For the first time since the end of World War II, a far-right party has won a state election in Germany. This most recent success for the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—it won one-third of the votes in the eastern state of Thuringia—has generated a swirl of questions both inside and outside the country, such as:
These questions have relevance beyond Germany. The far right is experiencing yet another wave of popularity across Europe. The anti-immigrant Party for Freedom came out on top in the last Dutch elections. Marine Le Pen’s National Assembly nearly won the most recent French elections after besting the competition in the European Parliament elections. And the equally far-right Freedom Party is poised to win the upcoming elections in Austria at the end of this month.
Taboos around extremism are being challenged the world over. Just as a substantial number of U.S. voters are willing to contemplate installing Donald Trump in the White House for a second term, an equally significant portion of the German electorate is willing to flirt once again with fascism. Are Germans, Americans, and others determined to repeat the history they’ve either forgotten or not bothered to learn in the first place?
The Alternative for Germany started out in 2013, during the world-wide financial crisis, as a party opposed to the European Union bailouts of southern members like Greece. The AfD was a right-wing party but not a neo-Nazi one, which would have triggered a German law outlawing the political spawn of Hitler.
Particularly under leaders like Alice Weidel and Björn Höcke, however, the party moved inexorably closer to a crypto-Nazi position, much as white supremacists have become more prominent in the Republican Party thanks to Trump’s MAGA movement. According to investigations by the German magazine Der Spiegel, there has been considerable cross-pollination between the AfD and neo-Nazi movements, with representatives of the latter working as advisors for the former. Occasionally, when news breaks of AfD members attending neo-Nazi meetings, the party leadership publicly distances itself from that member, as it did by firing Roland Hartwig, an advisor to Alice Weidel, after he participated in a discussion on a “master plan” for mass deportations of immigrants. These scandals seem to have had little impact on the AfD’s popularity.
Björn Höcke, the politician most responsible for the AfD’s success in Thuringia, is also the most infamous with regard to his extremism. He participated in a neo-Nazi march in 2010. Articles that have appeared under a pseudonym in a neo-Nazi magazine were most likely written by Höcke, which prompted an attempt within the........