Elon Musk calls it the “last spark of hope” for Germany. European elites call it the heir to National Socialism. The debate over Germany’s reviled populist party, the Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD), is worth paying attention to, since it reveals modern Western society’s most fundamental belief structure. That debate is about to heat up further, when Musk holds a live conversation on X with the AfD’s leader. The elites, Musk says, “will lose their minds.”
The Alternative for Germany is a leper in German political life, due to the party’s opposition to Germany’s lax immigration policies. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a domestic intelligence agency, has granted itself authority to surveil the party, which it deems a threat to democracy.
Germany’s other political parties have pledged not to cooperate with the AfD. The resulting “firewall” shuts the party out of governing coalitions, no matter how much popular support it enjoys. The AfD is denied the committee chairmanships in the national parliament in Berlin that its numbers would otherwise entitle it to. German courts have almost uniformly rejected the party’s efforts to remove these legal and extralegal barriers to normal participation in political life. The media keep AfD officials off the airwaves. While other political leaders, including far leftists, are regularly quoted in the press and interviewed, AfD representatives are spectral presences, rarely heard or seen on broadcasts or given space in publications.
The problems motivating the AfD’s rise are not spectral, however. Immigration into Germany increased significantly in 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel famously announced: “Wir schaffen das! [We can handle this!],” in response to the thousands of Syrians then crossing into the country. Twenty-three percent of the German population in 2021 were first- or second-generation immigrants—and that was before the Ukrainian migration. Over 17 percent of the German population are first-generation immigrants, a higher percentage than in the United States, where less than 14 percent of the population were foreign-born in 2022. The burdens on Germany’s social services, criminal-justice system, and housing stock have been enormous. Fifty-five percent of Syrians with at least eight years of German residency were on welfare in 2023, compared with 5 percent of native Germans. More than 60 percent of the people in Germany who depend on government benefits for income are foreign-born or second-generation migrants, according to the Wall Street Journal. The disruption to social cohesion from an unassimilated alien culture is greater still.
Establishment panic over the AfD reached a boiling point in late summer 2024. On August 23, 2024, an illegal Syrian asylum seeker stabbed to death three people attending a “diversity” festival in the western German town of Solingen. The festival commemorated Solingen’s 650th anniversary; it was a telling marker of modern German ideology that the city honored its medieval roots with a paean to “diversity.” Twenty percent of the Solingen population are now foreign-born. No one in the press observed the irony of a “diverse” Solingen resident trying to kill as many of Solingen’s less diverse inhabitants as possible, on the day celebrating his presence in the city.
Elections for the state parliaments of two eastern German states—Thüringen and Sachsen—were scheduled for September 1. The Solingen knifings threatened to boost the AfD’s vote share. And so, the Nazi comparisons poured out. Bodo Ramelow, the minister president of Thüringen and member of the Left party, told public TV station ZDF that he was fighting the “normalization of fascism.” “That is my battle [das ist mein Kampf],” he said. Election signs in Thüringen read: “Whoever votes for AfD is voting for FASCISM! [Wer AfD wählt, wählt FASCHISMUS!].” A female protesting the AfD on the day of the election told ZDF that she was “demonstrating for democracy.” She didn’t want to live in a “Nazi realm,” she said. A journalist in Berlin wrote that the “specter of Nazism continues to haunt Germany.”
But the Solingen stabbings seemed to confirm everything that the AfD had been saying about Germany’s immigration problem. The Syrian suspect, Issa Al H., had landed in a refugee center in Solingen in 2022, where he collected public assistance. Al H.’s asylum claim was rejected in 2023, and he was to be deported to Bulgaria, his initial entry point into Europe. (According to European Union migration law, alleged refugees must lodge asylum claims where they first enter Europe. But Europe’s allegedly desperate asylees inevitably head to the continent’s most prosperous countries, giving the cold shoulder to their first place of refuge if it disappoints their economic expectations.) When immigration agents showed up at the Solingen refugee center to take Al H. away, he was not there. Rather than looking further, the authorities dropped the deportation effort, allowing the six-month time limit on the government’s ability to deport illegal aliens to expire. When Al H. resurfaced, he was granted special protection status and taxpayer-subsidized housing in downtown Solingen.
Meantime, Al H. had apparently been reading up on Islamist propaganda; his knife attack followed ISIS terror manuals to the letter in aiming for the infidels’ necks. After the massacre, ISIS proudly claimed Issa Al H. as one of its own. The attack had targeted Christians “in revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere,” explained ISIS on its Telegram account.
While the German government dithered about identifying the murderer or a possible motive, AfD politicians immediately labeled the incident a likely terror attack and the result of unchecked mass migration. The AfD was on solid ground. The Solingen rampage was just the latest in a series of such immigrant crimes. On May 31, 2024, a 25-year-old immigrant from Afghanistan stabbed a police officer to death in Mannheim and injured five other males, one critically. Sulaiman Ataee had entered Germany without authorization in 2013 but could not be deported because he was a minor. He then slipped through the cracks.
Following the Mannheim attack, a 35-year-old Kosovar. Muhamed R., called on social media for the murder of “all ex-Muslims and every critic of Islam.” On June 5, an AfD politician was stabbed, again in Mannheim, by another Kosovar. On June 22, 2024, an 18-year-old Syrian with an extensive criminal history beat to death a 20-year-old man in a park in Bad Oeynhausen. Afterward, the town’s mayor complained that his community could no longer handle the burden of migration. On July 30, 2024, a 17-year-old Syrian stabbed five members of a family, one critically, in Stuttgart. He had 34 previous crimes on his record, including robberies and welfare fraud, but had avoided deportation.
Such attacks and attempted attacks continued after the Solingen stabbing. On September 6, 2024, a machete-wielding 29-year-old Albanian stormed a police station in Linz am Rhein, shouting “Allahu Akbar” and threatening to kill police officers. On September 13, 2024, a 27-year-old Syrian man was arrested in Munich for planning a machete attack on German soldiers in Upper Franconia. On October 20, 2024, German law enforcement arrested a 28-year-old Libyan plotting to shoot up the Israeli embassy in Berlin. The suspect had been denied asylum a few years earlier but had eluded deportation.
These are not isolated cases. There were nearly 40 knife attacks per day in Germany in 2023, with non-Germans six times more likely to be the assailant than Germans. In 2023, foreigners committed 41 percent of all violent crimes in Germany. About two-thirds of suspects in gang crimes are non-German. Brutal Moroccan drug gangs from the Netherlands have caused particular mayhem of late. Sexual crimes are seven times more likely to be committed by non-Germans than by German nationals, according to the national police agency. Since 2019, asylum seekers, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, have sexually assaulted more than 52,000 females. In 2023, Germany saw 761 group rapes. Half the suspects were foreign nationals; others were of immigrant parentage. In the state of Nordrhein Westfalen, almost three-quarters of group rapists are non-German or of immigrant parentage. On New Year’s Eve 2015, Muslim males attacked an estimated 1,200 German women.
The German media and the traditional parties keep these facts bottled up. As in Sweden and France, a code of silence is observed about immigrant crime and terrorism; to speak about such things is racist. Even the Solingen attack did not crack the code in the mainstream media. It did, however, draw attention to Germany’s seeming inability to remove illegal aliens. For the week following the attack, politicians were constantly asking and being asked why Issa Al H. had been allowed to stay in Germany. The answer never went beyond a vague: “There was a breakdown in law enforcement.”
There have been many such breakdowns. Nearly a quarter-million people in Germany have been designated deportable, but only 16,000 illegal aliens actually were removed in 2023—the highest number since 2000. In the aftermath of Solingen, a parade of government ministers, bureaucrats, and immigrant activists appeared on camera, shuffling papers and pointing to fat binders of regulations, to explain why the thing cannot be done more quickly, or at all: EU human rights laws; German human rights laws; the need to assemble identity documents for deportees; the difficulty of scheduling visits to the national embassy to get those documents; refugees’ failure to show for those visits; the paucity of flights to remove deportees.
Asylum claimants are not supposed to be sent back to countries deemed unsafe, but this excuse for the persistence of rejected asylum seekers is undercut by the fact that thousands of Afghans have gone home for the holidays, only to return to Germany once the festivities in their native country ended.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz repeatedly intoned: Germany is a Rechtsstaat (a country governed by the rule of law). But those laws are now working against Germany’s legitimate self-interest and national sovereignty. Germany resembles Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians.
Hoping to fend off an electoral slaughter, the governing coalition in Berlin proposed (but did not implement) bureaucratic adjustments to discourage illegal immigration, such as suspending welfare benefits for migrants who are determined to be deportable. Predictably, the coalition announced stricter rules governing the sale and carrying of knives, which would likely have as little an effect on criminal and terrorist behavior as gun control has on violent street crime in the U.S.
Only the AfD emphasized stopping the immigration flow in the first place, rather than trying to reverse it after it had occurred. The day after the Solingen attack, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel demanded a five-year moratorium on immigration, admission, and naturalization. She followed up with a call for the immediate expulsion of illegal migrants and criminals; in-kind rather than cash benefits for migrants; and an end to the naturalization of welfare-dependent migrants.
Weidel and other AfD politicians laid the blame for the Solingen rampage at the feet of Germany’s political establishment. The head of the AfD in Thüringen, Björn Höcke, said that those who “wield the concepts of tolerance, openness to the world, and diversity like a monstrance” had prepared the ground for the attack. Such AfD voices were almost impossible to hear, however, since only non-AfD politicians in Thüringen and Sachsen regularly received airtime.
If former West Germans were curious to understand AfD’s growing support among voters in the East, they were left wondering. In a rare moment of coverage, a young man at a small AfD youth rally lamented Germany’s social divisions. He would gladly speak with the counterdemonstrators across the street, he said wistfully, but they would not allow him to approach. Most man-on-the-street interviews were with people denouncing the “Rechtsextremisten [right-wing extremists].” The media lovingly covered a “Techno Parade für Toleranz” in Dresden and a business coalition for diversity, whose brightly colored posters proclaimed: “Erfolg Made by Vielfalt [Success Made by Diversity]”; “Made in Germany Made by Vielfalt [Made in Germany, Made by Diversity]” and “We [heart] Vielfalt.” Members of the Green Party and Amnesty International were guaranteed a forum to express their horror at proposals to limit migration.
This one-sidedness was no accident. On July 17, 2024, the German Journalists Association announced that it was boycotting the AfD. It would not send representatives to cover “anti-constitutional parties or groups,” even if members of those parties held elected office. While this boycott was not binding on individual journalists, any reporter who spoke with an AfD member would be violating the values of his profession.
Giving airtime to AfD members carried a risk: the interviewees might not confirm the AfD’s reputation as crazed fascists. Deutsche Welle, a public news and education outlet, complained in April that an AfD co-chair, Tino Chrupalla, came off as “friendly and well-meaning” during an interview on public channel ARD. Der Spiegel lamented that Björn Höcke appeared “more normal and socially acceptable” during a rare debate on Welt-TV.
This news blackout on democratically elected representatives was done in the name of democracy. According to a spokesman for the German Journalists Association, its members “actively stand up for democracy and its fundamental values, especially freedom of the press, broadcasting, and freedom of expression”—and thus should not cover the AfD. The AfD, by contrast, has the temerity to refer to the “lying press [Lügenpresse]” (aka “fake news”). Such disrespect allegedly threatens freedom of expression. Equally antidemocratic, in the eyes of elites, the AfD opposes compulsory taxpayer funding of Germany’s public broadcasting service.
Despite the media near-shutout, the AfD’s performance in the Thüringen and Sachsen parliamentary elections was its best since the party’s 2013 founding. The party won the largest vote share—33 percent—in Thüringen, and just missed a first-place finish in adjacent Sachsen. Turnout was especially high—over 74 percent in both states. The greatest share of the youth vote—38 percent—went to the AfD, compared with 16 percent for Die Linke, the party of the Left.
In a disturbing omen for the national government in Berlin, the combined vote for the three parties that made up the governing national coalition was just one-third of the AfD vote: a little over 10 percent. Barely two months after the Thüringen and Sachsen elections, the federal government in Berlin collapsed. Snap elections have been called for February 2025.
Glum faces reigned on the airwaves the night of the eastern German elections. The editor-in-chief of ZDF, Germany’s second most-watched television network, flagged an ominous precedent: it was on another September 1—in 1939—that Germany set off World War II with its invasion of Poland. Germany would go on to murder 6 million Jews and to spread suffering and death across the world, wrote ZDF’s Bettina Schausten on X. Now, 85 years to the day, a party led by a candidate who talks like a fascist and is rightly labeled one, Schausten said, had become the strongest political force in Thüringen.
And a second test for democracy loomed in three weeks: another eastern German state, Brandenburg, was holding its parliamentary elections on September 22. The incumbent minister president of Brandenburg, Dietmar Woidke, from Chancellor Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), announced that his sole aim was to block the AfD from becoming the majority party. If the AfD won the most votes, Woidke would quit politics, he said, rather than participate in a future “brown” government.
Woidke’s allegedly fascist opponent, Hans-Christoph Berndt, promised to end establishment paternalism. In a campaign video, Berndt explained: “I had to enter politics because politicians thought they could dictate how we live, what we eat, how we heat our homes, how we speak, and, above all, with whom we must share our country. It’s time they no longer treat us like children.” An op-ed on ZDF’s website sneered at Berndt’s references to a “cartel of the traditional parties” and to the negation of the white male—positions as offensive to the mainstream elite as a desire for lower immigration.
The SPD squeaked out a final 1.5-percentage-point lead over the AfD, receiving 30.9 percent of the vote to the AfD’s 29.4 percent. Woidke achieved that minor advantage only by poaching other parties’ voters. The head of a rival party campaigned for Woidke to ensure an AfD defeat. Woidke detected a worldwide threat in the close outcome. If an “openly far-right extreme party” can win almost a third of the vote in Brandenburg, he said, then “it is a shrill wake-up alarm for all of us democrats, for all those who stand for freedom, openness, and tolerance.”
The “democracy” defense came into play again two days later in Thüringen, when the state’s newly elected parliament convened on September 25. The non-AfD parties rammed through a series of arcane rule changes designed to deny the AfD the speakership to which its majority status entitled it. Commentary on the speaker coup set a new record for doublespeak. According to politicians and pundits, it was the AfD that had violated democratic norms and traditions, allegedly revealing yet again the party’s fascist agenda.
The self-proclaimed anti-totalitarians renewed the call to outlaw the democratically elected AfD entirely. No one noticed that this alleged nemesis of the rule of law had immediately complied with the state court ruling eliminating its parliamentary rights.
The lack of self-awareness on the part of the country’s elites was breathtaking. According to Chancellor Scholz, “democracy thrives on a diversity of political parties [die Democratie lebt von Parteien Vielfalt]”—except when it comes to the AfD.
Alice Weidel denounced this hypocrisy in a characteristically steely speech in the national parliament: “Instead of seeking the best solution through fair debate . . . you [the establishment parties] continue to deny us our rightful position in parliament and the presidencies of crucial committees. You thus deprive millions of voters their full parliamentary representation. You are the true enemies of democracy and the rule of law.” (Weidel is the AfD’s nominee for chancellor in the February 2025 elections.)
The “firewall” against including the AfD as a partner has made forming governing coalitions in the three eastern German parliaments difficult. A new left-wing party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, or BSW), named solipsistically by its formerly Marxist-Leninist leader after herself, held disproportionate influence. (The BSW backs a rollback of immigration, but it, too, refuses to deal with the AfD.) In none of the three states was a majority government reached. The resulting minority governments are particularly unstable, given the ideological incoherence among the partners stemming from the need to exclude the AfD.
And now, to the despair of the elites, history threatens to repeat itself. On December 20, 2024, two months before the national elections to replace Chancellor Scholz’s collapsed coalition, a Saudi Arabian refugee drove his SUV into a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg. The 50-year-old attacker killed six people, including a nine-year-old boy, and wounded close to 300. The attack recalled not just the Solingen knifings, but an earlier Christmas-market rampage, when a Tunisian drove a hijacked truck into a Berlin Christmas market in 2016, killing 12 revelers.
Magdeburg’s Christmas-market attack was not the only offshoot this year from the 2016 Berlin rampage. On November 6, 2024, authorities in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein arrested a 17-year-old with “extreme Islamist views,” according to prosecutors, who had planned his own Christmas-market bombing.
The Magdeburg establishment jumped into action to ward off the feared restrictionist backlash. On December 23, thousands of residents formed a “human chain against hate”—that would be German hate—in the city’s market square. They held eco-friendly candles and chanted “give fascism no chance.” The candles stand for a city “open to the world,” said an organizer of the “Give hate no chance” initiative.
The “fascists” who were to be given no chance were the AfD supporters peacefully demonstrating nearby to call for a change in Germany’s immigration policies. (The sight of such a demonstration is apparently so traumatic to elite sensibilities that a news website carrying the video posted a trigger warning: “This live feed may contain distressing scenes.”) Weidel told the rally participants: “Someone who hates—and kills—the people of the country that gave him asylum, who hates all we stand for and all that we love, does not belong to us. We want things to finally change in this country so that we will never again have to mourn with the mother who has lost her son in such a pointless and brutal way.”
Anti-AfD forces are hoping to blunt the party’s post-Magdeburg strength by tying the attacker to the AfD itself. The Saudi assailant, a psychiatrist named Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, had declared himself an enemy of Islam in general and of Saudi Arabia in particular. Though labeling himself a leftist, he had expressed support for the AfD’s immigration positions. Thus does the AfD’s “Islamophobia” kill, according to the establishment.
The argument won’t fly. Al-Abdulmohsen was patently unhinged. German law enforcement and intelligence authorities had been repeatedly warned that he wanted, as one tipster said, to “kill random German citizens.” Saudi Arabia had sought his extradition. Despite having been convicted of making violent threats, he was granted asylum status in 2016. German police had contacted Al-Abdulmohsen as recently as October 2024, but, as in Solingen, investigations went nowhere.
Magdeburg would not have been possible without uncontrolled immigration, wrote Weidel after the attack. An AfD legislator in Berlin, Gottfried Curio, argued: “What we need are deportations; instead we get naturalizations.” German voters will see Al-Abdulmohsen as a creature of the policies that the AfD opposes, no matter how many times the elites call the AfD the heir to the Nazi Reich.
So what of this equation between the AfD and National Socialism? It holds the key to the elite Western worldview.
The AfD’s most controversial figure is Björn Höcke, leader of the party in Thüringen and the former co-head of its most socially conservative (and thus reviled) branch, The Wing (Der Flügel). The mainstream parties and press have denounced Höcke and the now-disbanded Wing for their stands in favor of the traditional family and against gender ideology. The most damning charges against Höcke, though, are racism—for his demand to de-Islamize Germany and Europe—and fascism—for an allegedly insufficient repudiation of Germany’s World War II atrocities.
In 2017, Höcke called for a change in the way modern Germans are allowed to think about their past. It should be possible to recognize Germany’s legacy of philosophy, music, and science, now buried by the near-exclusive focus on its war crimes, he told young party members in Dresden. “We need a 180-degree turnaround in our policy of memory,” he said. “We Germans are the only people in the world who have planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital,” referring to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial.
Backlash was immediate, even from the AfD. Weidel rebuked him; some party members called for his ouster. In 2016, however, Germany’s Culture Commissioner under then-Chancellor Angela Merkel had used nearly identical language, without generating an uproar. In a speech opening a conference on “monument culture,” Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media Monika Grütters quoted the head of Britain’s National Gallery: “No other country,” according to Neil MacGregor, “would have erected a monument to its own shame in the middle of its capital [kein anderes Land, das in der Mitte seiner Hauptstadt ein Mahnmal der eigenen Schande errichtet hätte].”
In 2021, Höcke was accused of ending a speech in Merseburg with the words: “Alles für unsere Heimat, alles für Sachsen-Anhalt, alles für Deutschland [Everything for our homeland, everything for Sachsen-Anhalt, everything for Germany].” The last three words, Alles für Deutschland, echo a Nazi slogan and thus may not be publicly uttered under Germany’s laws banning “constitution-inimical” speech.
Höcke denied knowing that the words were proscribed. Historians testified on his behalf that the “Alles für Deutschland” phrase was not widely associated with Hitler’s regime. A former deputy member of the Constitutional Court in Baden-Württemberg opined that 99.9 percent of Germans did not know before the Höcke litigation that those three words were a forbidden phrase. The court did not believe Höcke’s claim of ignorance and fined him 13,000 euros.
In 2023, Höcke was accused of using the phrase “Alles für . . .” at an informal gathering in Gera, to which the crowd responded: “Deutschland.” In July 2024, he was again convicted of illegal speech and fined 16,900 euros. The AfD has converted the banned phrase to “Alice für Deutschland” (referring to Alice Weidel). The authorities have yet to figure out how to prosecute this latest hate crime.
Höcke’s loose, if not reckless, way with language evokes Donald Trump, though Höcke’s flouting of taboos is undoubtedly more self-conscious. But a willingness to ask whether Germany’s all-consuming penance for Hitler’s atrocities may ever by balanced by celebration of Beethoven, Bach, pioneering chemists, and biologists is not the same thing as excusing or embracing Hitler’s atrocities. Höcke has praised the “patriotic resistance to Hitler”—referring to Claus von Stauffenberg and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—and has referred to the “sincere will of Germans to come to terms with the transgressions and crimes of the Third Reich [die aufrichtige Wille der Deutschen, die Verfehlungen und Verbrechen des Dritten Reiches zu verarbeiten].” He has said that the “crimes of the Third Reich are still incomprehensible today.”
Höcke may not be the ideal candidate to start a debate about whether Germany should be allowed any pride in its pre-Hitler achievements, but such a debate should not be ruled out of bounds and is arguably overdue. Germany’s unremitting focus on its war crimes stands out even among other currently self-abasing Western nations. As for countries outside the West, their acts of terror and annihilation could also merit a culture of shame and public apology, but such a culture shows no sign of emerging in the non-Western world.
The AfD’s candidate in Brandenburg, Hans-Christoph Berndt, elicited Nazi comparisons after the Solingen rampage with a call to bar asylum seekers from certain public gatherings. A representative of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance asked him whether he wanted people to wear blue or purple badges as well. He responded: “Do you want to see people slaughtered again?”
Do these provocations from a handful of AfD representatives add up to the rebirth of National Socialism? The AfD “relies on a toxic combination of xenophobia, militarism and nostalgia to win votes,” claimed an August 2024 op-ed in the New York Times. But nothing indicates that Höcke, or any other AfD politician, wants to resurrect a genocidal Führer who seeks to take over the world. To the contrary, the party is antimilitarist. It opposes Germany’s involvement in the Ukraine war. Its campaign slogans in recent elections have included: “Es ist Zeit, für Frieden zu kämpfen! [It’s time to fight for peace!]” and “Frieden ist Alles! [Peace is everything!].” Nothing indicates that AfD has territorial ambitions in the rest of Europe or beyond. It does not propose a colonizing project. Berndt argued during the Brandenburg campaign that the focus of politics is not the climate, not the rest of the world, but one’s own people.
There is no indication, further, that the AfD wants to round up Jews or eliminate them from Germany. To the contrary, it is the sincerest supporter of Israel among Germany’s political parties. Your average German leftist must battle his reflexive support of the Palestinians every day, bound as he is to put Germany’s constitutional commitment to Israel ahead of his political inclinations.
After Iran fired missiles into Israel on October 1, 2024, the streets of Berlin and Bonn looked like a scene out of Beirut or Tehran. Thousands of frenzied Muslims cheered on a hoped-for escalation of Islam’s war on Jews.
In November 2024, Berlin’s police chief warned Jews and homosexuals to avoid parts of Berlin. “Unfortunately, there are certain neighborhoods in which the majority of people of Arab origin live who also have sympathies for terrorist groups, and where open hostility toward Jews is expressed,” said police chief Barbara Slowik.
These Muslim celebrants and Jew-baiters are the real source of anti-Semitism in Germany today. They are the product of deliberate policies of the establishment parties. For those parties to label the AfD anti-Semitic, as a proposed ban on the party does (“The AfD is a racist, antisemitic, and right-wing extremist party”), is stunning mendacity. Only the AfD has called for defunding the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) because of its anti-Israel connections. The AfD issued that call long before the post–October 7 revelations of UNRWA’s involvement with Hamas. The AfD proposal remains relevant. On September 30, 2024, Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, a UNRWA employee and head of the Lebanese teachers association, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Abu el-Amin led Hamas’s Lebanon branch. A deputy principal at an UNRWA elementary school in Gaza was recently revealed as a Hamas infantryman.
The AfD wants to cut taxpayer aid to the Israeli territories, so long as Palestinian educational materials teach young people how to become martyrs. The establishment labeled this proposal Islamophobic.
No other parties have voted for the AfD’s Israel-protective motions. In an October 9, 2024, debate with Sahra Wagenknecht, Weidel insisted that Israel was fighting for its existence and had a right of self-defense. Wagenknecht, by contrast, has accused Israel of war crimes and advocates cutting off its weapons. Yet Israel has boycotted the AfD since its founding, showing the same blinding prejudice against anything deemed “far-right” as Germany’s nominally centrist parties. As of December 2024, Israel has not taken a stance on the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance.
There is no indication that the AfD wants to replace democracy with dictatorship, or that it plans to murder internal rivals, in imitation of the Röhm Purge. It has not called for banning its political opponents or silencing their speech. The AfD seeks the same rights as those of Germany’s other democratically elected parties. When those other parties censor it and strip it of its parliamentary privileges, it seeks redress from the courts and abides by those courts’ rulings, which almost uniformly reject its petitions. Though it criticizes the democracy-curtailing powers of Germany’s establishment politicians and of the EU, it continues to participate in Germany’s political bodies and in the European legislature according to parliamentary rules. The same cannot be said of the AfD’s enemies.
A small number of AfD leaders have engaged in theoretical discussions regarding the problems of classical liberalism and the status of rights. These discussions have been no more Hitlerian than those of American critics of classical liberalism like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen.
The AfD polices itself. In November 2024, it expelled three members whom the federal attorney general accused of planning an armed revolt; in December, it replaced its youth branch, often criticized for extremism, with a new organization more closely tied to the main party.
Nothing indicates that the AfD embraces the mystical Nazi nature cult. It is scathing about the conceptual fallacies and economic irrationality of Germany’s war on fossil fuels and on nuclear power. An AfD campaign poster this year read: “No form of heating is illegal!” (referring to a law that will force the purchase of expensive “climate-neutral” heating systems). The AfD’s EU election manifesto called the European global-warming regime an “eco-socialist project” that allows Brussels to “interfere in the personal lives of every citizen.”
The AfD’s warnings about the green energy cult have proved as prescient as its warnings about anti-Semitic UN relief agencies. Germany’s once-formidable auto sector is teetering under impossible electric-vehicle mandates. The premature substitution of unreliable “renewable” energy for coal has inflated electricity costs and dragged down the rest of the German manufacturing economy. “Thirty-thousand windmill monsters and a million solar panels uselessly disfigure the landscape,” tweeted Weidel in November, referring to the stretches in winter where “clean” energy installations sit inert due to lack of sun and wind. “The ‘energy transition’ is a massive wasted investment and prosperity-destroyer. Enough!”
As for totalitarian measures, the Green Party and its allies seek to ban the social-media platform X. Weidel responded in a parliamentary address: “You consider freedom of expression more dangerous than the unrestricted importation of murderers and terrorists.”
It is the AfD’s migration positions, then, that allegedly mark it out as neo-Nazi. That equation rests on the following propositions:
To say: “we want to decide who enters our country” is tantamount to saying: “we want to exterminate other people.”
To say: “we like our culture the way it is and do not want to change it through mass immigration” is tantamount to saying: “we want to conquer other cultures.”
To say: “we feel a bond with people who share our national inheritance and do not want to weaken that bond” is tantamount to saying: “we want to destroy the Other.”
To prefer one’s own culture to other cultures is xenophobic.
Sub-proposition: “Xenophobia” is a cardinal sin.
To be against the unrestricted flow of people from the Third World is antidemocratic.
Corollary: Democracy consists in being for open borders.
A democratic consensus against open borders is antidemocratic.
To distinguish between citizen and noncitizen in the workings of self-government is racist.
Sub-proposition: To be “racist” is the cardinal sin.
To notice that immigrant populations are not assimilating is racist.
To notice that immigrant populations are bringing in a culture antithetical to one’s own is racist.
To notice disproportionate crime committed by non-natives is to support concentration camps.
A commitment to unlimited migration from non-Western countries is today the West’s constitutive principle. It defines what it means to be a member of the Western elect; anyone who wants to restrict immigration has revealed himself, at best, as an enemy of the Enlightenment and, at worst, a genocidal maniac. The commitment to open borders is so profound that it overrides the preservation of other cherished elite values. Europe’s establishment would rather import millions of migrants opposed to its liberal regime than protect that regime by restricting such immigration.
On October 9, 2024, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán told the European Parliament in Strasbourg that illegal immigration increases anti-Semitism, violence against women, and homophobia. Orbán’s pronouncements were denounced as anti-liberal. A pro-EU outlet, Euronews, accused Orbán of offering no evidence for his claims. To test them out, compare the laws on homosexuality and gay marriage in Middle Eastern and African countries with those of the West, or compare Muslim attendance at Europe’s Gay Pride marches with Muslim attendance at European pro-Palestinian protests.
Anti-Semitic attacks have doubled in Germany over the last year. The authorities are silent about the source. Since they are not accusing right-wing neo-Nazis of the violence, it is a good bet that the suspects are disproportionately migrant. During the celebrations in Hamburg of Iran’s October 1, 2024, missile strikes on Israel, a burned Star of David was paraded around on a pole, in front of massive red banners reading “Freiheit für Palaestina [Freedom for Palestine]” and “Die Rebellion ist gerechtfertig [Rebellion is justified].” (The Arabic writing on those same banners likely communicated something stronger.)
The elites see enemies only on the right; they are incapable of acknowledging the threat from the left, or from the left’s cherished victim groups. Every October 9, Germany mourns a 2019 synagogue attack in Halle by a neo-Nazi. In 2022, Scholz wrote: “This anniversary reminds us never to look away. We remember the victims and reaffirm our determination to fight right-wing extremism in every form.” Well and good. But if Germany’s Muslims were to exercise political power commensurate with their numbers, Germany’s vigilance against anti-Semitism would be a thing of the past. It is leaders of Muslim countries such as Iran who call for the destruction of Israel. No “nationalist” European leader has done so. Mein Kampf is popular in the Middle East—and likely not as an admonitory tale.
Gulf states and some industrializing Asian countries rely on cheap immigrant labor. Their immigrant-rights apparatus is minimal to nonexistent, compared with the lavishly funded organizations in the West that have created previously unheard-of rights against exclusion.
Everywhere that the populist revolt against culture-effacing migration gains ground, it is met with the same strategy: demean its participants as far-right extremists and enemies of democracy. The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) won Austria’s national elections in September on a platform of limiting mass entries and deporting criminal aliens. The losing parties pledged to form a government without the FPÖ, a strategy that only increased the FPÖ’s popular support. On January 3, 2025, those negotiations to exclude the FPÖ broke down. In an unexpected turnaround, Austria’s president will meet with the FPÖ’s leader, Herbert Kickl, on Monday, January 6, amid signs that the once-shunned Kickl may be invited to head a new government.
When the pro-borders National Rally (Rassemblement National, or RN) won the most votes in the first round of the French national elections in late June, self-proclaimed democracy defenders smashed windows and set fires to protest the results, reported Rod Dreher. The “far right is at the gates of power” and must be stopped, said prime minister Gabriel Attal. The left-wing New Popular Front and President Emmanuel Macron’s liberal coalition blocked the National Rally’s ascent in round two of the elections, consigning the future government to ongoing crises.
In November 2023, the restrictionist Freedom Party in the Netherlands trounced the left-wing alliance that had previously governed the country. It was allowed to form a governing coalition only after its leader, Geert Wilders, renounced the chancellorship.
Poland’s conservative pro-borders Law and Order Party won the most seats in November 2023 but lost the chancellorship. The new chancellor, Donald Tusk, a former prime minister and European Union president, pledged to “restore democracy” from alleged hard-liner threats. Yet on October 12, 2024, Tusk announced plans to suspend asylum rights and close Poland’s eastern border with Belarus. Belarus and Russia send migrants from the Middle East and Africa to destabilize the West, the chancellor said.
Tusk is right about migration’s destabilizing effects but wrong about its cause. Destabilization is self-inflicted, not a foreign plot. Western elites have willed it, defining modern democracy as the dissolution of national identity and borders—a dissolution expected only of the West. Non-Western countries face no charges of fascism for restricting immigration flows, though the mainstream media and American diplomats do criticize Japan for its stubborn resistance to “diversity.”
Efforts to block the AfD from exercising power proportional to its electoral support may succeed for now. The AfD has been expected to place second in the February parliamentary election, behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a centrist party; in light of the Magdeburg massacre, the AfD’s share of the vote will increase from the predicted 19 percent but will not likely surpass that of the Union. CDU leader Friedrich Merz has pledged not to cooperate with what he calls a “right-wing extremist party,” since doing so would require “selling [his party’s] soul.”
But the tide is turning in Germany and elsewhere. Establishment parties across Europe have been trying to co-opt the populist immigration message without driving away too many of their leftist allies. Border checkpoints have gone up throughout Europe in the last half-year. Merz wants to speed deportations and shift asylum proceedings to third countries. Even Sweden, now 20 percent foreign-born, is undergoing what its government calls a “paradigm shift.” Reality has caught up. Shootings and robberies occur almost daily. Twelve people were killed in September 2024 alone, in what the national police chief described as “terrorist-like violence.”
Germany’s elites are edgy and irritable. On Saturday, December 28, Elon Musk published an opinion piece in Die Welt am Sonntag, reinforcing his earlier claim that “only the AfD can save Germany.” The AfD is “the last spark of hope for Germany,” Musk wrote. This exercise of free speech on Musk’s and the newspaper’s part was, according to the political and media establishment, another dagger aimed at democracy. The CDU’s Merz announced that he could not “remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of the western democracies.” An editor at Die Welt resigned in protest. The ever-alert German Journalists Association blasted “election advertising for a right-wing extremist party packaged as journalism.” The German media’s alarms about a second Donald Trump presidency were apparently simple fact-based reporting.
The consternation will only grow. Musk declared German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier an “anti-democratic tyrant” after Steinmeier denounced what he called the “external influence” on German democracy being practiced “particularly intensively on (social media) platform X.” And now the Tesla founder is arranging a live conversation with Alice Weidel, possibly on January 10. It is an understatement to say that the establishment opponents of the AfD and of Musk will “lose their minds,” as the tech entrepreneur posted on December 30.
In a September ARD-DeutschlandTREND poll, 71 percent of respondents nationally agreed that Germany could not cope with more asylum seekers from crisis areas. Even if European and American elites continue to label the majority of their fellow citizens fascists—and they might—the revolt against cultural replacement will continue.
Mass immigration into the West is the defining issue of the twenty-first century. The AfD and its continental counterparts realize how precious is the Western inheritance and how urgently it deserves defense. Their warnings should be heeded before it is too late.
Top Photo: AfD supporters at a campaign rally before September elections in Thüringen (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)