I've always found it unusual that fascism and racism have become so lexically linked. The US, Canada, and Australia have forever been liberal democracies from their founding as federations to the present, and they were each founded by undeniable racists (Australia's founders even wanted to enshrine white supremacy in their constitution but were told not to by London due to the Anglo-Japanese alliance). Whereas Italy became fascist in 1922 and didn't pass racial laws until 1938 due to the influence of the Third Reich. Various regimes in Latin America could be plausibly described as fascistic and lacked a racial supremacist ideology. It goes without saying that both racism and fascism are grave political ills; nevertheless, it's unwarranted to frame them as inextricably linked as the press often does. Winston Churchill, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Deakin, and Thomas Jefferson were all white nationalists and not fascist in the slightest. Regimes the US backed during the Cold War were fascistic but often indifferent to race.
In the case of Germany it might seem sensible to strongly link the two, but even then it's questionable, as West Germany was explicitly not a nation of immigrants, and Germany only loosened its naturalization laws under Merkel. Hence, a German nativist may well be ideologically closer to Adenauer than to Hitler.
On a side note, Japan arguably catches even more unjustified flak than Germany for historical baggage. People are at least aware of Germany's apologies for Nazism (though their crimes in Namibia are less well known), whereas people falsely claim Japan hasn't apologized for its crimes (despite Murayama's and Fukuda's statements). When Japanese textbooks for kids don't dedicate as much space on atrocities, it draws international criticism, and Japanese PMs are often not even able to pay respects to the fallen due to international criticism.
US and Korean presidents pay respects to those who died serving in wars that most of their citizens consider unjustified and in which their countries committed atrocities. Korea hasn't held soldiers to account for the numerous atrocities committed in the Vietnam War, and Korean presidents pay respects to all the veterans of the conflict.
Moreover, Japanese PMs aren't specifically venerating war criminals. Yasukuni Shrine is a memorial to everybody who died serving in Japan's wars from the 1850s until the end, not just WWIIers
A funny anecdote about the AfD and speech laws in Germany:
> Alice Weidel said “Political correctness belongs on the dustbin of history” at an AfD party conference in 2017. The moderator Christian Ehring picked up on this in the satirical show extra 3 and said: "Yes, enough of political correctness. Let's all be incorrect." And he added: "The Nazi slut is right." Alice Weidel took legal action against this statement and received the following assessment from the court: "A violation of general personal rights can only be assumed if the statement, which has been exposed from its satirical guise, affects the dignity of the person concerned at its core." Since "Nazi" + "slut" were used here in a clearly recognizable satirical way, Weidel lost in court.
Taken from this compilation of statements from AfD members:
I listened to JD Vance's Munich speech over the weekend and was quite happy about it. Europe right now is so terrified of right-wing extremism that most of its parties would rather abolish free speech and multiparty elections outright than work with right-wing politicians.
What's ironic is that if you swap (fake) fascists for (real) Communists, you get the exact situation that allowed Hitler to come to power in 1933. Germany was full of centrists and conservatives who disagreed with much of Hitler's program, but they were willing to give him unchecked power anyway because they were so terrified of the KPD and saw Nazi authoritarianism as the only bulwark against communist revolution. (Since Communists in Russia had already killed millions of people by that point, and the Nazi mass-killings were still a hypothetical, it's hard to blame them.)
Of course the situation with present-day European leftists trying to ban right-wing parties or actually cancel elections (as they have already done in Romania) is much less justifiable, given how mild the overall AfD positions actually are. Left-wing authoritarianism is by far the only threat worth worrying about at the moment. I wrote an article all about this in December, called "Romania and the Iranization of the West."
My thesis was that Europe's left-wing parties are in the process of setting up a political system similar to Iran's, that has multiparty elections (Iranians DO get to elect a figurehead president every four years) but where elections are carefully managed, parties are often banned, and the unelected arm of the government can override the political arm whenever it has strong feelings about an issue (as happens in Iran when the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council ensure that the country will always have extreme policies on woman's dress, hatred of America, and sponsoring anti-semitic terrorists all over the Middle East, no matter how unpopular those policies are at the ballot box.)
America had a similar thing between the time of Earl Warren and when the Supreme Court swung right again under Trump. Americans got to keep freely electing presidents, congressmen, and so forth, but SCOTUS functioned as the true legislative power on any issue the justices had a strong opinion about. (Everyone knows that things like legal abortion and forced bussing had nothing to do with the original meaning of the US constitution; they were "constitutional" issues because at least five justices felt strongly about them, and for no other reason.) So the Court was able to force a lot of extreme and unpopular policies onto the country without ever having to get them approved by any representative body. Fortunately they never did anything as extreme as annuling elections and ordering them done over when a right-wing party won, but it got pretty close.
So in conclusion, you can't save democracy by destroying it, and the Nazis didn't take over Germany because Germany tolerated too much free speech - they took over because a lot of non-Nazis were so terrified of the Communists that they were willing to look the other way as the Nazis abolished all democratic checks and balances, since it seemed to them like the only sure way to keep the Communists out. If present-day Germany abolishes democracy to keep the AfD out, it will be even more shameful, since the AfD's actual positions are far less illiberal than either the NSDAP or the KPD.
"and the unelected arm of the government can override the political arm whenever it has strong feelings about an issue"
This is what happens here in the Netherlands. We elected a right wing (coalition) government with a pretty strong mandate to (significantly) tighten up immigration and asylum laws. But after a year, hardly anything has been done. Granted, in part it's because of infighting in the coalition, a lack of a senate majority and in part due to the (elected, in a way, but hardly democratic) EU dictating most of our laws on the subject, but a large part of it is due to the fact that the whole unelected government apparatus - the civil service, the courts, and other relevant institutions - are dominated by left-liberals, progressives and outright communists who will do anything to thwart any kind of conservative policies, especially on the topic of immigration. And the right, naively, hasn't made any kind of plan to deal with this or to change this.
And from my perspective, Vance was 100% right in his scolding of European leaders. Our continent is in a sad state when it comes to freedoms and economic dynamism. I know Richard is very pro-immigration and I can kind of see his point in the US context. But the islamisation of Europe is real, and it's not good and people are fed up. If the AfD doesn't win power now, it will in the future. Firewalls won't hold forever when every other day another Syrian or Afghan asylum seeker takes a gun, a knife or a car and goes on a religious rampage.
This has been a good read on the AfD, much more nuanced than what one usually finds. However, it is not true than Germany is too left wing, at least compared to other European countries. Restrictions on nuclear power and free speech are widespread in the EU, and homeschooling is anecdotal in Europe. In fact, Germany is, if anything, more right wing than the average Western European country, given its obsession with budget balancing (right wing coded in Europe) and that for most of its post-war history it has been ruled by centre right chancellors.
As for the JD Vance comments, it is ridiculous to suggest that German parties are disenfranchising voters by not entering coalitions with the AfD. Voters of all other major parties (CDU, SPD, FDP, the Greens, Die Linke) expect that the parties they support shun the AfD, and these voters are a supermajority of the German electorate.
I read Vance's entire speech. I don't recall him opining on whether other parties should enter coalitions with ADP. He argued that Europe (including Germany) was wrong to deploy government sanctions and penalties as a means of suppressing disfavored political speech, especially in settings where the speech and ideas being suppressed have a meaningful nucleus of popular support. His overall theme is that you can't really run a democracy if elite institutions fashion policy based on a fear that the majority of voters will vote the "wrong" way.
He said there should be no place for firewalls in politics which pretty much directly means that other parties should be prepared to enter coalitions with (I assume you mean) AfD. Because preventing that from happening is the purpose of the firewall.
I was going by the first paragraph of the article. I’m also against the free speech restrictions that many European governments are implementing, or considering implementing. Instead, I was talking about the refusal of all major parties to form coalitions with AfD, which is perfectly fine, and how believing that this shunning is somehow undemocratic is deeply silly.
No Germany led the march to poverty: Nordstream, led by Russian idiot utility (at best) Schröder, literally forging official investigative commission reports to justify and accelerate their environmentally and economically and geopolitically catastrophic de-nuclearisation, see also Nordstream II, and finally the Merkel led "mass immigration for all".
All of these were left wing projects.
We don't even need to mention their preventing any kind of European defence capability, or their enthusiastic repression of the middle classes (look up after tax income curves in Germany).
Small correction: The party to the right of the AfD is NPD, not NDP. It has now changed its name and is called "Die Heimat" loose to be translated as "The Fatherland".
You might want to add that an AfD federal deputy was actually involved in a coup attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgit_Malsack-Winkemann. It is understandable for deputies of other parties that they would rather not side with a party who fields such candidates.
To add on to what was said in this article, I have looked at which European parliament group AfD belongs to, which is a handy if imperfect way for determining the ideology of a European political party. They belong to the Europe of Sovereign Nations Group, which is the farthest right group in the European parliament. Other European parties that are considered far right belong to more moderate groups, like European Conservatives and Reformists Group (FdI from Italy, PiS from Poland) and Patriots for Europe (RN from France, FPÖ from Austria, Fidesz from Hungary). Meanwhile, all other parties in the same group as AfD are fairly niche. So even parties that hold similar positions, have been accused of being authoritarian or fascist, and are unafraid of appearing politically incorrect do not associate with AfD, and consider them to be too right wing or Nazi-adjacent. This should be kept in mind.
State security services in Europe are obsessed with the far right, even in countries with no fascist past. So is legacy media, most of it with public funding in Europe.
So I’m genuinely unsure as to how common fascist or neo-Nazi views actually are. Germany has 70 million adults and you will always find *someone* with mad ideas, especially if there is huge demand for such stories in the media. OTOH it’s very hard to make a living and keep the police off your back if you spend your time expressing these views as a German.
Stories about the American far right were common in the 90s after the Oklahoma City bombing. Hollywood made American History X. But after several documentaries trying very hard to find a menace it seems most on the far right in the US are just losers who and up carping with each other and couldn’t get themselves elected as a dog catcher.
Extremity to the degree of AfD is not particularly new in European politics. Italy has an actual communist party that has achieved >20% of the vote and run medium-sized cities all while seeking to leave NATO.
The problem is that Weidel being moderate has no impact on even the party platform. Weidel "tried to take the “remigration” term out of her manifesto because she considered it to be too extreme and it makes it basically impossible for them to have a coalition with the conservatives, and she was outnumbered and outvoted at the party conference and they put it back in.
And the same is true for other things like the definition of family as mother, father and child, which was in the manifesto. She took it out and they put it back in, despite her own situation not meeting that definition [she is in a same-sex relationship]. So it’s an odd thing in that you have a comparatively moderate leader leading a party that’s far more radical than she is but she’s willing to go along with it as well. " This is much more of a Milo situation, where you have the flamboyant gay heading your movement, not because you are actually on board with same-sex marriage, but because this is the sort of troll, that disarms legitimate worries, about the party being anti-gay. Weidel is selling her soul for the career, and the party gets good PR for the normies, but AFD remains as batshit crazy as ever.
I've had endless arguments with people on this platform regarding the nature of the AfD. Briefly, a party isn't 'extremist' because of a few phrases that a speechmaker says one time or some shadowy connections or suspect implications. It's only extremist on the basis of its members and its policy goals.
By that measure the AfD isn't extremist. German politics are unusually elite-captured and utopian.
Members and policy goals are hard to measure. Speech is easy to measure. If your members and policy goals are benign, it should be fairly easy to keep your speech benign as well?
Also, speech seems inextricably linked from members and policy goals. Imagine saying: "Their members like to fly the swastika, but that is just speech so it doesn't matter."
It’s a conundrum. If you can’t channel national conservative energies through the democratic system, then where will they go? and how truly democratic is that system?
On the other hand if there’s evidence they’d subvert it, isolating them becomes more understandable.
From this view, the case for preventing Trump 2.0 was stronger than that for banning the AfD, at least from what I know.
Hitler destroyed democracy through the democratic process. He specifically declared his intention to do it before taking office, then he went about doing it and somehow convinced enough people to go along with it that it worked. If the AfD is smart, they won't declare their motives outwardly like Hitler did, they will continue to use subtle language.
The AfD hasn't been shut out of anything. They have seats in the Bundestag. Nothing is legally preventing them from getting power. The whole way that coalition politics works is that you get to choose who to form coalitions with. If no one wants to form a coalition with the AfD, then it's ridiculous to argue that voters are somehow being disenfranchised. If the AfD wants more power, they need to make their message appealing to someone who might make a good coalition partner.
This really isn't very different than what is currently going on the US. Democrats don't join with Republicans to elect Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House. Republicans regularly refuse to work with Democrats to pass bills and vice-versa. The GOP Senate refused to let Obama put a judge on the Supreme Court. These are just choices. Other parties in Germany are choosing not to join with the AfD, which is probably smart. Radicals do not make good allies.
Oh it might be that the AfD is actually not radical enough. Like we currently see in the US there is potential for a new government basically reinventing the administration. Germany - and a lot of the EU - would also need something like that, but so far the populist right parties in Europe have been pretty ineffective in achieving foundational change and did more superficial measures like Trump 45 and the current AfD also looks more like that than doing a Milei / DOGE
I've always found it unusual that fascism and racism have become so lexically linked. The US, Canada, and Australia have forever been liberal democracies from their founding as federations to the present, and they were each founded by undeniable racists (Australia's founders even wanted to enshrine white supremacy in their constitution but were told not to by London due to the Anglo-Japanese alliance). Whereas Italy became fascist in 1922 and didn't pass racial laws until 1938 due to the influence of the Third Reich. Various regimes in Latin America could be plausibly described as fascistic and lacked a racial supremacist ideology. It goes without saying that both racism and fascism are grave political ills; nevertheless, it's unwarranted to frame them as inextricably linked as the press often does. Winston Churchill, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Deakin, and Thomas Jefferson were all white nationalists and not fascist in the slightest. Regimes the US backed during the Cold War were fascistic but often indifferent to race.
In the case of Germany it might seem sensible to strongly link the two, but even then it's questionable, as West Germany was explicitly not a nation of immigrants, and Germany only loosened its naturalization laws under Merkel. Hence, a German nativist may well be ideologically closer to Adenauer than to Hitler.
On a side note, Japan arguably catches even more unjustified flak than Germany for historical baggage. People are at least aware of Germany's apologies for Nazism (though their crimes in Namibia are less well known), whereas people falsely claim Japan hasn't apologized for its crimes (despite Murayama's and Fukuda's statements). When Japanese textbooks for kids don't dedicate as much space on atrocities, it draws international criticism, and Japanese PMs are often not even able to pay respects to the fallen due to international criticism.
I haven't heard of major German politicians paying respects to fallen German WWII war criminals. Is this a common occurrence?
US and Korean presidents pay respects to those who died serving in wars that most of their citizens consider unjustified and in which their countries committed atrocities. Korea hasn't held soldiers to account for the numerous atrocities committed in the Vietnam War, and Korean presidents pay respects to all the veterans of the conflict.
Moreover, Japanese PMs aren't specifically venerating war criminals. Yasukuni Shrine is a memorial to everybody who died serving in Japan's wars from the 1850s until the end, not just WWIIers
A funny anecdote about the AfD and speech laws in Germany:
> Alice Weidel said “Political correctness belongs on the dustbin of history” at an AfD party conference in 2017. The moderator Christian Ehring picked up on this in the satirical show extra 3 and said: "Yes, enough of political correctness. Let's all be incorrect." And he added: "The Nazi slut is right." Alice Weidel took legal action against this statement and received the following assessment from the court: "A violation of general personal rights can only be assumed if the statement, which has been exposed from its satirical guise, affects the dignity of the person concerned at its core." Since "Nazi" + "slut" were used here in a clearly recognizable satirical way, Weidel lost in court.
Taken from this compilation of statements from AfD members:
https://jugendstrategie.de/hasserfuellte-und-menschenverachtende-zitate-der-afd/
That’s a great story!
what about the guy who insulted a politician with a pun? didn't this apply to him when he was prosecuted?
"let's all be incorrect" indicates directly to the speaker that what follows is incorrect
I listened to JD Vance's Munich speech over the weekend and was quite happy about it. Europe right now is so terrified of right-wing extremism that most of its parties would rather abolish free speech and multiparty elections outright than work with right-wing politicians.
What's ironic is that if you swap (fake) fascists for (real) Communists, you get the exact situation that allowed Hitler to come to power in 1933. Germany was full of centrists and conservatives who disagreed with much of Hitler's program, but they were willing to give him unchecked power anyway because they were so terrified of the KPD and saw Nazi authoritarianism as the only bulwark against communist revolution. (Since Communists in Russia had already killed millions of people by that point, and the Nazi mass-killings were still a hypothetical, it's hard to blame them.)
Of course the situation with present-day European leftists trying to ban right-wing parties or actually cancel elections (as they have already done in Romania) is much less justifiable, given how mild the overall AfD positions actually are. Left-wing authoritarianism is by far the only threat worth worrying about at the moment. I wrote an article all about this in December, called "Romania and the Iranization of the West."
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/romania-and-the-iranization-of-the
My thesis was that Europe's left-wing parties are in the process of setting up a political system similar to Iran's, that has multiparty elections (Iranians DO get to elect a figurehead president every four years) but where elections are carefully managed, parties are often banned, and the unelected arm of the government can override the political arm whenever it has strong feelings about an issue (as happens in Iran when the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council ensure that the country will always have extreme policies on woman's dress, hatred of America, and sponsoring anti-semitic terrorists all over the Middle East, no matter how unpopular those policies are at the ballot box.)
America had a similar thing between the time of Earl Warren and when the Supreme Court swung right again under Trump. Americans got to keep freely electing presidents, congressmen, and so forth, but SCOTUS functioned as the true legislative power on any issue the justices had a strong opinion about. (Everyone knows that things like legal abortion and forced bussing had nothing to do with the original meaning of the US constitution; they were "constitutional" issues because at least five justices felt strongly about them, and for no other reason.) So the Court was able to force a lot of extreme and unpopular policies onto the country without ever having to get them approved by any representative body. Fortunately they never did anything as extreme as annuling elections and ordering them done over when a right-wing party won, but it got pretty close.
So in conclusion, you can't save democracy by destroying it, and the Nazis didn't take over Germany because Germany tolerated too much free speech - they took over because a lot of non-Nazis were so terrified of the Communists that they were willing to look the other way as the Nazis abolished all democratic checks and balances, since it seemed to them like the only sure way to keep the Communists out. If present-day Germany abolishes democracy to keep the AfD out, it will be even more shameful, since the AfD's actual positions are far less illiberal than either the NSDAP or the KPD.
"and the unelected arm of the government can override the political arm whenever it has strong feelings about an issue"
This is what happens here in the Netherlands. We elected a right wing (coalition) government with a pretty strong mandate to (significantly) tighten up immigration and asylum laws. But after a year, hardly anything has been done. Granted, in part it's because of infighting in the coalition, a lack of a senate majority and in part due to the (elected, in a way, but hardly democratic) EU dictating most of our laws on the subject, but a large part of it is due to the fact that the whole unelected government apparatus - the civil service, the courts, and other relevant institutions - are dominated by left-liberals, progressives and outright communists who will do anything to thwart any kind of conservative policies, especially on the topic of immigration. And the right, naively, hasn't made any kind of plan to deal with this or to change this.
And from my perspective, Vance was 100% right in his scolding of European leaders. Our continent is in a sad state when it comes to freedoms and economic dynamism. I know Richard is very pro-immigration and I can kind of see his point in the US context. But the islamisation of Europe is real, and it's not good and people are fed up. If the AfD doesn't win power now, it will in the future. Firewalls won't hold forever when every other day another Syrian or Afghan asylum seeker takes a gun, a knife or a car and goes on a religious rampage.
This has been a good read on the AfD, much more nuanced than what one usually finds. However, it is not true than Germany is too left wing, at least compared to other European countries. Restrictions on nuclear power and free speech are widespread in the EU, and homeschooling is anecdotal in Europe. In fact, Germany is, if anything, more right wing than the average Western European country, given its obsession with budget balancing (right wing coded in Europe) and that for most of its post-war history it has been ruled by centre right chancellors.
As for the JD Vance comments, it is ridiculous to suggest that German parties are disenfranchising voters by not entering coalitions with the AfD. Voters of all other major parties (CDU, SPD, FDP, the Greens, Die Linke) expect that the parties they support shun the AfD, and these voters are a supermajority of the German electorate.
I read Vance's entire speech. I don't recall him opining on whether other parties should enter coalitions with ADP. He argued that Europe (including Germany) was wrong to deploy government sanctions and penalties as a means of suppressing disfavored political speech, especially in settings where the speech and ideas being suppressed have a meaningful nucleus of popular support. His overall theme is that you can't really run a democracy if elite institutions fashion policy based on a fear that the majority of voters will vote the "wrong" way.
He said there should be no place for firewalls in politics which pretty much directly means that other parties should be prepared to enter coalitions with (I assume you mean) AfD. Because preventing that from happening is the purpose of the firewall.
I was going by the first paragraph of the article. I’m also against the free speech restrictions that many European governments are implementing, or considering implementing. Instead, I was talking about the refusal of all major parties to form coalitions with AfD, which is perfectly fine, and how believing that this shunning is somehow undemocratic is deeply silly.
"Voters of all other major parties (CDU, SPD, FDP, the Greens, Die Linke) expect that the parties they support shun the AfD"
I wouldn't be so sure about that regarding CDU/CSU voters
81% of CDU/CSU voters do not like the idea of the AfD governing:
https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2025-02-23-BT-DE/charts/umfrage-aktuellethemen/chart_1851951.shtml
No Germany led the march to poverty: Nordstream, led by Russian idiot utility (at best) Schröder, literally forging official investigative commission reports to justify and accelerate their environmentally and economically and geopolitically catastrophic de-nuclearisation, see also Nordstream II, and finally the Merkel led "mass immigration for all".
All of these were left wing projects.
We don't even need to mention their preventing any kind of European defence capability, or their enthusiastic repression of the middle classes (look up after tax income curves in Germany).
Small correction: The party to the right of the AfD is NPD, not NDP. It has now changed its name and is called "Die Heimat" loose to be translated as "The Fatherland".
You might want to add that an AfD federal deputy was actually involved in a coup attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgit_Malsack-Winkemann. It is understandable for deputies of other parties that they would rather not side with a party who fields such candidates.
Wow, before and after her time in the AfD she was a judge, still remaining one today despite being prosecuted for the coup attempt.
Wikipedia says she's in jail, awaiting trial (not sure how up to date they are). I doubt that she is working as a judge from her cell..
in fact she was suspended in March 2023: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/ex-afd-abgeordnete-malsack-winkemann-aus-richterdienst-entfernt-18752515.html
To add on to what was said in this article, I have looked at which European parliament group AfD belongs to, which is a handy if imperfect way for determining the ideology of a European political party. They belong to the Europe of Sovereign Nations Group, which is the farthest right group in the European parliament. Other European parties that are considered far right belong to more moderate groups, like European Conservatives and Reformists Group (FdI from Italy, PiS from Poland) and Patriots for Europe (RN from France, FPÖ from Austria, Fidesz from Hungary). Meanwhile, all other parties in the same group as AfD are fairly niche. So even parties that hold similar positions, have been accused of being authoritarian or fascist, and are unafraid of appearing politically incorrect do not associate with AfD, and consider them to be too right wing or Nazi-adjacent. This should be kept in mind.
State security services in Europe are obsessed with the far right, even in countries with no fascist past. So is legacy media, most of it with public funding in Europe.
So I’m genuinely unsure as to how common fascist or neo-Nazi views actually are. Germany has 70 million adults and you will always find *someone* with mad ideas, especially if there is huge demand for such stories in the media. OTOH it’s very hard to make a living and keep the police off your back if you spend your time expressing these views as a German.
Stories about the American far right were common in the 90s after the Oklahoma City bombing. Hollywood made American History X. But after several documentaries trying very hard to find a menace it seems most on the far right in the US are just losers who and up carping with each other and couldn’t get themselves elected as a dog catcher.
Extremity to the degree of AfD is not particularly new in European politics. Italy has an actual communist party that has achieved >20% of the vote and run medium-sized cities all while seeking to leave NATO.
Thoughtful and nuanced, well done! Jealous that you can write so fast.
The problem is that Weidel being moderate has no impact on even the party platform. Weidel "tried to take the “remigration” term out of her manifesto because she considered it to be too extreme and it makes it basically impossible for them to have a coalition with the conservatives, and she was outnumbered and outvoted at the party conference and they put it back in.
And the same is true for other things like the definition of family as mother, father and child, which was in the manifesto. She took it out and they put it back in, despite her own situation not meeting that definition [she is in a same-sex relationship]. So it’s an odd thing in that you have a comparatively moderate leader leading a party that’s far more radical than she is but she’s willing to go along with it as well. " This is much more of a Milo situation, where you have the flamboyant gay heading your movement, not because you are actually on board with same-sex marriage, but because this is the sort of troll, that disarms legitimate worries, about the party being anti-gay. Weidel is selling her soul for the career, and the party gets good PR for the normies, but AFD remains as batshit crazy as ever.
I've had endless arguments with people on this platform regarding the nature of the AfD. Briefly, a party isn't 'extremist' because of a few phrases that a speechmaker says one time or some shadowy connections or suspect implications. It's only extremist on the basis of its members and its policy goals.
By that measure the AfD isn't extremist. German politics are unusually elite-captured and utopian.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/case-study-elite-capture?r=1neg52
Members and policy goals are hard to measure. Speech is easy to measure. If your members and policy goals are benign, it should be fairly easy to keep your speech benign as well?
Also, speech seems inextricably linked from members and policy goals. Imagine saying: "Their members like to fly the swastika, but that is just speech so it doesn't matter."
It’s a conundrum. If you can’t channel national conservative energies through the democratic system, then where will they go? and how truly democratic is that system?
On the other hand if there’s evidence they’d subvert it, isolating them becomes more understandable.
From this view, the case for preventing Trump 2.0 was stronger than that for banning the AfD, at least from what I know.
Hitler destroyed democracy through the democratic process. He specifically declared his intention to do it before taking office, then he went about doing it and somehow convinced enough people to go along with it that it worked. If the AfD is smart, they won't declare their motives outwardly like Hitler did, they will continue to use subtle language.
The AfD hasn't been shut out of anything. They have seats in the Bundestag. Nothing is legally preventing them from getting power. The whole way that coalition politics works is that you get to choose who to form coalitions with. If no one wants to form a coalition with the AfD, then it's ridiculous to argue that voters are somehow being disenfranchised. If the AfD wants more power, they need to make their message appealing to someone who might make a good coalition partner.
This really isn't very different than what is currently going on the US. Democrats don't join with Republicans to elect Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House. Republicans regularly refuse to work with Democrats to pass bills and vice-versa. The GOP Senate refused to let Obama put a judge on the Supreme Court. These are just choices. Other parties in Germany are choosing not to join with the AfD, which is probably smart. Radicals do not make good allies.
Oh it might be that the AfD is actually not radical enough. Like we currently see in the US there is potential for a new government basically reinventing the administration. Germany - and a lot of the EU - would also need something like that, but so far the populist right parties in Europe have been pretty ineffective in achieving foundational change and did more superficial measures like Trump 45 and the current AfD also looks more like that than doing a Milei / DOGE
Excellent analysis.
Sellner didn't advocate "kicking out" anybody. Please correct this. Read his statements yourself if necessary.
Look at the first AfD poster in this article:
https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/afd-accused-nazi-symbolism-election-germany-hm8dv7nql
Two people making a nazi salute that is the roof of a hause for two blonde tottlers.
It has escalated quickly…