vote as they do.
The anticipated disappointment
The following day came the great disappointment. AfD also became the largest party in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, with 38.2 per cent, up 21.5 percentage points from 2021. The Social Democrats, SPD, were thus knocked off their pedestal, falling 4.1 percentage points to 35.5 per cent. Both the communists and the Greens remained just above the electoral threshold, but were down, while the CDU, with 4.9 per cent, down a full 8.4 percentage points, disappeared from parliament.
Even in Berlin, the AfD made strong gains, rising 7.2 percentage points to 16.3 per cent, becoming the capital region’s third-largest party. The CDU lost the lead with 18.8 per cent, down 9.4 percentage points.
The socialists and communists in Die Linke became the largest party, with 25.7 per cent, up 13.5 percentage points, mainly from voters who came from the SPD, which recorded a historically poor result in Berlin, with 12.1 per cent, down 6.3 percentage points, and Die Grünen, which fell 4.1 percentage points to 14.3 per cent.
Why Germany and Europe were shaken in this way, to use Dagbladet’s expression, is something that officially perhaps no reader, listener or viewer of the established truth-seeking Norwegian media knows.
