Like it or not, the far right is heading for Germany’s Bundestag | Alan Posener

On the face of it, Sunday’s general election will be the most boring in Germany’s history. The only question seems to be: will chancellor Angela Merkel continue her “grand coalition“ with the Social Democrats (SPD), or will she rule with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) or the Greens, or both?

One thing, however, seems as certain as Merkel’s continued premiership, and it’s more important: the far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party will enter the Bundestag. Polls put it at 10% or more. For the first time since the Reichstag fire of 1933, a nationalist, reactionary, racist party will sit in the building where the republic was proclaimed in 1918, where Nazis and communists helped destroy the democracy of Weimar, where the red flag was raised by Soviet soldiers in 1945, and which – redesigned by British architect Norman Foster – has come to represent the modern, multicultural and friendly Germany the world saw during the football World Cup in 2006, when Merkel had been in office for just one year.

Rightwing populism has been a fixture in the Netherlands and Austria for years, authoritarian nationalists are ruling Poland and Hungary, Marine Le Pen is down but not out, Ukip is taking Britain out of Europe, and then there’s Trump. Perhaps it’s time to get real, and live with the far right as part of our political present. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And with all due respect to the Netherlands and the others: Germany is different. Size matters, for a start. And then: German reactionaries have historically been even nastier than their counterparts elsewhere. The most worrying thing about the AfD is the way its rapid descent into nastiness has been accompanied by rising numbers at the polls.

Four years ago, the party narrowly missed the 5% of the vote needed to get into the Bundestag. At the time, the party was a radical free-market affair led by an economics professor, Bernd Lucke, who wanted Germany to leave the euro. Lucke had his quirks: he was in thrall to an evangelical sect and not above railing against gay people. But he refused to have anything to do with Ukip, which was too nationalist and anti-EU for his liking. I visited party meetings in south-west Germany at the time; they were sedate affairs, where lawyers and shopkeepers listened raptly to people such as Joachim Starbatty, another economics professor, or Hans-Olaf Henkel, a former president of the federation of German industries, expound on the dangers of the common currency.

Lucke, Starbatty, Henkel and the other liberals are gone now, Henkel yammering that he’d created a “Frankenstein’s monster”. They were sidelined by Frauke Petry, a failed entrepreneur from eastern Germany, who transformed the party into a populist anti-immigrant outfit that gained 21% of the vote in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and almost a quarter of the seats in the parliament of Saxony-Anhalt.

But even Petry proved too moderate. She wants the AfD to become respectable and enter coalitions with Merkel’s Christian Democrats. So she demanded the expulsion of members such as Wolfgang Gedeon, an ex-Maoist-turned-antisemite, and Björn Höcke, a history teacher who sports a Hitleresque forelock, calls for a “180-degree turn” in the way Germany remembers its past and wants the AfD to remain in “fundamental opposition” until it gains an absolute majority. Suddenly, Petry found herself isolated. Though still the party chairwoman, she is obviously going the way of Lucke and co.

The new stars are Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland. Weidel seems an unlikely leader for a party that decries gay marriage and gender mainstreaming, “American finance capital”, immigration and “globalism”. Weidel used to work for Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global Investors, is openly lesbian and lives in Switzerland – for tax reasons – with a partner originally from Sri Lanka. The couple have adopted two children. They have recently been accused of illegally employing a Syrian refugee as a cleaner.

But notwithstanding a lifestyle that puts her in the camp of the global elite the AfD despises, Weidel is a rabid nationalist. She has praised communist China – which she knows from her time as an investment banker – for its law-and-order policies and because it “knows how to protect its borders”. Emails from 2013 show her claiming that Germany was not a sovereign country, but beholden to the “victors of the second world war” who were trying to destroy Germany through immigration, creating “molecular wars” in German cities that sapped the country’s strength. Claims such as this – often concentrating on the US re-education programmes developed by Jewish émigrés that, so the legend goes, emasculated Germany by infusing it with a “culture of shame” about the Holocaust – have been a staple of the revisionist far right for decades. It’s disconcerting to say the least to think that they may soon resonate in the Bundestag.

As for Gauland, I’ve known him for over a decade. We’ve met for the occasional dinner – always at his favourite Italian restaurant on the lakeside in Potsdam – ever since the tweedy Anglophile was a CDU politician-turned-newspaper editor angry at Merkel’s modernisation of his party. (I have to admit that I always enjoyed his company.)

Gauland is featured in a 1996 novel by Martin Walser, Fink’s War, where he is portrayed as a reactionary bureaucrat and careerist. Some acquaintances felt he had been wronged. At the time, Gauland was among a group of CDU politicians interested in working with the Greens. But what interested Gauland wasn’t the Greens’ social or ecological agenda. It was their anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and their neutralist stance. When they abandoned those positions, Gauland abandoned them.

Gauland once wrote to me saying that I could never understand how Germans felt because my (Jewish) family “belonged to the victors”. It seems strange to call being expropriated and hounded out of the country a victory, but it is this intense feeling of resentment that led Gauland to support first Lucke, then Petry, and now the radical revisionists in the party – although he once told me that he despised most party functionaries intellectually, not to mention the disaffected losers that make up much of the party’s supporters, especially in eastern Germany.

But he is quite willing to pander to their anger by saying that it was natural for ethnic Germans not to want to live next door to black people or calling for a German politician of Turkish origin to be “dumped in Anatolia” for questioning whether there is a specific German – as opposed to western – culture.

This assorted bag of misfits has led the party to success through successive waves of self-radicalisation. Perhaps the realities of parliamentary work will expose their weakness. But I wouldn’t bank on it. In the wings, the next batch of radicals is waiting; and, if a true leader arises, the party could really go places. Places we’ve been before.

• Alan Posener is a correspondent for Die Welt and Welt am Sonntag