February 2, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Source: screenshot of Germany’s main public TV station’s news, 27th January 2024
It’s early February in 2024 and on the last 3 weekends in January hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets and rallied against the far-right AfD. Many politicians, intellectuals and ordinary voters are convinced that the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), is a true Neo-Nazi party.
In popular parlance the party is also referred to as:AfD = Alternative für Dumkopfe (Alternative for Dummies)
AfD = Abyss for Deutschland
AfD = Aus für Demokratie (The end of democracy)
AfD = Alliance for Demagogues
AfD – Alle faschisten Deportieren (Deport all fascists)
Since the recent Wannsee 2.0 scandal came to light, the AfD is even more widely regarded as a Neo-Nazi party. In 2018 CDU-boss and arch-conservative Friedrich Merz declared, “the AfD are Nazis.”
More recently, the regional CDU leader of Germany’s largest state of North-Rhine-Westphalia and state premier Hendrik Wüst said, “this is a Nazi party.”
A court decided that it was justifiable to call the AfD’s most powerful Führer, Björn Höcke, a Nazi. The AfD’s party deputy, who has no real power but is the pretty face of neofascism, Swiss resident Alice Weidel, has been called a Nazi-Schlampe or Nazi bitch and a court decision allowed that moniker to stand.
Last month, Weidel was forced to fire one of her advisors who had taken part in that secret Wannsee 2.0 meeting where plans were aired to force the elimination or deportation of anyone with a non-Aryan heritage.
It all began in 2013 with a handful of staunchly neoliberal and anti-EU professors of economics who founded the AfD. But today, the AfD is more right-wing than ever before.
To get to where they are today, in 2022 the AfD replicated Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. Even though nobody was killed, apart from a few character assassinations, the party purged anyone who could possibly move toward the center or be open for compromise with other parties.
This purge eliminated the party’s last moderates. The ideological cleansing of the party took place in the East-German city of Riesa at the AfD’s 2022 party congress. The neofascist core group eradicated the original non-fascist neoliberals and severely weakened the party’s conservative-reactionary wing.
Riesa 2022 strengthened the völkische (read: Neo-Nazis) forces within the party. By 2023, the traditional internal AfD fights between neoliberals, conservatives, and right-wing extremists had ended.
After that, inner-party disputes largely centered around inconsequential issues like which party candidates should be put on a list so they could be elected.
By the end of 2023, in virtually all of Germany’s recent elections as well as in public polling, the AfD was at a historic high, sitting at 20% to 24%, as reflected on German TV’s famous Sunday question that asks Germans: “Which party would you vote for if election day was next Sunday?”
Germany’s normally apathetic political landscape might well have accepted the AfD as a new (neo-fascist) normal for Germany. But then the wave of street protests began. Dramatically, the protests have had their first victory against the party, causing their defeat in an election in Thuringia.
For years, the AfD has been under intense scrutiny by the security services as well by Germans who remember the atrocities carried out by the Nazi regime.
Meanwhile, rafts of analytical acuity have also been applied to the AfD ever since its foundation. Early in its history, the AfD planned the destruction of the CDU, since 1945 Germany’s traditional conservative party. They failed.
Most recently there have also been passionate debates about the possibility of banning the AfD. This has arisen because the AfD has increasingly failed to camouflage its Neo-Nazi ideology.
However, at the moment there is a rather paradoxical development: the simultaneous radicalization and normalization of the AfD. Today it is no longer unthinkable to imagine a political scenario in which the AfD becomes the leading force on the right of Germany’s political spectrum.
Particularly in the former East-Germany, where the AfD is a very serious contender. In the eastern states it might even replace the conservative CDU.
In 2023, the party celebrated its 10th anniversary. In those 10 years the AfD moved even more to the right of the conservative CDU and neoliberal FDP. AfD founder Alexander Gauland was eliminated, and at the same time the simple-minded Beatrix von Storch, great-grandaughter of Hitler’s Finance Minster, has mostly been sidelined – but not for her statement advocating for the shooting of refugees at Germany’s borders!
With Gauland gone and Storch weakened, the Völkisch, i.e. Neo-Nazi, wing of the AfD runs the show. The AfD’s Neo-Nazi wing was only in its nascent stage after the foundation of the AfD. Initially, it played no visible role in the party.
The AfD’s Führer is the cunning hardcore Neo-Nazi Björn Höcke who spread his Nazi ideology under the self-assumed and camouflaging name of Landolf Ladig.
At the beginning of the AfD his Neo-Nazi wing was extremely marginal in terms of quantity and quality. But over time he was able to shape and develop them into a very strong contingent. Today they are “the” absolutely dominating force inside the party.
Since the Riesa congress in the summer of 2022, there is no doubt that the Völkische-Neo-Nazi wing has taken over the AfD’s leadership. The other two currents (reactionary and neoliberal) continue to exist, but their remnants must subordinate themselves to the Neo-Nazis.
Under the Neo-Nazis, anyone making public statements is obliged to use Neo-Nazi buzzwords such as Umvolkung or population exchange, as well as to promote the neo-fascist ideology of racial identity.
Through the use of these framing techniques, it has become obvious that the AfD’s right-wing radicalization has not harmed the party. Rather, the opposite is the case.
Absurdly, the AfD is more right-wing than ever and is also stronger than ever. In the East-German state of Saxony, for example, the AfD is currently at 35% of voter popularity.
Characterized by a strengthening of its Neo-Nazi self-confidence, AfD members themselves have noticed this rather astutely, further boosting their adherence to Neo-Nazi doctrine.
Not surprisingly, mini-Führer Björn Höcke has recently praised what he calls “the party’s ideological consolidation”. Appropriately, the AfD’s top candidate for the upcoming EU election in June 2024, Maximilian Krah, calls his party the “post-Riesa AfD”. Both of them acknowledge and support the far right radicalization of the AfD.
The leap into Neo-Nazism as “the” ideological strategy is working out well for the AfD – rather brilliantly actually. At the same time, their success cannot be seen without the current unpopularity of Germany’s progressive-environmental-neoliberal (SPD-GREEN-FDP) government.
The government’s downward trend in popularity has been strongly supported by Germany’s conservative mass media. The combined force of German conservatism (CDU) and corporate mass-media (Springer) has hit the present government hard and has inspired the AfD.
It has also generated mass support for the AfD as it successfully pretends to be the only true opposition to the government.
This occurred at the same time as the – seemingly – unstoppable normalization of the AfD. The AfD has been able to benefit from the current widespread displeasure about Germany’s so-called traffic light coalition. This has been shown in recent elections in the states of Hessen and Bavaria. In other words, there are currently a few trends that are favorable for the AfD.
The AfD was indeed starting to be perceived as a normal party until its Wannsee 2.0 scandal and its plans for the forced deportation of millions. According to recent public polling, about 27% of voters consider the AfD to be a “normal party”.
In 2016, when the AfD was much more moderate, it was only 17%. In other words, as it becomes more and more Neo-Nazi it is somehow increasingly regarded as a normal political party.
One of the reasons for the public support of the AfD can be found in the fact that the party appears much more disciplined than other parties to the outside world. The AfD’s very own replication of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives in 2022 has worked in favor of the party. Those who used to challenge the AfD’s Neo-Nazis internally are gone. There is no longer any opposition to the monolithic ideology promulgated by the leadership.
The few internal conflicts that remain no longer penetrate the Putin-inspired iron wall of fear to the outside world. The AfD also offers what on the surface seem to be unifying issues. For example, it takes a different position on the the war in Ukraine than almost all of Germany’s democratic parties.
What works for the Putin-loving AfD is the fact that an increasing number of Germans think that Germany’s federal government is undertaking way too few diplomatic efforts to end a war that Putin wants to extend in order to recover all of Russia’s “lost” territory.
Like the All-Russian Political Party “United Russia”, the AfD remains nationalistic. And it also benefits from the fact that voices critical of Germany’s current government have found an audience inside the AfD.
Recently, the AfD has also received support from Germany’s conservative CDU. What Germany’s conservatives don’t realize is that they are not helping themselves by taking up AfD-related issues and topics. The result is that the conservative CDU/CSU are stagnating in public polls.
Largely by taking up the AfD’s issue of migration, the CDU’s indirect support has moved Germany’s Overton Window of politics to the right. In other words, the AfD is harvesting the seeds of what the CDU/CSU is planting.
The AfD also pretends to offer a stand against billionaire predatory capitalism. This is nothing new as regards political “hall of mirrors” techniques. Historically, Germany’s Nazi party of the 1930s, called itself “socialist” as in “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP).
The illusion created by the names “socialist” and “workers” had its desired effect and attracted those disaffected by the inability of the leftist parties of the day to unite against the fascist right.
Once the NSDAP came to power, thousands of real socialist workers were beaten, tortured, and killed while Germany’s capitalist oligarchs and business elite thrived.
As in the 1930s, so in the 21st Century: the AfD is married to a strict neoliberal ideology. For example, the AfD is against any tax increase for the wealthy. On the whole however, the AfD remains a so-called single issue party. The issue that is their bread and butter is migration.
This plays well into the fear of Germany’s petit bourgeois middle class. For those with right-wing tendencies, the question is not so much whether and how social and economic policies will impact them. The easy answer to every question is: migration.
As a consequence, the AfD exploits the insecure very successfully in their fear of losing out by shouting the Big Lie that mirrors their tortured thoughts: “Migrants will replace me, take my job, take my house, take my car… .”
Self-negativity contains a belief of not being able to win something – not even something small. Unlike in the 1920s, this has nothing to do with class consciousness. Instead, it has a lot to do with xenophobia and – as so often in Germany – with race consciousness.
Meanwhile, it is not even clear whether more people in Germany’s population are actually moving toward the far right or not, compared to, let’s say, a few years ago. Germany’s all-important and most recent Mitte Studies supports this conclusion. At the same time, other surveys contradict the Mitte’s findings.
The problem for the democracy-loving parties is that the recent electoral success of the AfD is showing that there is growing support for Germany’s far right.
This is true almost everywhere, particularly in the eastern portion of Germany. Furthermore, the AfD remains particularly strong among the middle-aged and increasingly also among young voters. On the other side of the coin, Germany’s pensioners are reluctant to support the AfD.
One might even say that if the 60-to-70 year olds currently getting monthly payments from the federal government would support the AfD, an absolute majority for the AfD would already be within reach in some East German states.
At some point in the near future the recent mass rallies against the AfD will show whether or not the seemingly unstoppable growth of the AfD has finally been halted. The next three elections – for the EU’s parliament in June and in the three East-German states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia later in the year – will also be important indicators for the increasing (un)popularity of the AfD.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.DONATE
Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).
Source: screenshot of Germany’s main public TV station’s news, 27th January 2024
It’s early February in 2024 and on the last 3 weekends in January hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets and rallied against the far-right AfD. Many politicians, intellectuals and ordinary voters are convinced that the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), is a true Neo-Nazi party.
In popular parlance the party is also referred to as:AfD = Alternative für Dumkopfe (Alternative for Dummies)
AfD = Abyss for Deutschland
AfD = Aus für Demokratie (The end of democracy)
AfD = Alliance for Demagogues
AfD – Alle faschisten Deportieren (Deport all fascists)
Since the recent Wannsee 2.0 scandal came to light, the AfD is even more widely regarded as a Neo-Nazi party. In 2018 CDU-boss and arch-conservative Friedrich Merz declared, “the AfD are Nazis.”
More recently, the regional CDU leader of Germany’s largest state of North-Rhine-Westphalia and state premier Hendrik Wüst said, “this is a Nazi party.”
A court decided that it was justifiable to call the AfD’s most powerful Führer, Björn Höcke, a Nazi. The AfD’s party deputy, who has no real power but is the pretty face of neofascism, Swiss resident Alice Weidel, has been called a Nazi-Schlampe or Nazi bitch and a court decision allowed that moniker to stand.
Last month, Weidel was forced to fire one of her advisors who had taken part in that secret Wannsee 2.0 meeting where plans were aired to force the elimination or deportation of anyone with a non-Aryan heritage.
It all began in 2013 with a handful of staunchly neoliberal and anti-EU professors of economics who founded the AfD. But today, the AfD is more right-wing than ever before.
To get to where they are today, in 2022 the AfD replicated Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. Even though nobody was killed, apart from a few character assassinations, the party purged anyone who could possibly move toward the center or be open for compromise with other parties.
This purge eliminated the party’s last moderates. The ideological cleansing of the party took place in the East-German city of Riesa at the AfD’s 2022 party congress. The neofascist core group eradicated the original non-fascist neoliberals and severely weakened the party’s conservative-reactionary wing.
Riesa 2022 strengthened the völkische (read: Neo-Nazis) forces within the party. By 2023, the traditional internal AfD fights between neoliberals, conservatives, and right-wing extremists had ended.
After that, inner-party disputes largely centered around inconsequential issues like which party candidates should be put on a list so they could be elected.
By the end of 2023, in virtually all of Germany’s recent elections as well as in public polling, the AfD was at a historic high, sitting at 20% to 24%, as reflected on German TV’s famous Sunday question that asks Germans: “Which party would you vote for if election day was next Sunday?”
Germany’s normally apathetic political landscape might well have accepted the AfD as a new (neo-fascist) normal for Germany. But then the wave of street protests began. Dramatically, the protests have had their first victory against the party, causing their defeat in an election in Thuringia.
For years, the AfD has been under intense scrutiny by the security services as well by Germans who remember the atrocities carried out by the Nazi regime.
Meanwhile, rafts of analytical acuity have also been applied to the AfD ever since its foundation. Early in its history, the AfD planned the destruction of the CDU, since 1945 Germany’s traditional conservative party. They failed.
Most recently there have also been passionate debates about the possibility of banning the AfD. This has arisen because the AfD has increasingly failed to camouflage its Neo-Nazi ideology.
However, at the moment there is a rather paradoxical development: the simultaneous radicalization and normalization of the AfD. Today it is no longer unthinkable to imagine a political scenario in which the AfD becomes the leading force on the right of Germany’s political spectrum.
Particularly in the former East-Germany, where the AfD is a very serious contender. In the eastern states it might even replace the conservative CDU.
In 2023, the party celebrated its 10th anniversary. In those 10 years the AfD moved even more to the right of the conservative CDU and neoliberal FDP. AfD founder Alexander Gauland was eliminated, and at the same time the simple-minded Beatrix von Storch, great-grandaughter of Hitler’s Finance Minster, has mostly been sidelined – but not for her statement advocating for the shooting of refugees at Germany’s borders!
With Gauland gone and Storch weakened, the Völkisch, i.e. Neo-Nazi, wing of the AfD runs the show. The AfD’s Neo-Nazi wing was only in its nascent stage after the foundation of the AfD. Initially, it played no visible role in the party.
The AfD’s Führer is the cunning hardcore Neo-Nazi Björn Höcke who spread his Nazi ideology under the self-assumed and camouflaging name of Landolf Ladig.
At the beginning of the AfD his Neo-Nazi wing was extremely marginal in terms of quantity and quality. But over time he was able to shape and develop them into a very strong contingent. Today they are “the” absolutely dominating force inside the party.
Since the Riesa congress in the summer of 2022, there is no doubt that the Völkische-Neo-Nazi wing has taken over the AfD’s leadership. The other two currents (reactionary and neoliberal) continue to exist, but their remnants must subordinate themselves to the Neo-Nazis.
Under the Neo-Nazis, anyone making public statements is obliged to use Neo-Nazi buzzwords such as Umvolkung or population exchange, as well as to promote the neo-fascist ideology of racial identity.
Through the use of these framing techniques, it has become obvious that the AfD’s right-wing radicalization has not harmed the party. Rather, the opposite is the case.
Absurdly, the AfD is more right-wing than ever and is also stronger than ever. In the East-German state of Saxony, for example, the AfD is currently at 35% of voter popularity.
Characterized by a strengthening of its Neo-Nazi self-confidence, AfD members themselves have noticed this rather astutely, further boosting their adherence to Neo-Nazi doctrine.
Not surprisingly, mini-Führer Björn Höcke has recently praised what he calls “the party’s ideological consolidation”. Appropriately, the AfD’s top candidate for the upcoming EU election in June 2024, Maximilian Krah, calls his party the “post-Riesa AfD”. Both of them acknowledge and support the far right radicalization of the AfD.
The leap into Neo-Nazism as “the” ideological strategy is working out well for the AfD – rather brilliantly actually. At the same time, their success cannot be seen without the current unpopularity of Germany’s progressive-environmental-neoliberal (SPD-GREEN-FDP) government.
The government’s downward trend in popularity has been strongly supported by Germany’s conservative mass media. The combined force of German conservatism (CDU) and corporate mass-media (Springer) has hit the present government hard and has inspired the AfD.
It has also generated mass support for the AfD as it successfully pretends to be the only true opposition to the government.
This occurred at the same time as the – seemingly – unstoppable normalization of the AfD. The AfD has been able to benefit from the current widespread displeasure about Germany’s so-called traffic light coalition. This has been shown in recent elections in the states of Hessen and Bavaria. In other words, there are currently a few trends that are favorable for the AfD.
The AfD was indeed starting to be perceived as a normal party until its Wannsee 2.0 scandal and its plans for the forced deportation of millions. According to recent public polling, about 27% of voters consider the AfD to be a “normal party”.
In 2016, when the AfD was much more moderate, it was only 17%. In other words, as it becomes more and more Neo-Nazi it is somehow increasingly regarded as a normal political party.
One of the reasons for the public support of the AfD can be found in the fact that the party appears much more disciplined than other parties to the outside world. The AfD’s very own replication of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives in 2022 has worked in favor of the party. Those who used to challenge the AfD’s Neo-Nazis internally are gone. There is no longer any opposition to the monolithic ideology promulgated by the leadership.
The few internal conflicts that remain no longer penetrate the Putin-inspired iron wall of fear to the outside world. The AfD also offers what on the surface seem to be unifying issues. For example, it takes a different position on the the war in Ukraine than almost all of Germany’s democratic parties.
What works for the Putin-loving AfD is the fact that an increasing number of Germans think that Germany’s federal government is undertaking way too few diplomatic efforts to end a war that Putin wants to extend in order to recover all of Russia’s “lost” territory.
Like the All-Russian Political Party “United Russia”, the AfD remains nationalistic. And it also benefits from the fact that voices critical of Germany’s current government have found an audience inside the AfD.
Recently, the AfD has also received support from Germany’s conservative CDU. What Germany’s conservatives don’t realize is that they are not helping themselves by taking up AfD-related issues and topics. The result is that the conservative CDU/CSU are stagnating in public polls.
Largely by taking up the AfD’s issue of migration, the CDU’s indirect support has moved Germany’s Overton Window of politics to the right. In other words, the AfD is harvesting the seeds of what the CDU/CSU is planting.
The AfD also pretends to offer a stand against billionaire predatory capitalism. This is nothing new as regards political “hall of mirrors” techniques. Historically, Germany’s Nazi party of the 1930s, called itself “socialist” as in “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP).
The illusion created by the names “socialist” and “workers” had its desired effect and attracted those disaffected by the inability of the leftist parties of the day to unite against the fascist right.
Once the NSDAP came to power, thousands of real socialist workers were beaten, tortured, and killed while Germany’s capitalist oligarchs and business elite thrived.
As in the 1930s, so in the 21st Century: the AfD is married to a strict neoliberal ideology. For example, the AfD is against any tax increase for the wealthy. On the whole however, the AfD remains a so-called single issue party. The issue that is their bread and butter is migration.
This plays well into the fear of Germany’s petit bourgeois middle class. For those with right-wing tendencies, the question is not so much whether and how social and economic policies will impact them. The easy answer to every question is: migration.
As a consequence, the AfD exploits the insecure very successfully in their fear of losing out by shouting the Big Lie that mirrors their tortured thoughts: “Migrants will replace me, take my job, take my house, take my car… .”
Self-negativity contains a belief of not being able to win something – not even something small. Unlike in the 1920s, this has nothing to do with class consciousness. Instead, it has a lot to do with xenophobia and – as so often in Germany – with race consciousness.
Meanwhile, it is not even clear whether more people in Germany’s population are actually moving toward the far right or not, compared to, let’s say, a few years ago. Germany’s all-important and most recent Mitte Studies supports this conclusion. At the same time, other surveys contradict the Mitte’s findings.
The problem for the democracy-loving parties is that the recent electoral success of the AfD is showing that there is growing support for Germany’s far right.
This is true almost everywhere, particularly in the eastern portion of Germany. Furthermore, the AfD remains particularly strong among the middle-aged and increasingly also among young voters. On the other side of the coin, Germany’s pensioners are reluctant to support the AfD.
One might even say that if the 60-to-70 year olds currently getting monthly payments from the federal government would support the AfD, an absolute majority for the AfD would already be within reach in some East German states.
At some point in the near future the recent mass rallies against the AfD will show whether or not the seemingly unstoppable growth of the AfD has finally been halted. The next three elections – for the EU’s parliament in June and in the three East-German states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia later in the year – will also be important indicators for the increasing (un)popularity of the AfD.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.DONATE
Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).
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