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
A bit late to read your article and I would like to underline that while Trump Administration is clearly a 'sovereignist', it does seem to act very interventionist against the sovereignty of other nations.
I believe in the future historians will say that not banning AfD after it was declared wholly extremist was the biggest mistake on the way to Fascist Germany 2.0
We are missing our last chance to prevent the fascists taking power again in the next years and we will pay a horrible price for it, just like the US.
A "militant democracy" does you no good when the democrats that are supposed to be militant in defending it are cowards.
The German Foreign Office gave a great reply to Marco’s tweet:
“This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”
Thomas Zimmer's clear-sighted Democracy Americana story on the recent international fascistic activism of the regime alerts the free world we face an emergency situation that demands an international response, not just a democratic alliance within the post-coup US. A urgent, resilient and nonviolent national mobilization coordinating with judicial constitutionalism can now surge to meet hollow force with the power of real legitimacy.This will influence key actors who have sworn allegiance to the Constitutional rules-based order. Active, organised, engaged hope is powerful.
Your proclamation of those Great Depression/Greatest Generation/mutual aid values again will be vital in this post-neoliberal era of market collapse caused by extreme inequality, ecological overshoot and emergent eco-fascist ethno-nationalism (EFEN)
masquerading as economic nationalism. The Christchurch shooter, as he live-streamed the Christchurch Mosque, Massacre, released a long "manifesto" of cut-and-paste alt-right extremism in which he explicitly identified as an EFEN.
Yes, dialogue is difficult and generally unproductive when cult identity, as with serious mental illness, takes over a vulnerable person's brain.
Compassionate action then has to triage capacity and effort from pulling drowning victims out of the river to stopping those upstream who are throwing them in. Situation ethics kicks in. Bonhoeffer and the assassination attempt on Hitler. Some American Quakers who joined the fight against Fascism while respecting the logic and sentiment of conscientious war resistance.
As US military psychiatrist M.Scott Peck memorably opened The Way Less Travelled: "Life is difficult." And opening A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".
Those of us who have already immigrated to Germany are very concerned. I am a dual German and American, who grew up in the US. My American friends here in Germany are also concerned about the rise of the AfD. It is being discussed regularly. Our family and friends in the US ask us, why are you better off living in Germany when they have the AfD? It is no different than Trump.
I am bothered that Merz is planning on visiting Donald Trump in the US. If Germany is to have a firewall against working with fascists, what does it say when Merz goes to Donald Trump who is both a fascist and a convicted criminal? All of the European leaders going to pay homage to Trump do not seem to see the negative optics of their actions. They are negotiating with a convicted criminal and a fascist. The EU would probably be better off if they did not. The members of the AfD show their true colors by visiting Trump and Putin, and the CDU/CSU Union should not be doing this as well.
Like you, Linda, I am a dual national. I am USA born and GER naturalized. For me right now, the question is where would I feel less unsafe. The double negative construct might seem silly, but that's what my worry is right now. The BfV domestic intelligence agency, which had already designated several local AfD chapters as right-wing extremist, said it decided to give the entire party the label due to its attempts to "undermine the free, democratic" order in Germany. It cited in particular the "xenophobic, anti-minority, Islamophobic and anti-Muslim statements made by leading party officials".
It seems to me that the German Federal Government is more or less intact, while the US Federal Government is not, having been subject to what can only be described as an "internal coup," reminiscent of Hitler.
Only a few months ago, the question for us was « where will we feel happier? » It has now become « where will we feel safer? » My mind has difficulty conceiving how the world has changed in such a short time.
Jeff, I understand the differences between the two countries, but as a German with brown skin, I hear the AfD discussing removing Germans with the "wrong" skin color, and that is scary. My daughter and husband have nothing to worry about in that regard. I do. The CDU/CSU has not been very reassuring in that regard. It seems they agree.
While I heard that the BfV said that the anti-Muslim rhetoric is one reason that the AfD is considered far-right, I do not see that awareness being applied equally. Anti-semitism is illegal and yet when a Muslim says a certain slogan they can be deported and lose their German citizenship. When a White Neo-Nazi uses slogans and signals from the time when Hitler was in power, or even complaining about "globalization," which is code speak for Jews, there is no discussion of removal from Germany.
My husband and I chose the city we live in here in Germany, because there are a lot of immigrants, and it is an immigrant friendly city. My husband is born and raised in Germany, but after living in the US most of his working life, he is more aware of what I am discussing. I understood about the seduction of the AfD to Germans when we moved here a few years ago, but they were not as popular then as they are now, and since the election they are polling even higher.
I believe part of this is because it has taken the government so long to speak up. Waiting until after the election to make this announcement was not helpful, but the opposite. If the party is illegal, enforce the law and outlaw them. There are people who would not vote for them if they understood them to be far right, even as they try to mask it.
Right after the election I decided that the AfD might no longer be legal in the next election, but Zimmer has pointed out how the government is reluctant to stand up to a party that is growing ever more popular.
Also concerning is one of the root causes of the increased support of the AfD is related to education in the younger generations who are the future.
Whereas the education level of Gen Zers is higher than in older segments of the population since a greater percent get university degrees, which is related to being more likely to vote for more liberal parties in their generation, we see that males are less likely than women to attain higher education making them more susceptible to the influences of the AfD. In fact, I read an article where a man was interviewed and he could not decide between the AfD and Die Linke.
I wrote two articles on research on the influence of X and TikTok on the German elections. One thing one can conclude is that people with less education are more likely to be influenced by Bot accounts. Here is the second article since her research covers both platforms.
The attempt by the US (X) and China (TikTok) to influence the German elections to support the AfD is concerning. While a direct correlation between attempt to influence people and their actual votes is not yet established, what is established is that they did try to do this. Germany has not banned these platforms from operating in Germany, and they have not helped people who are not educated to be better consumers of technology, and disinformation. It is also concerning that in a country with a tuition free education, not many citizens are completing a university degree.
This is as interesting as it is alarming - and frankly, ridiculous. Musk just installed AI in all US government computers so that the US can take spying on its own citizens (and punishing them illegally) to a whole new level, which only exists in China and definitely not in Germany. And somehow, Vance and Rubio want to call the GERMAN intelligence agency "anti-democratic"?? All while supporting a violent insurrection at home and ignoring court orders (something Germany's democratic government never did either)?
That being said, what are the specific arguments showing that the AfD is not only anti-immigrants but also anti-democracy?
German federal governments have ignored a number of court orders over the years, including orders by our version of SCOTUS. And the incoming CDU led government will start its work with clear breaking of German, EU and international law when it starts turning away migrants at the German borders.
Our Grundgesetz and EU immigration laws which guarantee the individual processing of each asylum claim, for instance. Dublin III is another. International law by turning away fugitives under the Geneva Convention. They all make push backs at the border illegal. Merz doesn't give a shit and SPD is co-signing this.
Any concrete facts? Which individual asylum claim was not individually processed more precisely? And what Geneva Convention article was broken when and where more precisely?
Thanks for sharing your spot on coverage. This was one of the related reasons I wrote this commentary for Salon which shares much in common with the simpático at play here:
The Germans associated the Weimar Republic with their defeat in WWI, hyper-inflation, and the Great Depression. We may be lucky that Trump's abject stupidity has led him to self-inflict an economic recession on America. It's hopeful that Americans will associate Trump with the destruction of democracy together with the economy and see the restoration of democracy and the rule of law as a way out of the mess that he created.
Your command of English is superb; why not aim for perfection? Where you wrote “eminent threat” you meant to write “imminent threat”— a very common mistake.
While they were far from the uniformly perfect bastions of democracy they were mostly portrayed as (I'm thinking racism, sexism, colonialist etc) the Greatest Generation themselves in my experience were more supportive of social welfare programs than their children. Probably from living through the Depression. While I have heard all my life how it was the US that saved Europe by entering the war; what I heard from my great uncles was that the USSR saved Europe from the Nazis. The veterans themselves that I knew weren't the type of people to claim a victory that wasn't theirs. How they felt about communism is hard to say, probably mostly that it was a subject best avoided. It might have behooved all of us if the climate had been more amenable to discussions about the differences between socialism and communism and why exactly the US was so set against communism. It seems we focused much attention on the evils of a autocratic state coming from the left and almost none on the far more likely threat of the same thing coming from the right. When I was a kid there were lots of bumper stickers in my neighborhood demanding "US out of El Salvador!" But it was years before I fully understood what that meant and why. And I'm in the minority by far I fear. It troubled me to watch Biden and the entire federal government apparatus choose so unwisely to not punish Trump personally for January 6. In general even with reports done by their own agencies (who have untold numbers of white nationalists in their members) our federal and state security agencies have chosen every time to turn their attention to the left, or the poor, or the immigrant, always this "other". In this it appears Germany is choosing to be somewhat more proactive? From your description of the timing though, it also sounds like perhaps not proactive enough in many ways. Even the media that is underreporting the reality of the damage Trump is causing hasn't escaped his wrath. I don't know if there is a parallel in history of a population so willing to look the other way, to embrace ignorance, to act as if this is no big deal, to sleepwalk themselves into the dissolution of their own freedoms.
I'll never understand, because it's impossible to have a dialogue with those who refuse to discuss reality.
We Americans on the left have long believed in what appears to be a fatally incorrect formula: that the more we act towards the 'good,' then the more the 'bad' will automatically subtract towards zero, to eventually simply disappear. We don't really have to *do* anything about negative effects (or actors, or movements), as long as we can point out some vague positive progress.
Obviously this formula has been wrong, since the Civil War & Reconstruction, and carrying through so many traumatic events: Ford pardoning Nixon, the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, the gun violence of the 21st century, BLM, the January 6th insurrection, etc., etc., etc.
As an American having observed this tendency for nearly 60 years, it's always striking to me how little we want to even entertain a discussion, much less actually try to do something about it.
A bit late to read your article and I would like to underline that while Trump Administration is clearly a 'sovereignist', it does seem to act very interventionist against the sovereignty of other nations.
I believe in the future historians will say that not banning AfD after it was declared wholly extremist was the biggest mistake on the way to Fascist Germany 2.0
We are missing our last chance to prevent the fascists taking power again in the next years and we will pay a horrible price for it, just like the US.
A "militant democracy" does you no good when the democrats that are supposed to be militant in defending it are cowards.
The German Foreign Office gave a great reply to Marco’s tweet:
“This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”
Thomas Zimmer's clear-sighted Democracy Americana story on the recent international fascistic activism of the regime alerts the free world we face an emergency situation that demands an international response, not just a democratic alliance within the post-coup US. A urgent, resilient and nonviolent national mobilization coordinating with judicial constitutionalism can now surge to meet hollow force with the power of real legitimacy.This will influence key actors who have sworn allegiance to the Constitutional rules-based order. Active, organised, engaged hope is powerful.
Your proclamation of those Great Depression/Greatest Generation/mutual aid values again will be vital in this post-neoliberal era of market collapse caused by extreme inequality, ecological overshoot and emergent eco-fascist ethno-nationalism (EFEN)
masquerading as economic nationalism. The Christchurch shooter, as he live-streamed the Christchurch Mosque, Massacre, released a long "manifesto" of cut-and-paste alt-right extremism in which he explicitly identified as an EFEN.
Yes, dialogue is difficult and generally unproductive when cult identity, as with serious mental illness, takes over a vulnerable person's brain.
Compassionate action then has to triage capacity and effort from pulling drowning victims out of the river to stopping those upstream who are throwing them in. Situation ethics kicks in. Bonhoeffer and the assassination attempt on Hitler. Some American Quakers who joined the fight against Fascism while respecting the logic and sentiment of conscientious war resistance.
As US military psychiatrist M.Scott Peck memorably opened The Way Less Travelled: "Life is difficult." And opening A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".
Those of us who have already immigrated to Germany are very concerned. I am a dual German and American, who grew up in the US. My American friends here in Germany are also concerned about the rise of the AfD. It is being discussed regularly. Our family and friends in the US ask us, why are you better off living in Germany when they have the AfD? It is no different than Trump.
I am bothered that Merz is planning on visiting Donald Trump in the US. If Germany is to have a firewall against working with fascists, what does it say when Merz goes to Donald Trump who is both a fascist and a convicted criminal? All of the European leaders going to pay homage to Trump do not seem to see the negative optics of their actions. They are negotiating with a convicted criminal and a fascist. The EU would probably be better off if they did not. The members of the AfD show their true colors by visiting Trump and Putin, and the CDU/CSU Union should not be doing this as well.
Like you, Linda, I am a dual national. I am USA born and GER naturalized. For me right now, the question is where would I feel less unsafe. The double negative construct might seem silly, but that's what my worry is right now. The BfV domestic intelligence agency, which had already designated several local AfD chapters as right-wing extremist, said it decided to give the entire party the label due to its attempts to "undermine the free, democratic" order in Germany. It cited in particular the "xenophobic, anti-minority, Islamophobic and anti-Muslim statements made by leading party officials".
It seems to me that the German Federal Government is more or less intact, while the US Federal Government is not, having been subject to what can only be described as an "internal coup," reminiscent of Hitler.
Only a few months ago, the question for us was « where will we feel happier? » It has now become « where will we feel safer? » My mind has difficulty conceiving how the world has changed in such a short time.
Jeff, I understand the differences between the two countries, but as a German with brown skin, I hear the AfD discussing removing Germans with the "wrong" skin color, and that is scary. My daughter and husband have nothing to worry about in that regard. I do. The CDU/CSU has not been very reassuring in that regard. It seems they agree.
While I heard that the BfV said that the anti-Muslim rhetoric is one reason that the AfD is considered far-right, I do not see that awareness being applied equally. Anti-semitism is illegal and yet when a Muslim says a certain slogan they can be deported and lose their German citizenship. When a White Neo-Nazi uses slogans and signals from the time when Hitler was in power, or even complaining about "globalization," which is code speak for Jews, there is no discussion of removal from Germany.
My husband and I chose the city we live in here in Germany, because there are a lot of immigrants, and it is an immigrant friendly city. My husband is born and raised in Germany, but after living in the US most of his working life, he is more aware of what I am discussing. I understood about the seduction of the AfD to Germans when we moved here a few years ago, but they were not as popular then as they are now, and since the election they are polling even higher.
I believe part of this is because it has taken the government so long to speak up. Waiting until after the election to make this announcement was not helpful, but the opposite. If the party is illegal, enforce the law and outlaw them. There are people who would not vote for them if they understood them to be far right, even as they try to mask it.
Right after the election I decided that the AfD might no longer be legal in the next election, but Zimmer has pointed out how the government is reluctant to stand up to a party that is growing ever more popular.
Also concerning is one of the root causes of the increased support of the AfD is related to education in the younger generations who are the future.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379423001282
Whereas the education level of Gen Zers is higher than in older segments of the population since a greater percent get university degrees, which is related to being more likely to vote for more liberal parties in their generation, we see that males are less likely than women to attain higher education making them more susceptible to the influences of the AfD. In fact, I read an article where a man was interviewed and he could not decide between the AfD and Die Linke.
I wrote two articles on research on the influence of X and TikTok on the German elections. One thing one can conclude is that people with less education are more likely to be influenced by Bot accounts. Here is the second article since her research covers both platforms.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/did-bots-and-right-wing-media-platforms-b88?r=f0qfn
The attempt by the US (X) and China (TikTok) to influence the German elections to support the AfD is concerning. While a direct correlation between attempt to influence people and their actual votes is not yet established, what is established is that they did try to do this. Germany has not banned these platforms from operating in Germany, and they have not helped people who are not educated to be better consumers of technology, and disinformation. It is also concerning that in a country with a tuition free education, not many citizens are completing a university degree.
This is as interesting as it is alarming - and frankly, ridiculous. Musk just installed AI in all US government computers so that the US can take spying on its own citizens (and punishing them illegally) to a whole new level, which only exists in China and definitely not in Germany. And somehow, Vance and Rubio want to call the GERMAN intelligence agency "anti-democratic"?? All while supporting a violent insurrection at home and ignoring court orders (something Germany's democratic government never did either)?
That being said, what are the specific arguments showing that the AfD is not only anti-immigrants but also anti-democracy?
German federal governments have ignored a number of court orders over the years, including orders by our version of SCOTUS. And the incoming CDU led government will start its work with clear breaking of German, EU and international law when it starts turning away migrants at the German borders.
Which court orders, more precisely? Any evidence to back up your claim?
And wich laws does the new government intend to break how, more precisely?
Our Grundgesetz and EU immigration laws which guarantee the individual processing of each asylum claim, for instance. Dublin III is another. International law by turning away fugitives under the Geneva Convention. They all make push backs at the border illegal. Merz doesn't give a shit and SPD is co-signing this.
Any concrete facts? Which individual asylum claim was not individually processed more precisely? And what Geneva Convention article was broken when and where more precisely?
Push backs haven't started yet.
https://archive.is/HNHsd
Thomas,
Thanks for sharing your spot on coverage. This was one of the related reasons I wrote this commentary for Salon which shares much in common with the simpático at play here:
https://www.salon.com/2025/04/30/maga-returns-to-a-faithful-fantasy-to-tune-out-trouble-for/.
The Germans associated the Weimar Republic with their defeat in WWI, hyper-inflation, and the Great Depression. We may be lucky that Trump's abject stupidity has led him to self-inflict an economic recession on America. It's hopeful that Americans will associate Trump with the destruction of democracy together with the economy and see the restoration of democracy and the rule of law as a way out of the mess that he created.
Your command of English is superb; why not aim for perfection? Where you wrote “eminent threat” you meant to write “imminent threat”— a very common mistake.
Or just a typo? ;-)
While they were far from the uniformly perfect bastions of democracy they were mostly portrayed as (I'm thinking racism, sexism, colonialist etc) the Greatest Generation themselves in my experience were more supportive of social welfare programs than their children. Probably from living through the Depression. While I have heard all my life how it was the US that saved Europe by entering the war; what I heard from my great uncles was that the USSR saved Europe from the Nazis. The veterans themselves that I knew weren't the type of people to claim a victory that wasn't theirs. How they felt about communism is hard to say, probably mostly that it was a subject best avoided. It might have behooved all of us if the climate had been more amenable to discussions about the differences between socialism and communism and why exactly the US was so set against communism. It seems we focused much attention on the evils of a autocratic state coming from the left and almost none on the far more likely threat of the same thing coming from the right. When I was a kid there were lots of bumper stickers in my neighborhood demanding "US out of El Salvador!" But it was years before I fully understood what that meant and why. And I'm in the minority by far I fear. It troubled me to watch Biden and the entire federal government apparatus choose so unwisely to not punish Trump personally for January 6. In general even with reports done by their own agencies (who have untold numbers of white nationalists in their members) our federal and state security agencies have chosen every time to turn their attention to the left, or the poor, or the immigrant, always this "other". In this it appears Germany is choosing to be somewhat more proactive? From your description of the timing though, it also sounds like perhaps not proactive enough in many ways. Even the media that is underreporting the reality of the damage Trump is causing hasn't escaped his wrath. I don't know if there is a parallel in history of a population so willing to look the other way, to embrace ignorance, to act as if this is no big deal, to sleepwalk themselves into the dissolution of their own freedoms.
I'll never understand, because it's impossible to have a dialogue with those who refuse to discuss reality.
We Americans on the left have long believed in what appears to be a fatally incorrect formula: that the more we act towards the 'good,' then the more the 'bad' will automatically subtract towards zero, to eventually simply disappear. We don't really have to *do* anything about negative effects (or actors, or movements), as long as we can point out some vague positive progress.
Obviously this formula has been wrong, since the Civil War & Reconstruction, and carrying through so many traumatic events: Ford pardoning Nixon, the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, the gun violence of the 21st century, BLM, the January 6th insurrection, etc., etc., etc.
As an American having observed this tendency for nearly 60 years, it's always striking to me how little we want to even entertain a discussion, much less actually try to do something about it.
100%
Little Marco is Secretary of State,, not Defense (that's Pete Hegseth).
You can tell them apart because Marco Rubio has sold his soul to MAGA and Trump.
Hegseth had nothing to sell.