By Angelo Boccato, freelance journalist
The AfD shows three significant features in its path to electoral popularity, with the electoral result on Sunday, February 23 as its greatest feat until now.
The first one is that the party has not made any real attempt at the cosmetic “normalisation” followed by other far-right parties like Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy or Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
In connection with the former feature, the party has always had a hostile relationship with German media, focusing instead on promoting their views through their social media channels, particularly on TikTok.
The third feature is that the party has always been able to bounce back, even after apparent major setbacks.
The AfD was expelled from the Identity and Democracy Group (the former ID parties founded the Patriots for Europe afterwards) following the comments by its leading candidate Maximilian Krah on the SS (in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica) before the 2024 European Elections; following the elections, the party launched a new far-right European group, the Europe of Sovereign Nations beating expectations of isolation.
Another relevant element is that the AfD has not embraced the Ukrainian resistance (like other far-right leaders such as Giorgia Meloni, but similarly to Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orbàn) keeping instead its sympathies for and ties with Putin’s United Russia intact, throughout the brutalities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This choice seems to have paid off in the current scenario, where Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are planning to make “peace” arrangements without involving Ukraine and the EU; AfD is now positioned as a perfect US-Russian bridgehead in dismantling the idea of Europe which is despised in both Moscow and Washington by Putin, Lavrov, Trump, Musk, and Vance.
AfD is currently the second most popular party in Germany (a “militant democracy” structured as such to resist the return to power of a post-Nazi political force), and its state as “pariah” among the other parties in the German political arena is debatable.
“ The term Brandmauer means firewall; this firewall was established by all democratic parties (similar to the French cordon sanitaire against the far-right, which is also cracking), but Friederich Merz (the CDU secretary) started to cooperate with the AfD to establish stricter migration policies, knowing that this is not going to have an impact on anything” investigative journalist and author Mohamed Amjahid tells MDI.
“ So the question is why did he cooperate with the AfD not once, but twice after he promised that he would never do that?” Amjahid adds.
“ It is a fairytale that there was no cooperation before this between different parties and the AfD. On a local level, in local governments, parliaments, cities, and villages, you have cooperation, especially between the CDU and the AfD. You have a lot of members of conservative parties who advocate to be more pragmatic or share similar, or the same values with the AfD”.
“ You have this phenomenon and then, on a regional level, you have a very transparent cooperation between the AfD, CDU, and the FDP. The Liberal Party is very conservative in Germany. A lot of parties established AfD policies in their programmes”.
As Amjahid further points out “This firewall has already been down for a long time”.
“While there are big-scale demonstrations against this cooperation, you do not see this translated in the polls. Friedrich Merz will be most likely the next Chancellor if we look at the polls (this interview was made before the elections) because a lot of Germans are very receptive to or in favour of racism, law and order, police violence, and very simple answers to complex questions and problems”.
“ In this electoral campaign, we do not talk about any other problem even though Germany has so many. From housing to the economy to climate change, the crumbling infrastructure…..they speak only and exclusively about migration and this is very much a victory of the German far-right”.
An argument adopted by the AfD in their anti-migration rhetoric is remigration (which has long existed in academia as a neutral phenomenon but was then appropriated and popularised by French identitarian and other identitarian movements).
In the far-right identitarian narrative, remigration is a far-right concept that aims at the expulsion of all non-ethnically Europeans and their descendant back to their country of ‘origin’ (regardless of whether they were born or not in a European country).
In the southwestern city of Karlsruhe, the local section of the AfD has distributed about 30,000 fake one-way deportation tickets all for a passenger named “illegal immigrant”; this campaign has led to a police investigation.
The discourse on remigration has also been picked by other far-right parties, like the League and Brothers of Italy.
This latter element is an indication of how European far-right parties, despite all the “cosmetic” differences speak the same language, a sort of “Esperanto of hate”, with common threads like the racist (and antisemitic) Great Replacement Theory, the white genocide and the aforementioned remigration.
Police violence, free speech at risk, and lack of diverse voices
In the context of protests for Palestinian rights, the level of violence and repression by the German police against demos and gatherings has been uncanny, going to the length of banning chants in Arabic.
“Police violence has become more and more normalised or even something that people would ask for. The answer to the repetitive migration debate for example often is “Send more police to the border, send more police to racialise under-served urban areas…. ” adds Amjahid (who wrote of a book on police violence titled Alles nur Einzel-fälle? Das System Hinter Der Polizeigewalt, published by Piper ).
The book title translates into English as “All Just Single Cases? The System behind Police Violence”.
Regarding Palestinian solidarity, the right to protest is not the only one that has been infringed on.
One of the most recent examples of this can be seen in the pressure from German politicians and Berlin police on the Külhaus Berlin venue to cancel an event with UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese organised by the pan-European progressive movement Diem 25, on February 18 (the event was moved to another venue).
Two other events with Albanese at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University and Free University in Berlin were also cancelled, following state governments’ pressure, showing how much free speech in Germany is being constrained, also in universities.
All of this must also be inserted in the framework of ramping Islamophobia which has followed October 7 2023 all over Europe, and on which the far-right has capitalised, and strongly so in Germany.
“There is a lack of representation when we talk about racism, certain vulnerable groups, queer perspectives, people coming from poor areas of the country in the German media. After many years as a journalist, I know this is also part of the problem”.
“However, when I look at the media landscape and see some very prominent journalists of colour I would describe them more as tokens, as they are in their roles by repeating things that most German audiences would like to hear” concludes Amjahid.
A lack of real diversity in the media and repression of free speech make for a dangerous combination in Germany and also create a breeding ground for the far-right rhetoric of the AfD.
It may not matter that its leader, Alice Wiedel will not be the next Chancellor.
Wiedel and her party have already changed the German political grammar and discourse, they are not pariahs anymore, and their stances are more mainstream than ever in the German political arena.
