The American Government Sides with the Party of German Neo-Nazis

The MAGA-AfD alliance of extremists is not surprising, but it remains outrageous. If democracy is to prevail, America needs to establish a robust anti-fascist consensus

The Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in NYC in February 1939 – a picture taken from the documentary “A Night at the Garden”

News broke Friday morning that Germany’s domestic intelligence service is now officially classifying the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” group. The decision came after three years of investigating the party and was presented in a 1,100-page report. This is a big deal: The AfD is currently the second strongest party in the country. In the general election in late February, it received 20.8 percent of the vote; in east Germany, the AfD dominated almost everywhere, getting close to 50 percent of the vote in some areas of the former GDR.

Whatever the political fallout, this decision is also clearly correct. Founded in 2013, the AfD quickly evolved from what was initially mainstream-rightwing-to-reactionary territory into a far-right party that fully rejects liberal democracy and is undoubtedly the political home of Germany’s rightwing extremists. In the American public discourse, the AfD is often referred to as Germany’s Neo-Nazi party. The best “defense” one could plausibly come up with on behalf of the AfD is that, technically, many of the AfD politicians aren’t Neo-Nazis themselves, although some leading party figures certainly have strong ties into the Neo-Nazi scene and the AfD is all too happy to tolerate those connections as well as the fact that the country’s Neo-Nazis certainly see the AfD as their party. So, technically, the AfD is best described as a coalition between national-conservative reactionaries and seething extremists (very much including Neo-Nazis) that is defined by anti-Muslim sentiment, an escalating anti-immigration stance, and an aggressive ethno-nationalism; it is also increasingly focused on raging against any social and cultural progress of recent decades. The feminists, the environmentalists, the lefty students, the lgbtq+ community – they are all on the AfD’s enemy list.

(With those “qualifications” in mind, go ahead and call it Germany’s Neo-Nazi party.)

The decision of the German authorities to call this party of extremists an extremist party was met with immediate outrage from MAGA America. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, always so eager to please his wannabe-dictator president and prove his MAGA credentials, posted a statement on Ex-Twitter:

“Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy—it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD—which took second in the recent election—but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes. Germany should reverse course.”

Rubio calls it a “spy agency” to make it sound ominous and shady. The AfD is, of course, only one of several opposition parties in the German parliament (all the other ones reject the AfD) – but calling it “the opposition” is in line with how these rightwing extremists like to present themselves: The voice of the true people, the Volk, in a struggle against the evil “establishment.” AfD leaders love to talk about how they stand alone against “the uniparty”: They are all the same, very much including the mainstream conservative CDU, all just agents of radical woke leftism. The spectrum of acceptable opinion, to the German Far Right, starts and ends with the AfD. Finally, Rubio fabulates about the “establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies” – a complete fabrication, but an established talking point on the American Right: Those European politicians are allowing their countries to be overrun with dangerous Others!

Just a few hours after Rubio’s statement came out, Vice President JD Vance chimed in. He wasn’t going to miss this chance to show his disdain for liberal democracy in Europe!

“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. The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt - not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment.”

This is exactly the line Vance had already taken at the Munich Security Conference in February, when he declared that the real threat for Europe was not coming from Russia, or any other autocratic regime – it was coming “from within.” The democratic parties in Europe are the real authoritarians, and the authoritarians working to destroy liberal democracy from both within and without are the real democrats.

No surprises here, but it remains remarkable and shocking nonetheless: The government of the most powerful nation in human history is in the hands of people who openly align with Germany’s Neo-Nazi party. Let’s dwell on this for a little bit. I hope we have not become too cynical or numb to acknowledge how outrageous this is.

What actually happened in Germany – and what happens next

I think it’s worth taking a step back to unpack why the German authorities made this decision, why they made it now, and what might happen next.

The decision itself has been at least three years in the making. In May 2021, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz – BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, designated the AfD as a “suspected extremist case” and consequently placed the party under surveillance. The AfD challenged this decision, but it was upheld in court. In May 2024, the judges at the Higher Administrative Court in Münster declared they were “convinced that there are sufficient factual indications that the AfD is pursuing efforts that are directed against the human dignity of certain groups of people and against the principle of democracy.”

In addition to investigating the party as a whole, the BfV had already designated the AfD regional branches in three of the sixteen German states as “confirmed right-wing extremist.” In April 2023, it did the same for the youth wing of the AfD, the so-called “Young Alternative” (Junge Alternative). This designation was also challenged and upheld in court.

It seems the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution had its report ready at the beginning of the year. Why did they wait until now to make it public? As Germany scheduled a snap election for late February, it seems the authorities decided they couldn’t interfere in the ongoing election campaign. But non-interference is an active – and explicitly political – decision as well, of course, and one that protected the AfD. The agency ultimately chose May 2 to drop its report: A bridge day (May 1 is a federal holiday in Germany), and right before the lame-duck government is being replaced by an incoming administration next week. It certainly seems like Germany’s domestic intelligence service was hoping to get this over with rather quietly; a strategy intended to maximize the impact in order to protect the constitutional order would have looked very different.

The big question now is whether the government will ask the constitutional court to ban the AfD – which the German Basic Law allows as a last-resort measure. Coming out of the experience of democracy’s demise in the interwar period, the widespread perception after 1945 was that the Weimar Republic had simply not been given the necessary tools to defend itself against the onslaught of extremist movements and parties that were making use of the very democratic features of Weimar’s constitution to bring the hated Republic down. Attempting to rectify this fatal flaw, West Germany adopted the idea of a “militant democracy,” a term coined and popularized by German constitutional lawyer and political scientist Karl Loewenstein (1891-1973) in the late 1930s. Germans tend to speak proudly of their “wehrhafte Demokratie” – a fortified democracy capable of fighting back and enacting preemptive measures to hinder enemies of the constitutional order before they even have the chance to wield power. In practice, Germany’s Basic Law allows, for instance, for groups or parties to be declared “hostile to the constitution” and therefore be surveilled by the state or, at the extreme end, even outlawed. As the Federal Constitutional Court puts it: “While the state should have as little influence as possible over their actions, a militant democracy must be able to combat anti-constitutional parties.” Both the legislative bodies as well as the Federal Government can ask the Court to ban a party; but the decision ultimately rests with the judges.

That these parties “seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany” is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for a ban. Before a party can be outlawed, two further conditions must be met: The party “must also take an actively belligerent, aggressive stance vis-à-vis the free democratic basic order”; and, crucially, “specific indications are required which suggest that it is at least possible that the party will achieve its anti-constitutional aims.”

On substance, I really don’t see much reason to doubt that the AfD fulfills all three of these criteria for a ban. And yet, I’d be very surprised if the government actually asked the constitutional court to act. Even the German Left and leading progressives seem, at best, divided over this issue. And to be clear, there are certainly reasons to be skeptical towards the instrument of a party ban. The history of how it has been used in post-war Germany offers no easy lessons. The Federal Constitutional Court has twice banned a party: the Sozialistische Reichspartei (SRP), an explicitly fascist party that proudly claimed the tradition of Hitler’s NSDAP, in 1952; and the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), a communist party, in 1956. In the twenty-first century, there have been two attempts to prohibit the far-right Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD). But both times, the Constitutional Court decided against it: On procedural grounds in 2003; and in 2017 because the Court found there was no indication that the NPD, while clearly aiming at destroying the democratic order, “would succeed in achieving its anti-constitutional aims.” No imminent threat, no party ban.

Most observers regard the banning of the openly fascist SRP in 1952 as wholly justified, and I agree. But the ban of the communist KPD is a completely different matter. The KPD was certainly hostile to the constitutional order. But there is no plausible case to be made that it constituted an imminent threat and had any realistic chance of bringing democracy down. It was a fringe party; its prohibition can only be explained as an excess of anti-communist hysteria in the early Cold War. The decision was heavily criticized even at the time and its successor parties have not been subjected to bans. In fact, it has now been almost 70 years since a party was prohibited – this particular instrument has been used rarely, the government has proven extremely reluctant and hesitant to seek a ban, and the Court has certainly not, contrary to what critics of “militant democracy” feared, acted as a henchman for an executive eager to eliminate political opposition.

The instruments that make a democracy “militant” in the sense Loewenstein envisioned must evidently be handled with great care, lest the defense of democracy turn the system into something other than democratic. On those grounds, I think it is reasonable – although I may disagree – to argue that the option to ban a party should not be part of a democracy’s arsenal at all.

But I fear what will actually keep the German government from using the tools the law and the constitution provide is not a principled stance against party bans, but something that has also hampered and sabotaged the response of U.S. institutions to the threat of Trumpism. The political debate over how to handle the AfD is too often dominated by concerns over how “undemocratic” it would be to do anything against a party that has the support of millions of Germans – rather than focusing on the duty to protect German democracy *from* the AfD. For anyone who has paid attention to how reluctant American institutions have been to hold Donald Trump accountable, this must sound very familiar. On either side of the Atlantic, there is also an element of volkish ideology shaping the way the institutions have behaved: Both Trump and the AfD, the assumption seems to be, channel the Volk and therefore are to be given wide latitude; as they supposedly embody and give voice to a populist uprising of “regular folks,” their message is to be amplified; the will of the true people must not be impeded. Who wants to bring the hammer down on those tribunes of “real” America/Germany?

I fear what we will get in Germany is a debate in which too many people claim to be on board with the idea of a “militant democracy” (as laid out in the constitution) but also simply do not want a ban for the AfD. They will therefore rationalize backwards from that position: If acutely dangerous, extremist parties are to be banned; but if one does not want to apply that to the AfD, one must argue the AfD doesn’t deserve to be banned (making, in effect, a case *for* the AfD). Something very similar happened in the United States: There is an insurrection clause in Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment that very clearly disqualifies insurrectionists from holding office. As long as we are pretending to still be following the constitution, we must pretend January 6 was not an insurrection (or come up with all sorts of disingenuous contortions for why the constitution supposedly does not say what it says).

What we mean when we call the AfD an extremist party

As that is all about to play out, we must not forget the key point: There is no question the AfD is a rightwing extremist party. Here are just a few examples, some reminders of who the current government of the United States of America is siding with:

The leading figure of the AfD’s most extreme wing, with strong ties to the neo-Nazi scene, is Björn Höcke. He leads the AfD in the state of Thuringia, its strongest bastion in the country. In 2017 Höcke called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “memorial of shame.” In May 2021, he yelled “Everything for Germany!” (“Alles für Deutschland!”) at a party rally. This slogan is associated with Nazi stormtroopers. Höcke, of course, claims he did not know that. Which hasn’t kept him from repeatedly playing around with this kind of Nazi rhetoric: At a rally in December 2023, he said “Everything for…” – leaving it to the audience to finish: “Germany!” In May 2024, a court found that Höcke was indeed guilty of using a prohibited Nazi slogan; he was fined.

In November 2023, several high-ranking AfD politicians attended a meeting with neo-Nazis and rightwing businesspeople to discuss a plan envisioning the ethnic cleansing of Germany via the forced deportation of millions of people. They euphemistically called it “remigration,” a term European rightwing extremists have widely adopted. Subsequent reporting revealed that this had in fact been the seventh such meeting. The whole plan hinged on the AfD coming to power in Germany.

In May 2024, the coalition of far-right parties in the European parliament, the so-called Identity and Democracy (ID) group, threw the AfD out. The ID was the home of France’s National Rally (that’s the party of Marine Le Pen) and Austria’s far-right FPÖ. Not exactly liberal democracy’s loyal allies – but they no longer wanted to tolerate the AfD in their midst. Why? Because the AfD’s lead candidate for the 2024 European parliamentary election, Maximilian Krah, publicly declared we shouldn’t be so quick to judge the actions of… members of the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the SS, which played a key role in the Nazi regime’s genocidal machine. In response, none other than Marine Le Pen declared that “it was urgent to establish a cordon sanitaire” and end all cooperation with the AfD; she demanded “a clean break with this movement.” Krah now represents the AfD in the German parliament.

One more: In January 2025, the AfD in Karlsruhe, a mid-sized town in the southwest of Germany, printed 30,000 flyers made to look like plane tickets. They were called “Abschiebeticket”: deportation ticket. They were addressed to “illegal immigrants” (the AfD denied targeting foreigners – but people from immigrant communities certainly found them in their mailboxes and alerted police). “Only remigration can still save Germany,” it said on the flyer. This disgusting stunt, which had the support of state party leadership, clearly resembled an infamous Nazi campaign: In 1933, the Nazis distributed fake train tickets to Jewish Germans – “free one-way tickets to Jerusalem, no return.”

Just always remember: That is the party the American government is actively supporting.

And it makes sense. In many ways the AfD is the German version of the fully Trumpified Republican Party: A far-right coalition that unites different shades of radical reaction and “counter-revolutionary” extremism. Frankly, they deserve each other. And there is no better way for them to tell the world who they really are than through this MAGA-AfD alliance of extremists.

The American Right loves rightwing authoritarians abroad

There is a long tradition on the Right of supporting foreign autocrats, of longingly admiring and emulating rightwing regimes in other countries. It has always been a way for rightwing intellectuals and politicians to affirm and communicate their preferred vision of societal order at home and abroad. They supported apartheid in South Africa as the manifestation of a “natural” racial hierarchy. They adored Franco-Spain as a model of white Christian patriarchal order. They hailed Mussolini for his “reactionary modernism” and his manliness. And, of course, the original “America First” movement of the 1940s was strongly opposed to going to war with Hitler: Many of the movements’ leaders either supported the Nazis and thought Germany was fighting for a noble cause or were simply anti-anti-Nazi. MAGA explicitly places itself in that political and ideological tradition.

There is also, to be clear, ample precedent for the American government to side with rightwing authoritarians abroad. During the Cold War, the Western superpower certainly preferred a “stable” rightwing regime over anyone deemed insufficiently anti-Communist.

What is happening right now is still different. The Trumpist regime isn’t supporting the AfD out of opportunism, its stance isn’t based on raw power politics or a cynical indifference to who or what the AfD is. MAGA is siding with the AfD *because* it is a rightwing extremist party - *because* it is aiming to bring liberal democracy down in Germany. That is the shared goal; liberal democracy is the shared enemy.

An anti-fascist consensus, reimagined

This is a remarkable moment in U.S. history. The fact that a movement that openly embraces the German Far Right, the party of German Neo-Nazis, was able to first take over the Republican Party and then the American government signals the complete dissolution of something we might call an anti-fascist consensus. The term is imperfect and perhaps even problematic. There was certainly never a universally shared consensus in America that the key elements of Nazi politics and ideology were bad. But there was nevertheless some agreement across the mainstream political spectrum that America had fought a righteous and noble war against Hitler. American society celebrated and revered its “Greatest Generation” and the soldiers who defeated the Nazis; American popular culture used the Nazis as a representation of ultimate evil. Anyone openly siding against this agreement would have had to expect to pay a price – politically, socially, and culturally. In post-1945 America, this was obviously never enough, in and of itself, to turn the nation from a racial caste system to a fully realized multiracial, pluralistic democracy. But it did provide those who desired egalitarian pluralism with a strong argument they could deploy in their struggle against rightwing extremism – it helped police the boundaries of what was considered acceptable within mainstream politics and “respectable” society.

That is evidently no longer the case. MAGA is now in power. This breakdown of boundaries did not happen overnight. It took decades for the most extreme factions to pull the entire “conservative” coalition further and further to the Right – and for the more moderate people, all those who might have objected to the idea of supporting German Neo-Nazis, to be ostracized. It will likely take decades to get the country out of this mess, which requires not just political change, but a fundamental reform of political and social culture. If a stable democracy that deserves the name is ever to emerge from this, America will have to restore some boundaries. We need to reimagine an anti-fascist consensus not in service of a purely restorative project, but as a reminder of the nation’s egalitarian aspirations, as a plea to finally defeat those anti-democratic forces in our midst and push America forward. You are siding with the German Neo-Nazis? That makes you the bad guys. In a society that cannot hold even that basic line, democracy stands little chance.