‘Morning Joe’ Warns Europe’s Political Center Has Been ‘Hollowed Out’ as Far-Right Rises in Germany

The hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” reacted Tuesday to the ongoing rise of the far-right in Germany, warning that Europe’s political center has been “hollowed out” in recent years by immigration and economic issues.

This past Sunday, the far-right German political party AfD (Alternative for Germany) earned over 40% of the regional vote in the country’s formerly communist eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. The election marked the first time that a far-right political party has won any state election in Germany since World War II, prompting concern from analysts both within Germany and abroad.

In the wake of the election results, thousands of Germans took to the streets to stage peaceful protests against the AfD. Concerns only continue to mount, however, as more elections await and the AfD is positioned to potentially garner even more pivotal victories. For his part, “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough said that the AfD’s recent, watershed political wins have been a long time coming.

“The center in Europe needs to have reasonable, rational immigration policies,” Scarborough said on Tuesday. “We warned time and time again in 2014, ’15, ’16, ’17, that either the center in Europe was going to figure out how to handle the immigration crisis in Europe or right-wing extremists would start getting elected. Those right-wing extremists, with a lot of neo-Nazi overtures there, would take control. If the center wasn’t going to do it, the extremists would.”

“You have seen the middle in Europe hollowed out,” he added. “German leaders need to be shaken. Europe needs to be shaken.”

Scarborough also reflected on former German Chancellor Angela Merkel being named as 2015’s Person of the Year by Time Magazine, an honor that was given to her not long after she allowed hundreds of thousands of Syrian immigrants into the country. At the time, Scarborough said he and “Morning Joe” guest Mark Halperin “mockingly laughed.”

“[We] said, ‘Don’t they understand? Don’t the editors of Time Magazine understand that we are going to be paying for the repercussions of the backlash, the political backlash of this, for years to come?’” he recalled. “And we have with Brexit. Donald Trump picked up on it. And now, [in] Germany, that backlash continues.”

The “Morning Joe” host then noted that the rise of the far-right in Germany is not just the result of German citizens’ immigration concerns, but also the country’s economic struggles.

“When the government doesn’t respond well on the economic front and when you see Germany going from being in an unassailable position economically 15 years ago to being where it is today, that’s when people in the center start looking around and say, ‘Who do we blame for this?’” Scarborough summarized. “Instead of talking about deindustrialization or AI or robotics or all these other things, they look to immigrants to use them as scapegoats.”

“The problem is the economy. European leaders have lost the plot on how to grow the economy,” the “Morning Joe” host concluded. “People are going to look for somebody to blame, and sadly, in this case, as in the United States and Britain, it goes back to immigrants.”