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General Category => News and Information => General Discussion => THE DICTATORS (Fascists/NAZIs/Authoritarians/Kleptocrats/Plutocrats/Populists/Strongmen/Oligarchs/Libertarians) => Topic started by: 5arah on February 23, 2025, 06:07:03 PM
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The AfD's Nazi Connections Run Deeper Than You Think
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Germany’s far-right AfD still faces limits, despite election success
The success of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is a sign of the times. Across Europe, far-right parties once on the fringe have gone mainstream.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/23/germany-far-right-afd-election-limits/
As exit polls across Germany came in, what was long predicted still seemed shocking. In national elections, the country’s far right looked set to become the second largest faction in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament — the best result by a German far-right party since before World War II. It’s a once-unthinkable outcome in a nation so indelibly shaped by the shame and traumas of Nazism.
The success of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is a sign of the times. Across Europe, far-right parties once on the fringe have gone mainstream, borne into power or closer to it by popular anxieties over migration, cultural identity and the fraying political and economic orthodoxies of the past generation. In some countries, the “cordon sanitaires” blocking far-right parties from ruling parliamentary coalitions collapsed.
In the case of Germany, the AfD remains shut out of national governments by a political “fire wall” set up against it, with the country’s other major parties already having pledged to keep it out of power. But this election appears set to propel it to become the biggest force in the country’s opposition. On Sunday, the AfD appeared to double its vote share from 2021, winning about 20 percent of the vote. That placed it behind the center-right Christian Democrats, led by Friedrich Merz, but ahead of the center-left Social Democrats and Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Merz faces a tricky task in assembling a ruling coalition made all the more complicated by the outsize presence of the AfD, which emerged only 12 years ago.
Alice Weidel, the AfD’s co-leader, was triumphant Sunday, suggesting on television that Merz’s victory would be “pyrrhic” if he had to ally with Social Democrats or the Greens. She also mocked the Christian Democrats for trying to copy the AfD’s far-right manifesto and predicted her party would be waiting in the wings for the collapse of Merz’s “unstable government which will not last the next four years.”
Turnout in the election was high, with voters animated by fears over a stagnating economy and angst over Germany’s place in the world. The outgoing “traffic light” coalition — an amalgam of Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Greens and the neoliberal Free Democrats — buckled under its own political contradictions, and all three parties slumped in the polls. A return to a “grand coalition” between the center right and center left may seem the most obvious option for Merz, but won’t inspire many disaffected Germans, especially young voters, who cast their ballots in large numbers for parties on the far right and far left.
An ungainly establishment coalition could add “fuel to the fire of the AfD’s populism,” said Jessica Berlin, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, in a briefing call before the elections. “If we end up with another grand coalition, then we would need to see some real courage coming from it, and there is no indication as of yet that that would be on the cards,” she said.
“The government will be expected to take on the country’s most pressing challenges: boosting its stagnating economy and deficient infrastructure, and reassessing its role in the shifting global order. Migration also emerged as a major issue during the campaign,” my colleagues wrote, with the AfD championing calls for the “repatriation” of Muslim immigrants and asylum seekers.
The German state has classified a few branches of the AfD as extremist organizations, given their links to neofascist activism. Some party leaders have been accused of stoking Nazi apologia and invoking banned Nazi slogans in their speech.
After the election, Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews, the largest German Jewish organization, expressed his dismay to Die Welt newspaper. “It must concern us all that a fifth of German voters are giving their vote to a party that is at least partly right-wing extremist, that openly seeks linguistic and ideological links to right-wing radicalism and neo-Nazism, that plays on people’s fears,” he said.
That’s a reflection of a wider fatigue with establishment politics. One exit poll indicated that only 12 percent of German workers cast a ballot for the Social Democrats — the country’s traditional workers’ party. Close to 40 percent of workers may have voted for the AfD. The party has grandstanded on culture wars, casting traditional mainstream factions to the left as betrayers of the nation and beholden to elite cosmopolitan agendas — a familiar picture elsewhere, including in the United States.
But the AfD isn’t the only antiestablishment game in town. The hard Left party proved the surprise of the election with a surge in support: By one estimate, 1 in 4 young German voters cast their ballot for a faction that emerged, in part, from the dissolved Communist Party that once held sway in East Germany.
The AfD “deserves little credit for this momentum,” argued Jeremy Cliffe of the European Council on Foreign Relations, describing the AfD’s rise as “circumstantial” and linked to the failures of the outgoing coalition. “It is extreme even by the standards of the European far-right and lacks the quasi-professionalisation of counterparts like Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.”
That didn’t deter U.S. tech billionaire and far-right provocateur Elon Musk from loudly championing the AfD ahead of the election. Earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance avoided meeting Scholz but called on Weidel in Munich in what was a de facto endorsement of an ideological kindred spirit. German politicians across the political spectrum expressed alarm for the Trump administration’s embrace of the far right, though Musk’s gambit didn’t appear to have much impact on the outcome of Sunday’s election.
Once Merz’s victory seemed secure Sunday, President Donald Trump weighed in on social media, hailing a “great day for Germany” and likening the result to that of his own victory in November. But Merz had decried U.S. “interference” ahead of the election and, on Sunday, pointed to the need for greater policy independence from Washington.
“I would’ve never thought I would need to say something like this on television,” Merz said on a post-election panel of party leaders. “But after Donald Trump’s statements last week, it’s clear: This American government doesn’t care for Europe.”