Germany's unshocking far-right surge
A quick primer on the AfD
Hi,
I was in Berlin over the weekend. Not to vote in the Bundestag election; only German citizens can, which is just dandy given the focus on immigration. Imagine an election where abortion was the main issue and most women couldn’t vote.
The result was what we all expected, indeed the least fascist fallout that anyone who’s been paying attention could realistically have hoped for. And it’s catastrophic, as things usually are when you find yourself using phrases like ‘only 20.8% explicitly ethno-nationalist’.
The far-right AfD, founded in 2013 and now officially Germany’s second most popular political party, are vile on levels not even Meloni or Trump have reached. They have an explicit track record of trivialising the Holocaust and the Nazis. In 2018, then-co-leader Alexander Gauland referred to the Third Reich as ‘nur ein Vogelschiss in über 1000 Jahren erfolgreicher deutscher Geschichte’ (mere birdshit in over a thousand years of successful German history). Just over a year ago, key members participated in a secret Potsdam meeting to plan mass deportation for those with a ‘Migrationshintergrund’. This absurd German phrase means ‘migration background’ — i.e. that of all human civilisation in Europe — but is only applied in practice to racialised people. The systematic scope of such rhetoric handily surpasses even the wildest of Trump’s fulminations.
The AfD’s youth wing Junge Alternative has been formally monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a suspected violent extremist effort. The group is now being replaced by a new formulation more tightly controlled by the AfD. Their numbers will only grow under such protection. ‘Prepper’ in Germany refers not necessarily to tin-hats harmlessly storing bottled water and canned food, but to right-wing militias actively training to attack political opponents and refugees. Formally the AfD disavows such activities, but in practice they attract many of the same sinister crowd.
Their supporters are fond of chanting ‘Alice für Deutschland’, a supposed reference to their co-chair Alice Weidel that oh-so-coincidentally sounds exactly like the Nazi slogan ‘Alles für Deutschland’. One of their worst and maddest honchos, Björn Höcke, faced a €13,000 fine last year for closing a speech with the actual phrase; since then the AfD have been using the cosmetic Alice tweak to normalise Nazi nostalgia. It’s not even a dog whistle, since the general public knows exactly what it means. The AfD haven’t doubled their support despite the Nazi talk, but because of it. The disenfranchisement of the former East Germany gives some context for the party’s popularity there, but it is an obfuscating and minimising cliché to claim that they are exclusively a protest vote for deprived communities. In fact they have fairly robust support in all income groups. Last year’s infamous video of a party at Sylt didn’t show disaffected unemployed former agricultural workers, but rich kids drinking bubbly and chanting the skinhead slogan ‘Ausländer Raus’. The racism, for many, is the point.
The same Björn Höcke was the subject of a Vice quiz a few years ago where you have to guess whether various statements are his or Hitler’s: ‘Wer hat’s gesagt, Höcke oder Hitler?’ The SPD have another with a similar premise, ‘AfD oder NSDAP?’ Both will keep you on your toes.
Like Nigel Farage and indeed Trump, Alice Weidel has successfully marketed herself as a swashbuckling maverick despite a long period of incubation within the hated system. She’s worked for Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. Her former boss Jim Dilworth implied to Der Spiegel that she opportunistically joined the AfD because she could rise much faster there than in the CDU: ‘[D]a hätte ihr Aufstieg innerhalb der Partei wahrscheinlich viel länger gedauert als bei der AfD’ (There her rise within the party would probably have taken much longer than in the AfD). German media has also made much of her being a lesbian with a Sri Lankan partner. Such an individual’s prominence in the AfD is another ‘because’ that centrist commentators mistake for a ‘despite’. The British Tories have long proven the PR value of heading your party with superficial ‘representatives’ of the very people it’s out to deport.
My friend Musa Okwonga is one of the best anglophone journalists you can read on German politics. A year and a half ago, he wrote this masterful piece summarising the rise of the far-right in Germany over the past decade and bitingly critiquing the attempts of many white liberal Germans to claim the danger was being exaggerated: ‘The only reason I am saying this now is not to convince anyone of the threat. It is so that I can look back months or years from now and tell myself, "you were not imagining it. This was all really happening.”’ This election result is the clear and predictable consequence of everything outlined in the piece.
For now the AfD will remain locked out of the new coalition government. But they have nudged the Overton window to such a position that they can still lift the pane and slip their policies in. In a mind-numbingly stupid attempt to steal their thunder, the ‘centre’-right CDU leader Friedrich Merz just tried to push through an illegal bill that would have violated asylum seekers’ rights with a severity only otherwise mooted by Viktor Orbán. For the next few years, Germany’s ‘moderate’ politicians will continue to do a certain amount of the AfD’s dirty work, while the party itself builds support on promises it will not yet have to keep. The deepening recession will aid them, as will the concomitant rise of similar parties across Europe.
This Bundestag turning point is of depressingly international significance, both because of Germany’s concrete power within the EU and because of the country’s symbolic value to global fascism.
It’s an enormously complex situation that has been over ten years in the making, but I hope I’ve given at least an overview.
Till next time,
N