Germany’s federal system of government makes the country’s politics seem so complicated that most people outside Germany give up trying to understand it. At the federal level, there is the parliament (the Bundestag), a ceremonial president and a chancellor. At the moment, all of those branches of power seem normal enough, and are run by the same few democratic parties that have been there since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if you look the next level down, at the individual states (or länder), the picture that emerges is terrifying. Germany is still culturally and economically split in two by the old Iron Curtain. Nearly 40 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the promised reunification has still not been completed. People living in the former East look at the Berlin government and see policies that seem to ignore them. There are five states in the eastern part of the country, and opinion polls show majority support for the radical right party Alternative for Germany in all of them. This September, two of these states, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, will be holding elections in which AfD candidates are expected to win, putting them in charge of state governments for the first time. They are hoping for absolute majorities. That would give them sole control of the education system, the prisons and the police force.
A taste of what this might mean was given by Tommy Thormann, a low-level AfD politician from Rügen, a resort island that was formerly part of East Germany. Thirty years old, a former soldier and a train driver by trade, he became famous by making a speech suggesting that left-wing politicians should be dragged from their beds by police once the AfD takes power. His use of Nazi jargon has led critics to call him a “Gestapo fanboy.” He joined the party at age 20 and is looking forward to standing for election as an AfD candidate. Germany is still culturally and economically split in two by the old Iron Curtain. Like the Vox party in Spain, a lot of the extremist energy for the AfD comes from the young, and the party was forced to close down its first youth wing, Young Alternative, when it was officially classified as an extremist right-wing organization. Germany has strict laws against using Nazi imagery, with a dedicated administrative unit to enforce them, but this is the first time these laws have been seriously tested. The AfD simply started another youth wing, called Generation Germany, and the extremists migrated to the new entity. One of its leading lights is a 27-year-old blond beast named Kevin Dorow, a member of the executive board of Generation Germany, and also of the AfD’s state executive board for Schleswig-Holstein. He has dueling scars on his face like an old-fashioned young SS officer; in February, in his speech at the foundation of Generation Germany, he used Hitler Youth slogans. Online, he had already posted a video including an SS oath of allegiance: “And if all others become disloyal, we will remain loyal.”
The party expelled him for this blatantly illegal behavior, but one month later, in March, the expulsion was reversed following a rebellion within the party of the right-wing faction controlling Generation Germany. Dorow has said that he is happy to accept the negotiated solution of resigning from his public positions for two years. “My commitment to Generation Germany and to political work in Schleswig-Holstein remains unaffected by this step,” he said. The chairman of Generation Germany, his friend Jean-Pascal Hohm, didn’t criticize or even mention any Nazi slogans, instead praising Dorow’s selfless attitude in putting the party first.
There is a long list of similar stories: Nazi salutes, a future city councillor in Würzburg fined for repeatedly shouting “Sieg heil” at a gas station, and individual local AfD organizations having to close down or take some other damage control steps after similar scandals made it into the press. At present, the German population is evenly divided at 47% on the question of whether the AfD should be banned from elections completely. Legal scholar and former Constitutional Court judge Udo Di Fabio has warned against labeling the AfD a Nazi party. As he told Bild am Sonntag:
There may be figures within the AfD who flirt with the ideology and symbols of the Nazi Party. We must monitor this carefully; no one can rule out the possibility that the party will become further radicalized. But if we act as if we are already dealing with a Nazi party, then we also alienate those who vote for the AfD for whatever objective or less objective reasons. And that represents, after all, a quarter of the population of the Federal Republic of Germany.
This was in December. It is no longer a quarter of the population, but 41%, according to the latest polls. The AfD was not founded as a Nazi revival band. In 2013, it was just a small party focused on boring technical disagreements with the European Union. Three-quarters of its members had Ph.D.s, and this led to it being called the “Professors’ Party.” As it has grown, it has gone through many changes of leadership and policy positions, and often goes through convulsions in which leading members resign. Sometimes this is because the latest version of the party is not right-wing enough, but sometimes it is the opposite. The dissidents then try to form a new party that is more left- or right-wing as the case may be, and after a few weeks or months this fails and is wound up. The AfD juggernaut rolls on.
The party’s leaders in Berlin are chasing national victory, and have learned that they have to present a sanitized version of what their voters want. Nobody in Germany believes this, but it is evidently enough to fool people like Elon Musk (“Only the AfD can save Germany”), Marco Rubio (“Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy — it’s tyranny in disguise”) and JD Vance (“The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, and by far the most representative of East Germany. Now the bureaucrats try to destroy it”). Donald Trump himself has not commented, probably because he doesn’t know what the AfD is, but the man who kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside is unlikely to lose too much sleep over a Nazi revival.
Make no mistake: This is an actual Nazi movement. The extremist leaders may have been purged, but the grassroots make up a working-class movement based on opposition to Islam and the EU, constituting a new-generation Nazi organization hiding in plain sight. In Russia, nationalist demonstrations always have a sprinkling of old people with pictures of Stalin. This is not illegal, and, after all, Stalin did lead Russia in its Great Patriotic War. If swastikas and pictures of Hitler were not illegal in Germany, there is little doubt that they would have reappeared at AfD events, with the key difference that the keen Nazis are not nostalgic old people, but young people who apparently believe that what Germany now needs is a bit of national socialism. Make no mistake: This is an actual Nazi movement. Proof of this comes from the 2023 Bremen state election. The AfD was disqualified from the ballot after submitting two lists of candidates due to party infighting. The result was 10 seats won by Citizens in Rage, a tiny far-right party that no longer exists. Voters were not voting for the AfD party specifically, but for far-right policies, whoever was offering them.
It is hard to exaggerate how dangerous this is. Germany, largely as a result of Trump’s anti-European and anti-NATO rhetoric, is rearming and will soon have a larger defense budget than France and the U.K. combined and the largest in Europe. The AfD wants to reintroduce conscription at age 18, and, as in many countries, the military is a stronghold of far-right ideas. It is entirely possible that the largest and most powerful military in Europe will soon be predominantly Nazi in its sympathies. This does not mean they are going to invade Poland again, however. For there is one big difference this time around: The AfD has developed a friendly relationship with Russia.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and in the second Trump administration, the AfD has moved to an anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian position, publicly saying it wants no sanctions on Russia, and no military aid to Ukraine. In June 2024 many AfD delegates boycotted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the Bundestag. In February 2023, the Amsterdam-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found evidence that the AfD was a target for the International Agency for Current Policy, a Kremlin front organization run by Sargis Mirzakhanian, a staffer at the Russian Duma, which was making secret cash payments to European politicians to make pro-Kremlin parliamentary motions and for favorable media articles. In August of that year, an investigation by The Insider reported payments from Moscow to AfD politicians who then initiated a complaint in Germany against the supply of weapons to Ukraine.
Following this logic, a future AfD government would likely be an ally for Vladimir Putin’s Russia rather than a sworn enemy of the subhuman Slavs. It is not the Adolf Hitler of “Mein Kampf” and the concentration camps that these new Nazis want to bring back. They place no particular stress on antisemitism, Muslims being their primary target. The unanswered question is what relationship they now have with MAGA. Many AfD policies mirror MAGA talking points: Islam, immigration, woke, LGBTQ+, and so on, and being friends of Trump was a major selling point of the national leadership. But a party driven by a spontaneous mass movement has to follow public opinion, and the war in Iran is extremely unpopular in Germany, as everywhere else in Europe, which has led to calls for the expulsion of U.S. troops and nuclear weapons from Germany, an old AfD policy now coming back into focus. For the time being, the AfD seems to be simultaneously pro- and anti-MAGA, but that can’t last. If the wars in Iran and Ukraine end, that will have some kind of unpredictable effect, but the main picture is clear: A growing movement of mainly young German Nazis has latched on to the AfD as their preferred route to power. From what is now a solid base in the former East, the rest of Germany is gradually being absorbed, as the boring old Christian Democrats and Social Democrats and the ineffectual Greens fail to provide the kind of answers the disillusioned electorate is looking for.
The AfD has a favorite academic, Jörg Baberowski, a professor of Eastern European history at Humboldt University in Berlin, who has just published a book on populist politics (widely understood to be mainly about the AfD) called “Am Volk vorbei” (Bypassing the People), which presents the surprising argument that fascism is good for democracy. “Populism is also a corrective,” writes Baberowski,
an antidote to the self-empowerment of the privileged, a wedge that breaks through the prescribed consensus, and in this way it contributes to the revitalization of politics.
The book has made a big splash in Germany, with reviews appearing in all the main political media outlets. Only a few left-wing publications remarked that Germany has seen its politics revitalized like this before — in 1933.
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