Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:12Only bread, bed and soap, nothing more
00:00:15for asylum seekers, was the motto in 2024 from
00:00:19the German radical right, which today they re-edit and
00:00:22radicalize. AFD says:
00:00:26for children of irregular immigrants, separate
00:00:29schools. for refugees, zones
00:00:32far from the general population, establishments with
00:00:35foreigners must pay to
00:00:39Stasi, which was the secret police of monitor them, because they claim that they increase violence. This is an alternative for
00:00:43Germany that triumphed in the local elections in Saxony
00:00:46Anhalt, with its leader Ulricht Sigmund, who intends to
00:00:50give a more friendly face to a group accused by the
00:00:54German Evangelical Church of wanting to destroy
00:00:56democracy. They were three seats short of...
00:01:00the local government. They capitalize on the discontent against Chancellor
00:01:04Merkel's government and the depressed economy of that area. They
00:01:08present themselves as the only representatives who know how to
00:01:10connect with the people, of which only Germans are
00:01:14a true part. My heart is bleeding,
00:01:18said a normally cold Angela Merkel in front of this election result,
00:01:21as if to make us calibrate what it means in the
00:01:25country that experienced the horror of Nazism, that
00:01:27AFD has for the first time won local
00:01:31elections. What is happening in the rest of Europe and how does it question the
00:01:35common project, and what do these movements tell us in Latin
00:01:38America? We will discuss it in Global Connection for CNN
00:01:42Spanish.
00:01:46We begin the analysis of this exciting topic with Franco de Ledone,
00:01:50who is a researcher, also an analyst, specialist in all
00:01:53issues of authoritarianism and global far-right, and a doctor in
00:01:56communication from the Free University of Berlin, author of the book.
00:02:04Thank you very much for inviting me. We were already
00:02:07talking about the proposals and the program of Alternative
00:02:10for Germany, but what is this party and tell us a little about its
00:02:14history? Well, it is a party that is located
00:02:20democratic AFD within the family of what are called radical right parties, that is, parties that through
00:02:23democratic tools
00:02:27manage to advance and possibly reach
00:02:31you what is always very difficult for power. And from those positions, they have an agenda that
00:02:34erodes different aspects of
00:02:37democracy, of democratic institutions, of
00:02:40values, rights and guarantees. It is a party that was born about
00:02:4413 years ago in 2013, precisely
00:02:48as a Eurosceptic party, that is to say, it criticized the positions
00:02:52of the government at that time, Angela Merkel's government, of
00:02:55support or rescue for banks and
00:02:58rescue of the euro itself. You remember that crisis, right, that
00:03:01moment. And over time it mutated and became a
00:03:05much more radicalized party with
00:03:07these ideas much closer to
00:03:11what appeared in other Western European parties like the National Front in its
00:03:14time, Jean Marie Le Pen,
00:03:18election have on as a comparison, I mean, and it is the party we find today
00:03:21where, from the point of view
00:03:25of the current German political reality, it is
00:03:28absolutely normalized and having results, results
00:03:31like those of last Sunday. Let's talk about the leader of this
00:03:35AFD party, but in Saxony,
00:03:38who is
00:03:42Ulricht Sigmund? Ulricht Sigmund is a
00:03:45character who is now occupying
00:03:49a leading position in the Alternative for Germany party, but
00:03:53the data, ready for what's it has not always been like this, he has not always had
00:03:56such a relevant place. He gained
00:04:00ground after the election campaign of last summer where he got the result he
00:04:03obtained, but he is a person who comes from the sector, if you
00:04:07will, the most extremist sector of the party, the most radicalized sector, he
00:04:11is a person who has contacts
00:04:14with sectors of neo-Nazism, who has
00:04:18contacts with sectors such as the identitarian movement, which
00:04:20are classified by the federal office for the protection of the basic
00:04:24law as extremist positions and
00:04:27movements, and in that sense,
00:04:30it constitutes one of the elements that
00:04:34lead the Alternative for Germany party to position
00:04:37itself in those more anti-democratic
00:04:40spaces, and to build a sort of agenda that points
00:04:44to more authoritarian tendencies at this moment, yes.
00:04:48States Senator, both of And what is the key to their success? Because among several of the things
00:04:52they have said is that, in some way, beyond their
00:04:55real proposals, they appear as very direct,
00:04:59young, in contrast to Chancellor Merkel,
00:05:02and with a very intelligently planned
00:05:06campaign.
00:05:08Yes, that's true, they have a quality that other parties also have.
00:05:13of radical right around the world and that is a rather
00:05:16strong and quite
00:05:19efficient capacity to manage political
00:05:22communication. They can build
00:05:25messages in a fairly
00:05:27accessible way, in some cases even simplified, which allows them
00:05:31to access through social networks and what platforms offer with
00:05:34these short videos and so on to a very
00:05:38wide audience, an audience that perhaps other parties do not manage to reach.
00:05:41It is also true that during the campaign they showed a
00:05:45very close profile to the people, a profile
00:05:49showing themselves as a member of a community, right? But
00:05:53what explains this local victory of AFD in Saxony-Anhalt
00:05:56also in terms of national politics?
00:06:00Well, first of all, it must be said
00:06:02that Saxony-Anhalt is a rather
00:06:05small, sparsely populated, and quite poor region, one of the poorest,
00:06:09so we are always talking about a symbolic blow with what happened on Sunday.
00:06:13Now, as you rightly point out, it belongs to a
00:06:17particular region in Germany that is known as Eastern Germany or
00:06:20East Germany, which is precisely located where the old
00:06:24GDR was, where the old
00:06:27GDR territories were. That
00:06:30territory was unified with Federal
00:06:33Germany in the early
00:06:3790s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a process of
00:06:40annexation, if you will,
00:06:43was generated there. The point is that in that reunification
00:06:46process,
00:06:49a narrative has been built, developed, and passed down from generation
00:06:53to generation of a sort of injustice, a sort of injustice
00:06:57in economic terms, but also in terms
00:07:00of positioning in decision-making
00:07:03places, etc. That narrative has
00:07:06become a sort of
00:07:09deep frustration, even for people who did not experience the process
00:07:12but who received it later
00:07:15by listening to their parents and grandparents, and from
00:07:18there, no party was able to take responsibility for that
00:07:22narrative. The majority of people who understood that process as
00:07:26unfair ended up seeking refuge in abstention,
00:07:28right? Now,
00:07:32has built an identity, a political
00:07:35identity through that narrative. AFD has presented itself as the
00:07:39only party that responds to that. that can
00:07:43convey it. From there, they have been able
00:07:46to establish a kind of connection that goes beyond the political
00:07:50program, that goes beyond the concrete content they
00:07:53propose. There lies at least part of that very
00:07:57important success they have had now. And of course, one can also
00:08:00account for an impressive mobilization, one of the
00:08:03highest participations recorded, with 78% with new
00:08:07voters, discontent, punishment for the general
00:08:10government, the leaderships we mentioned, the strategies we
00:08:14mentioned, also the anti-immigration
00:08:17theme and in favor of greater stability, with
00:08:21bad economic figures. I would like to ask you, Franco, what can you tell
00:08:25us, from your perspective, and what impact can this local
00:08:30the next local elections, but above all,
00:08:34thinking about 2029 in the next general national
00:08:37election, how much can it shake up, how much can it change
00:08:41the German political system?
00:08:44Well, first of all, it's a novelty that AFD is on the verge of
00:08:47forming a government. It has won another election, it was in Suhl
00:08:51two years ago, if I remember correctly, but it has never been so close
00:08:54as now to forming a government, as you rightly pointed out, it only needs three
00:08:58more seats and it would achieve it, or with some abstentions as well.
00:09:02This puts AFD in a role and in a space it didn't have
00:09:05until now. This allows AFD to press
00:09:09even harder
00:09:13on the rest of the parties to break the sanitary cordon, to
00:09:17build or at least be openly willing to
00:09:20build dialogue with AFD, something that no party wants to do except
00:09:24the left, the conservative left, which is a relatively
00:09:28new party that emerged two years ago and that has shown itself open to
00:09:31this, but going back to your question,
00:09:34AFD now has a much stronger
00:09:37position in the political spectrum, in the political
00:09:41scenario, better said. This will surely have an impact on the other
00:09:44regional elections, but above
00:09:47all, I believe that the strongest symbolic impact is at the federal
00:09:51level in terms of showing that the discontent with the
00:09:54federal government, with the Merkel government, is more
00:09:58latent than ever, right? That exception, if you will,
00:10:01that there may be with the electoral promises, both for the more,
00:10:05if you will, progressive
00:10:08conservative sector, would not be fulfilling
00:10:12expectations, and well, that is what the AFT vote would
00:10:16reflect, as growing as what we are seeing
00:10:19now in the polls. Yes, of course, and the halving of the CDU vote, which
00:10:23backs that.
00:10:25Briefly, to conclude, you who are there, how has it
00:10:28resonated in a country that experienced the Second World War, that
00:10:32experienced the horror of Nazism, how does the
00:10:35victory, even if regional, and the advance of this far
00:10:39right resonate from that perspective, how is it
00:10:42experienced? Well, first of all, I would say that in
00:10:46general there is a significant concern because, well, as I told
00:10:49you a while ago, the connections that may exist
00:10:53with more extremist, neo-Nazi sectors are worrying.
00:10:57It has been revealed that some of the candidates who were voted on that
00:11:00list belonged to the
00:11:04the GDR. Others have deep connections with
00:11:07neo-Nazi sectors, openly neo-Nazi sectors,
00:11:11sectors with connections to Russia,
00:11:14etc. There are many elements that cause concern. However, when
00:11:18you look at the reactions in general, you start to try
00:11:21to identify different profiles. You also
00:11:25find opinions like, for example, "well, they should be
00:11:28allowed to govern to see if they do it well, and if they don't do it well, they
00:11:32will be punished electorally," a position that
00:11:35I doubt, I doubt that this is the case, because in general it has not happened.
00:11:39We have examples all over the world that when the far right comes to
00:11:42power, it does not necessarily receive that punishment. And there are
00:11:46other positions that have to do with, "well, this will
00:11:49help the rest of the parties realize that they have to change their stance on
00:11:53some issues, that they have to change their discourse." These are some issues, something that also
00:11:57makes me doubt, because if they haven't achieved it until now,
00:12:00now we are in some way at the end of the normalization
00:12:03process. There have been other warning signs, so I also doubt
00:12:07that will happen. The point is that in any
00:12:10case, AFD occupies this place, a place that 13,
00:12:1414 years ago it was impossible to imagine a party of this type
00:12:18having this role in Germany, and Germany, as well as the rest of Europe and
00:12:22many other places in the world, will have to learn
00:12:25to live with that and try to sustain democracy and democratic
00:12:28institutions in the best possible
00:12:31way. Franco, thank you very much for joining us on Global
00:12:34Connection. Thank you very much, see you
00:12:37next time. We take a break and return with more.
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00:13:54To understand the world, you need to seek the
00:13:57truth, let's go back to the time when we had to be much more
00:14:01human, that's why we follow the facts, wherever they
00:14:04take us, no matter how far we have to
00:14:07go, from the internal story, there are new
00:14:11declarations from President Donald Trump, to an external
00:14:14perspective, we delve into
00:16:13What does the triumph of this radical right in a local
00:16:16election in Germany mean, for Germany, for Europe and
00:16:20for Latin America? We will discuss it with Michelle Jafem, academic from the
00:16:24Institute of Political Science at the Catholic University. Thank you for joining us. Thank
00:16:27you very much, Mónica, for the invitation. We talked about the local leaderships
00:16:30specifically in Saxony-Anhalt with the
00:16:34local leader
00:16:36of AFD, but what does the national leadership mean,
00:16:40again a woman, Alice Weidel at the
00:16:44head of a radical right-wing party, as we have seen in other places,
00:16:47exactly, we have the cases, right, of Marine Le Pen in France, Giorgia
00:16:51Meloni in Italy, the leader of the far-right
00:16:53party of Denmark, there are repeated
00:16:57female leaderships in the European far-right, this
00:17:00is a particularity of these European
00:17:04parties that promote female leadership.
00:17:07Because they understand that gender equality and women's
00:17:11rights are achievements of Western civilization, and
00:17:14that allows these projects to be contrasted with the threat posed
00:17:18by the East, especially the Middle East and Muslim migration,
00:17:21which arrives in Europe, which understands women in another
00:17:25role within society and in a more patriarchal role, right,
00:17:29of subordination. The authorities show it. These more
00:17:32radical right-wing groups, is it correct to call them
00:17:36radical right? Far-right, the categorization
00:17:39we are using and the typology that is
00:17:42most recurrent posits that there is a family of parties
00:17:45that is the far-right. There we have two projects: the extreme
00:17:48right, which is characterized by trying to operate outside democratic
00:17:52rules, and right-wing radical populism, which plays within
00:17:58norms and takes advantage of democratic institutions
00:18:00to set back democracy, as AFD
00:18:04would be in that sub-family. It is advancing and
00:18:07how. What can this election tell
00:18:10us about the advance of this radical populist
00:18:14right in Europe? Well, we are,
00:18:17according to what various authors have proposed,
00:18:21in a fourth wave of the far-right, and in this
00:18:24fourth wave, we have seen European cases, Viktor
00:18:27Orbán, the case of Marine Le Pen herself, who has not yet
00:18:30come to power, but has grown. Her National Rally has
00:18:34grown in terms of
00:18:37representation in France. We already mentioned
00:18:40the case of Giorgia Meloni, but also Viktor Orbán, who
00:18:44came to power and then left. The Polish
00:18:47far-right party also came to power and lost the
00:18:50next election. That's why we also talk about Hungary,
00:18:54exactly, with Orbán, and that's why we talk about the wave,
00:18:57right, that is, in a way,
00:19:01activating and deactivating cases
00:19:04in different parts of the continent, but... We are facing a
00:19:08phenomenon that is spreading worldwide, which is why we can
00:19:11speak of a wave in general terms and with the
00:19:15same logic, right? Just as many authors have focused their attention on
00:19:18Europe, they are now also focusing it on Latin America and with the cases that
00:19:22are emerging in our region. What can we say
00:19:26then about the European project? Is it
00:19:29threatened by these groups that are anything but
00:19:32Eurosceptic? Exactly, one of the logics
00:19:35of the emergence of these parties is their opposition
00:19:39to globalization. They are deeply
00:19:43globalizing or anti-globalization.
00:19:46They are sovereignists, they understand that countries must
00:19:50resolve their political issues from within their borders,
00:19:54so transnational organizations and international governance
00:19:57like the European Union are threatening. They think that,
00:20:01as they had already discussed, AFD emerged as
00:20:05an opposition to the European Union's rescue plan for countries
00:20:08like Greece, during the crisis between 2008 and
00:20:112013, and today they are also very opposed, for
00:20:15example, to supporting Ukraine against Russia,
00:20:18exactly. This is one of the fundamental characteristics of these
00:20:22radical right-wing populist projects: one,
00:20:25an authoritarian nostalgia, in this case, a nostalgia for the
00:20:29German project of Eastern Europe, right? A
00:20:33search for the vindication of that previous state, right, of a previous
00:20:36order that was lost and that in a way explains the shortcomings and
00:20:40difficulties faced by that sector, that area of Germany, even if it is of a
00:20:44different ideological sign, even if it is a different ideological sign, and that is curious because there
00:20:48was a regime, but there was an order, and the nostalgia
00:20:51for that order. On the other hand,
00:20:55right, a populist discourse in the logic of separating
00:20:58society into an "us" and a "them," right? "They"
00:21:02being the corrupt elite, in this case the corrupt transnational
00:21:06elites, the European Union, right, that wants to
00:21:09threaten that "us," right, which is the pure German
00:21:12people, also the Muslim
00:21:15migration that is a civilizational, cultural threat to
00:21:19pure Germany. And finally, a component that is
00:21:22known as nativism, which is different from xenophobia, which is the idea
00:21:25that countries should function with the natives
00:21:29of those regions, that is, Germany for
00:21:32Germans, right, and German decisions made
00:21:36by Germans. What happens in Latin America?
00:21:39What can you tell us or what can we learn from this German process for
00:21:43our continent? Well, the far right has a diffusion
00:21:47effect, as happens in many political
00:21:50phenomena in general and in global terms also, right?
00:21:53From Latin America, the advance of the
00:21:56far-right in Europe has been
00:21:59observed, and it is no coincidence that there are links between the parties, these
00:22:03new rights or the far-right, as various authors
00:22:06are studying them, with parties like Vox,
00:22:09right, with parties like AFD or FPO of
00:22:13Austria, which was with its MEPs at the Madrid Forum last
00:22:16week here in Santiago. So, the
00:22:20success in Europe in a way inevitably makes one think
00:22:23that it encourages these projects in Latin
00:22:26America, but it must be understood that there are fundamental variations. The migratory
00:22:30issue is not a political issue for the
00:22:34Latin American far-right, right? The majority of countries, for
00:22:37example, Brazil, Argentina, which have had
00:22:41governments, or are having,
00:22:45like the Argentine case, do not have migration
00:22:49as a public problem or a matter of public concern,
00:22:52as it can be for the Chilean case, yes, the economy, yes,
00:22:55indeed security, and yes, the idea of that interference, right, of
00:22:59agents outside national states, right, in local
00:23:02politics, let's call it the UN, let's call it
00:23:05the WHO for the Argentine case, right, but
00:23:09of entities that seek to infer in local
00:23:12politics, right, with the objective of, in addition, in the populist
00:23:15logic, harming that "us" that is the pure people. I'll close by asking
00:23:21political scientists, but do you
00:23:24think this will still
00:23:27be a specific event for
00:23:31the next regional elections, will
00:23:35the more radical populist right of
00:23:37AFD also advance in Germany and perhaps, thinking
00:23:41about 2029, become the leading force in the national
00:23:44elections? I think there is a
00:23:47process that... an author whose
00:23:51surname is Valentín calls the "information
00:23:54shock," which is when these parties win elections,
00:23:57increase their representation and reach
00:23:59power, other political
00:24:02leaders do not see that power is taken by force,
00:24:05they see that they comply with institutionalism, they
00:24:09see that they are even capable of sitting down to negotiate, and what some have
00:24:13called in France the "sanitary cordon" is lowered. In
00:24:16Germany, the other parties have called it the "firewall,"
00:24:20right? I think not negotiating with them, exactly. That advance
00:24:23will depend on how the other political forces
00:24:26align themselves around this
00:24:30far-right force that is growing electorally,
00:24:34on the one hand, how much they keep it marginalized and how much they
00:24:37integrate it into the political mainstream, right, how much they
00:24:41have the capacity, they agree to form
00:24:45a coalition with them. We are already seeing the discussions
00:24:48German, even though there is no possibility of a coalition, but the truth is that they do not
00:24:52have a majority, so they have to negotiate, of course, to reach
00:24:5650% of the seats,
00:24:58so part of the successes of the far right also have an
00:25:02endogenous character in the sense that it is outside the parties and it has to do
00:25:06with how the other political forces react, I understand, but also how
00:25:09the media react, how much they normalize these
00:25:12projects, because the
00:25:16language can change and they can moderate certain antisemitic positions.
00:25:20that they have put forward, Holocaust denial that they have put forward or at the
00:25:23end of the day Islamophobic that they have
00:25:26put forward, but the project remains, so they
00:25:30moderate themselves to grow and when they grow
00:25:33a certain impulse is
00:25:37you very much for joining us on global connection. Thank you very much,
00:25:40Mónica. We'll take a break and
00:25:42be right back.
00:25:54Here at CNN, the news is the
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00:30:00October 6, deadline to see if... AFD manages
00:30:03to form a local government, what repercussions does this have nationally
00:30:07for Germany and for Europe? We are following
00:30:10it closely, in global connection for CNN en Español.
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00:30:44Here is my promise: if the Republicans win the House
00:30:48of Representatives and the United
00:30:51them, because of our
00:30:53economic, tremendous economic.