German voters are heading to the polls in a parliamentary election that is all but certain to return Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to a fourth consecutive term in power. The Social Democrats, Germany's second-largest party, are expected to fare poorly after a lacklustre campaign by former European Parliament President Martin Schulz, and the centrist Free Democrats and moderate Greens are poised to hold relatively steady in the country's federal parliament, as is the radical Left Party.
If that were it, the story of Germany's election would be very uninteresting. But it is the strong polling numbers for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party that have political analysts and European leaders worried. Today, the AfD stands to make modern German history, if it becomes the first far-right party in the postwar era to win seats in the German parliament.
Since the fall of the Nazi Party at the end of World War II, far-right politics has found very little success in Germany. But the onset of the Syrian refugee crisis several years ago breathed new life into Germany's hard-right nationalists. AfD has taken a strict anti-immigrant stance, in stark contrast to the open-door policy towards refugees adopted by Ms. Merkel's government since 2015.
In addition, AfD has broken a long-held taboo in German politics, taking direct aim at the country's religious minorities -- specifically, Muslims. One election poster posits "Burqas? We prefer bikinis" beneath a photograph of three women -- all of them white -- wearing swimsuits on a beach. This is just one example of the provocative -- and, many would say, offensive -- messaging taken by the party.
Current opinion polls project that AfD will take around 13% of the vote in today's election. Under Germany's proportional-representation system, that would translate into around 70 seats in the 599-seat Bundestag (the lower house of the country's parliament). But don't be surprised if the AfD's result is actually better than that. It is possible that some voters have been reluctant to tell opinion-pollsters that they intend to vote for a party that many voters find appalling. A result in the upper-teens for the party is far from an impossibility.