I don't know why this happens, but I would caution against assigning rationality to the voters.
In Italy voters have been electing one party after the other without consistency for the last several elections, which I would use as a point to general desperation and not feeling represented.
I would like to know how many other countries have a similar attitude, like "let's try these ones, we have not voted them yet so maybe this time it's better"
That sort of “smarter than thou” attitude resulted in the Republican victories in the Eisenhower/Stevenson US Presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. Maybe Nixon too, with the “silent majority”.
Superficially smart, smug, supercilious and (ironic, eh) emotionally satisfying…but ultimately very foolish.
That half of any sizeable population will always be dumber than the average of that population is thing that feels worrisome even though its just how statistics work.
Let them have their minority government and see what they table for consideration. From their actions, people will judge them.
The won because people think complex problems have simple, untried solutions that are common sense. They hate "them", they're stoked on (social) media. They feel put upon and denied their rewards. Same old, same old with more effective communication paths.
I don‘t think people believe in the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.
It’s more about “the old parties didn’t have any solutions” and “political promises and proposed solutions don’t work anyways”. So why not try a new party
The simple, untried solution is to stop being the export dumping ground of china. But when anyone says that the knee-jerk reaction is “you’re an awful person for saying that”
That is not a simple solution in practice, only on social media.
It will make prices go high, which will spiral in a lot of things and will increase the cost of living in the present even more for the vulnerable part of the population of a country.
of course it can be the proper solution for the future but saying it is simple is a huge huge understatement of the political and economical will needed to make it happen.
"Cheap goods" is quite a problem, as basically the US, possibly all of North America loves their cheap Walmart items. Screw how they were made... They're usually the cheapest. Replace "Walmart" with whatever large box store goes lowest price as appropriate.
Grievance politics sells quite well. When AfD backers argue it's Western Germany's fault, it's easy for a lot of people to climb on board.
Heck, AfDs own platform argues there should be more Russian language in the schools and Russian cooperation across the board. That on its face says an awful lot.
Germans are our long term neighbors and generally friends. As "Pravda" wrote at the end of WW2, "Hitlers come and go, but the German people remains". It's about time they take their country back.
Caldwell is a Claremont guy, which is key to understanding where he's coming from. First Things is an christian nationalist / natcon outlet funded by (among others) Peter Thiel. That doesn't prevent him from being correct about things in this article, but it's worth noting the outlet and source.
Caldwell systematically elides the völkisch-nationalist character of the AfD and their adjacency to neo-Nazism. He underplays Höcke's extremism, ignores the Potsdam meeting, and leads us to believe (falsely) that the identification of the AfD as rechtsextrem was somehow a biased political stunt. It wasn't, there is plenty of backing for the classification, and it would not have been undemocratic to apply the Verfassungschutz and ban them permanently.
I'm not German and knew little of this subject, but I read the piece word for word and I can say with certainty you have not offered enough of a counterargument here.
I looked up the Potsdam meeting you mentioned and there were literally members of CDU (Merkel's party) present as well. It's utterly laughable to try and use that to then exclusively castigate a different political party for having had some of its members present. By your illogic, we would be forced to infer that the CDU is also "extremist".
So far, I'm left feeling like AfD has indeed been misrepresented by the liberal western media. And, I say this as someone who certainly does not agree with some of their positions. For example, being "skeptical" about climate change in 2026 is sheer idiocy.
But what is very clear to me is that Germany has a democracy problem. The system as described has not been truly democratic. It instead sounds approximately 'left-leaning authoritarian', right down to your insinuation that a political party should have been banned for its speech.
In case anyone in Germany is interested in rediscovering democracy, please note that THIS is what it looks like: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
There's a big difference between "I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it" and "I disapprove of your stated objective to expel german citizens who don't meet your ethnic/cultural standard of German-ness, but will defend to the death your right to govern." A century ago, Germans tolerated a völkisch-nationalist party that wanted to expel non-german ethnic groups as well. They did; they expelled millions of them to Poland and liquidated them there. The Verfassungschutz was implemented after WWII to prevent that element in society from taking power again.
I find the vociferousness with which clueless Americans have decided to defend the AfD bizarre. You don't know the political context, you clearly don't know the history, but you've decided that "Germany has a democracy problem." Why are you so entitled to an opinion?
> "I disapprove of your stated objective to expel german citizens who don't meet your ethnic/cultural standard of German-ness, but will defend to the death your right to govern."
I can't believe you're still insisting on this complete straw man. AfD's stated position on immigration is very easy to look up and it's NOT this. At all. You are parroting a leftwing lie.
They want to deport undocumented migrants and remigrate certain refugee groups, such as Ukrainians. You're free to disagree with that position, but lying about it and then descending into such an absurdly histrionic spiral over the matter does your argument absolutely no favors. That only supports what people like Caldwell are saying and, ironically, precisely bolsters AfD's argument about suppression of the discourse and an honest discussion of Germany's problems.
In fact, you've offered a perfect demonstration of what Caldwell covered in the first section of this very essay.
> you clearly don't know the history
Are you seriously trying to imply I'm not aware of the Holocaust?
Yet now you know their party stance by heart and come to their rescue? That is Sus, with a capital S.
>They want to deport undocumented migrants and remigrate certain refugee groups, such as Ukrainians.
This is not what they really want, is it now? They also want to deport Germans with attained citizenship. It's what they said out loud. There are records of this. Anything else is
> They also want to deport Germans with attained citizenship. It's what they said out loud. There are records of this.
It's what who said aloud? When and where? At the referenced Potsdam meeting where certain extremist CDU politicians did the same?
If I judged Democrats in the US by what their most extreme members have said, I would have to assume a vote for them would be a vote to end private property. But I don't assume that, because I'm not a moron.
So, show me a trusted source that argues a plurality of mainstream AfD politicians are claiming they want to deport German citizens. Show me where this is the official policy of the party. I see no good source to support that accusation.
And that's likely because it is in fact what it appears to be: a desperate smear campaign generated by extremists arrayed at the opposing political polarity. And it's also apparently failing since large percentages of the German population are moving the other way.
This is entirely reminiscent of the foolishness that sunk the Democrats in the US and put us in the mess we now find ourselves in. "Why moderate our policy stances when we can just call them bigots and Nazis instead?"
I expect the outcome of this strategy will be much the same in Germany.
By your own admission, (top of your first comment) you don't know what you're talking about. I never implied you aren't aware of the Holocaust. Thinking that the Holocaust is the only history to know here is indicative. You don't seem to understand the history of the BRD or how its constitution is structured, and you clearly don't know the internal history of the AfD, which started as a mixed center-right libertarian anti-EU party and has become more and more extreme over the past decade. You being angry doesn't make anything I've said wrong.
> “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
This has not led to positive outcomes currently in the US.
I agree with it in theory, I truly do. I think it also gets used as a tool for politicians, companies, and governments to say unhinged shit not based in fact to drive emotional reactions that actually hurts other people in various ways.
> This has not led to positive outcomes currently in the US.
I can't disagree. But, paraphrasing Churchill, (true) democracy is indeed 'the worst form of government except for all the others.'
And Americans will be given opportunities to remedy their mistakes. Both this year and especially in 2028.
We might find that MAGA having the freedom to speak their mind will turn enough of the electorate against them. Or we will continue to choose poorly and suffer the consequences.
But those consequences will have been arrived at honestly. And that matters.
> But those consequences will have been arrived at honestly
The problem with that is that Republican voters will not be the first, and certainly not the only, people to experience those consequences. Nor will they be the ones to suffer the majority, and especially not the worst, of them.
The electorate at large eventually learning their lesson is cold comfort to anyone that warned of this, and suffered regardless
The main reason AfD won the election is the incompetence and arrogance of all other political parties.
Since Covid times every other political parties in Germany seems to be under the impression that they are somehow holier and knows what is best for the people and what people wants doesn’t matter and the politicians decide what people deserves. The pinnacle of this is the current Chancellor of Germany which is arrogant, completely broke his election promises and keep on pushing the voters that are in the centre right or centre left towards the respective extremism.
Another important factor is the current German economy. When the economy was somewhat in good shape after Merkle’s government people mainly voted for the Greens whose main agenda is climate change back in 2021 because people had good living standards and they could afford to focus on solving world problems. But the current economy is imploding and a lot of people are losing their well paid jobs and no other party seems to be even talking about it except for AfD and somehow the current government is under the delusion that economy is doing far better than they have thought. This again is a reason for a lot of people to vote for AfD.
Last but not least is the Islamic extreme/terrorist attacks that happened past years. There have been multiple incidents of cars been driven into crowd including in Christmas markets and latest attack in the Gay pride in Berlin this year. That has been used by AfD to emphasise the incompetence of the current and previous governments to ensure the internal security of the country to gain even more votes
The Economy is not imploding. While 2025 was a lost year for growth Germany‘s GDP is consistently growing since q4 2025 - despite a very interesting geopolitical situation. It is part of the problem that every media outlet from progressive to far-right paints the economical situation in the worst light. What is decreasing are nominal wages at least for parts of the population which is a pure allocation problem. Sure the automobile sector has structural problems and the chemical industry needs cheaper energy but Germany is still an economical powerhouse even without a strong domestic ICT industry, which is, in comparison, the most important driver of growth in the US. During the pandemic something went terribly wrong and public institutions seem to be incredibly weak in the moment. Don’t be fooled though, the problems are solvable, the question is how to find political majorities for doing so. The tale of the weak economy is taken as a reason to cut down welfare and thus the CDU/CSU have a vested interest in writing down the economy. This policy will soon lead to even more people turning to political extremism and the CDU is going to suffer most from this development. On the other hand, with the AfD in charge in Sachsen-Anhalt, a small part of Germany with only 1.7 million voters, France, which has its own political problems, is already getting wary of chancellor Merz's plan to build the largest conventional military forces in Europe. Maybe this mechanism explains why so many Germans in the pacifist movement are so compatible to so called nationalists (who also want to withdraw from helping Ukraine against Putin). The biggest irony is that Germany is gaining so much through the Euro currency (most of the exported goods stay within the EU) and a German national currency, which the AfD wants to implement, would appreciate so hard and quickly that exports would go down enormously. That would easily cripple GDP by 10% or more leading to substantial problems.
The mere few bips of GDP growth doesn’t justify the negative GDP growth Germany has for the past few years. That had a huge impact on people’s lives and their wages. In fact people are taking home even less money due to the increased social contributions imposed by this government. So many companies are moving they factories away from Germany due to high energy prices and that has a huge impact on jobs. Not everyone works in IT branch.
Euro is a ticking time bomb and the currency would collapse when France cannot pay its debt anymore. They are literally borrowing money to pay pension and the only way the Euro has survived so far is due to the fiscal discipline of Germany. The lenders trust Germany to keep Euro stable and that has been weakened by the current government when they borrowed more than half a trillion Euros.
Fact check before posting. German gdp growth was negative in 2023 and 2024 since then its positive again. And it was positive before. Wage growth was nominal 28% since 2017.
>I face people are taking home even less money due to the increased social contributions imposed by this government.
You face what? Anyways, the only thing they did was raising the ceiling for contributions which has no effect on low and middle incomes, which you seem to care a lot about.
>Euro is a ticking time bomb and the currency would collapse when France cannot pay its debt anymore
I remember watching a movie about Hitler coming back and became a media and political star. That movie was probably more than ten years old but I still find it very relevant.
Extremely high budget for ads and posters, social media campaigns, etc., all paid from foreign countries under dubious circumstances by straw men. It's all copy & paste across EU countries, far-right parties even copy the slogans they put on their posters, they just exchange the country name.
That's kinda implying that they only got elected because they had money and a good campaign instead of addressing issues that are not addresses in an effective way by the other parties.
This is probably the case of both things being true at the same time.
This says more about the electorate than the candidates. You can’t have a segment of your population that refuses to connect ideas and expect a working society to come out the other end.
they connect ideas all day. xenophobia is that, making fast and loose connections.
unfortunately we are deep into the TikTok times, and simple, but catchy ideas dominate. it's flat Earth, QAnon, anti-vax, anti-economics but now in 4K.
I don't disagree but I see this more psychologically by now. Certain mechanisms are just tried and tested, what worked for Mussolini works just as well today, and it's always the same kind of people who are attracted to it.
Of course, it's not just the support by various enemies of Europe and Germany, there are many factors like always. In this particular case there are also historical reasons for the rise of Neonazism in parts of the former GDR and many other former East Bloc countries. I don't want to go into the details, everybody knows that story, but it's worth noting the Skinnheads Sächsische Schweiz of the 90s are now the fathers of young voters and particularly few things had been done against this trend in Saxony. When you allow Neonazi movements to become a major youth culture, you're bound to get serious problems. Since the AfD has absorbed the NPD, it's just the political arm of a vast movement there.
Did the Brexit campaign address the issues of the people who voted for it? Are all those people now better off because of it? Did Trump and his 'no new wars' and '$1.99 gas' and
'Drain the swamp' and 'Balance the budget' address the issues of the people who voted for him?
Or did they just lie out of their ass and leave everyone worse off?
...Should we also point out that the people who actually lived Nazism and Fascism are basically gone, so we are very probably looking at nostalgics who do not believe it was that bad, simply because to them it's just another third-hand story?
We can have billionaires, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both, because the billionaires have declared war on democracy. We have to imagine a world without billionaires because the billionaires are imagining a world without us.
--Gil Duran, author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy
If a right wing party can win in Germany, that’s a sign the left wing and centrist parties completely sucked and ignored voter concerns for too long. Let’s start there.
The left party in Germany is basically organising anti-Semitic rallies and call for the eradication of Israel which is quite problematic given the history of Germany.
Nothing in this sentence is true. There is a network that is not part of the left that is trying to do this. But the official party line is different.
Anyone can join a party and make it look bad, if they bring their friends even doubly so.
Not to mention that a honest discussion about Israeli war crimes, their government and its members, and finally settlements is long overdue in german society.
I live in Berlin and have seen many rallies organised by left party with antisemitic slogans. Especially in Neukölln and that’s the hard truth (https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/politik/nach-yalla-yalla...). Even the CDU (the current governing party in Germany) is distancing itself from the left party due to its antisemitic stance.
> Anyone can join a party and make it look bad, if they bring their friends even doubly so.
That’s funny because then people can say the same thing about AfD as well. Like they are bad people unwanted people joined AfD to make it look bad just like they do for the left party.
Citing the jüdische Allgemeine while discussing antisemitism is a joke, they call you an antisemite if you say out loud that Palestinian children are humans and have a right to live.
>That’s funny because then people can say the same thing about AfD as well. Like they are bad people unwanted people joined AfD to make it look bad just like they do for the left party.
Not really, no. At the beginning when they were small, maybe. But the difference is that the left is distancing from antisemitism while the AfD is not and will never distance themselves from racism.
This is happening to the technocratic centrist parties all over the world - such as the Democrats losing in '24 to Trump. The irony is that if the technocratic center would stop being paralyzed by fear (fear that the the right wing parties will take over and so we must play it "safe") and get imaginative in proposing actual solutions we could actually stop this slide to the far right. This is kind of starting to happen in the US with the DSA challenging the status-quo, schlerotic leadership within the Democratic party.
It may be that in the US we now have a bit of an advantage at stopping the slide to the extreme right wing. The advantage being the total incompetence of the Trump administration which is now become obvious even to those outside of the left-leaning bubbles. His approval ratings are now right around 33% which is really quite abysmal for a president at this point in their 2nd term.
Because all other parties both want more immigration and two do their best to ignore the crime statistics by the immigrants. There is also the high percentage of immigrants who require public assistance coupled with a reluctance to assimilate definitely drives people to make these choices.
It comes down to ignoring voters will drive them to people who don’t ignore them.
Also fixing the economy as well. People are pushed to extremes when they are made to felt unsafe in their own country by foreigners that gets free handouts by the government when the citizens can barely afford a living
Yes but somehow conventional wisdom is that leaning right is a vote for “fiscal responsibility” and the economy, a misconception that the left needs to deal with.
This was true right when Weimar Germany fell to the Nazis also. There's a degree of inertia to politics. We're also talking about a region of Germany that has been economically depressed for decades, with an unemployment rate twice the national average.
Just because you don’t like the result of the election doesn’t make it undemocratic. It was a fair and just election and people have voted what they want and that’s how democracy works.
So is democracy always good? Or not? If you say you’re anti democracy, a certain cohort gets upset. If you say you’re anti fascist but fascists get elected via democracy, another cohort gets upset.
“Democracy always works” has been shown to be objectively false, and so I’m unsure how we can say it is an optimal governance system. Works sometimes, but sometimes it doesn’t. Can we tolerate the failure modes until reversion to the mean? Depends on your tolerance for the costs.
> Why it matters: Germany rebuilt its democracy after Nazi rule with unusually strong safeguards against extremism. AfD's breakthrough shows those barriers aren't stopping Europe's far right from becoming dominant electoral forces.
> Context: Germany's postwar system was built in the shadow of the Nazis' destruction of the democratic Weimar Republic.
> The 1949 Basic Law embraces the concept of a "militant democracy" to defend against movements that seek to abolish the constitutional order.
> “Democracy always works” has been shown to be objectively false
Citation needed, never heard this said by anybody.
"democracy" is a wide, wide thing. Technically Russia is a democracy. Also in Europe democracies' presidents don't have the same level of power as Trump, and are more limited.
Democracies only work as long as the people are smart, invested, informed and politicians are accountable and changed often to avoid concentration of power.
Bureaucracy is hell, until you realize it's a feature since it complicates power grabs.
Even Churchill said "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others", so I really have no idea where you got the "it always works" from.
the topics have different emphasis than in the US, but the principle remains. immigration, de-industrialization, green politics, erosion of trust based society
The real underlying issue is the economic pressure - much worse in East Germany than in West Germany. People have problems, but the real problems are not immigration or green politics.
I guess this must be extremely subjective because for 15 years now in my country the far-right has been "on the rise" and all the politicians, and a lot of the media, now only talk about the immigration, the immigration and all the "normal" right-wingers, centrists and even soft left try to compete for being the one who will say the least "politically correct" thing, that is something about how immigration is not compatible with our culture or something. The right-wing party has split and one part is now allied with the far-right party.
My impression is that the overton window has gone further and further to the right so chacun voit midi à sa porte
This is a very obviously biased argument that both sides make about themselves.
The AfD literally published a manifesto of new and notably more conservative policy goals in 2017.
They do not claim to have the political stance of Germany 25 years ago, they themselves say that they are something new (For example, point 1 is an adoption of Swiss-style direct democracy, which is a notable shift to the right).
I encourage you to think much more deeply than "I saw this meme and it resonated with me," because the same is true of the American Tight, despite Elon's claim (Regan, for example, was very famously against Tariffing Canada).
A rose by any other name etc. The moniker may change once every few years - even A. Occasional Cortex recently agreed that 'Woke 1.0 was craaaazy' [1] - but the beast never loses its stripes. Maybe the next term will be 'Woke 2.0', maybe something else but seeing how as this terminology comes from inside the narrative generator it can not be denied that it describes something real and as such claiming that those who use such terms that have fallen by the wayside '[are] not worth listening to' is the equivalent of loudly saying NA NA NA I DON'T HEAR YOU NA NA NA.
Woke 1.0 was 'crazy' indeed, good that this can now be said. The successor will probably be just as crazy but in some different way. It most likely will be some throwback to classical marxist tropes instead of the intersectional mess which best describes 'Woke 1.0' because younger generations never experienced the reality of the Soviet bloc, never were taught the reality of life under communism in school and as such are easy targets for socialist propaganda, viz. the success of the DSA. This time it will surely work, people, real socialism has never been tried after all...
I don't know why this happens, but I would caution against assigning rationality to the voters.
In Italy voters have been electing one party after the other without consistency for the last several elections, which I would use as a point to general desperation and not feeling represented.
I would like to know how many other countries have a similar attitude, like "let's try these ones, we have not voted them yet so maybe this time it's better"
Voters are mostly emotional, not rational. The people that actually sway the elections vote by feel.
You have to always remember that about half the population has an IQ under 100.
That sort of “smarter than thou” attitude resulted in the Republican victories in the Eisenhower/Stevenson US Presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. Maybe Nixon too, with the “silent majority”.
Superficially smart, smug, supercilious and (ironic, eh) emotionally satisfying…but ultimately very foolish.
That's by design, of course. Whether people got smarter or dumber we might still assign 100 to be the median.
That half of any sizeable population will always be dumber than the average of that population is thing that feels worrisome even though its just how statistics work.
You have to always remember that about half the population has an IQ under 100.
And that the <100 half is much easier to herd.
Let them have their minority government and see what they table for consideration. From their actions, people will judge them.
The won because people think complex problems have simple, untried solutions that are common sense. They hate "them", they're stoked on (social) media. They feel put upon and denied their rewards. Same old, same old with more effective communication paths.
I don‘t think people believe in the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. It’s more about “the old parties didn’t have any solutions” and “political promises and proposed solutions don’t work anyways”. So why not try a new party
The simple, untried solution is to stop being the export dumping ground of china. But when anyone says that the knee-jerk reaction is “you’re an awful person for saying that”
FT has had a few articles about it recently, here is one about a historical vote at the G20 summit. https://www.ft.com/content/dcefdf76-9bac-4b34-80c2-eab80b559...
That is not a simple solution in practice, only on social media.
It will make prices go high, which will spiral in a lot of things and will increase the cost of living in the present even more for the vulnerable part of the population of a country.
of course it can be the proper solution for the future but saying it is simple is a huge huge understatement of the political and economical will needed to make it happen.
"Cheap goods" is quite a problem, as basically the US, possibly all of North America loves their cheap Walmart items. Screw how they were made... They're usually the cheapest. Replace "Walmart" with whatever large box store goes lowest price as appropriate.
Grievance politics sells quite well. When AfD backers argue it's Western Germany's fault, it's easy for a lot of people to climb on board.
Heck, AfDs own platform argues there should be more Russian language in the schools and Russian cooperation across the board. That on its face says an awful lot.
This is common sense.
Germans are our long term neighbors and generally friends. As "Pravda" wrote at the end of WW2, "Hitlers come and go, but the German people remains". It's about time they take their country back.
Caldwell is a Claremont guy, which is key to understanding where he's coming from. First Things is an christian nationalist / natcon outlet funded by (among others) Peter Thiel. That doesn't prevent him from being correct about things in this article, but it's worth noting the outlet and source.
Caldwell systematically elides the völkisch-nationalist character of the AfD and their adjacency to neo-Nazism. He underplays Höcke's extremism, ignores the Potsdam meeting, and leads us to believe (falsely) that the identification of the AfD as rechtsextrem was somehow a biased political stunt. It wasn't, there is plenty of backing for the classification, and it would not have been undemocratic to apply the Verfassungschutz and ban them permanently.
edit: typo
I'm not German and knew little of this subject, but I read the piece word for word and I can say with certainty you have not offered enough of a counterargument here.
I looked up the Potsdam meeting you mentioned and there were literally members of CDU (Merkel's party) present as well. It's utterly laughable to try and use that to then exclusively castigate a different political party for having had some of its members present. By your illogic, we would be forced to infer that the CDU is also "extremist".
So far, I'm left feeling like AfD has indeed been misrepresented by the liberal western media. And, I say this as someone who certainly does not agree with some of their positions. For example, being "skeptical" about climate change in 2026 is sheer idiocy.
But what is very clear to me is that Germany has a democracy problem. The system as described has not been truly democratic. It instead sounds approximately 'left-leaning authoritarian', right down to your insinuation that a political party should have been banned for its speech.
In case anyone in Germany is interested in rediscovering democracy, please note that THIS is what it looks like: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
There's a big difference between "I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it" and "I disapprove of your stated objective to expel german citizens who don't meet your ethnic/cultural standard of German-ness, but will defend to the death your right to govern." A century ago, Germans tolerated a völkisch-nationalist party that wanted to expel non-german ethnic groups as well. They did; they expelled millions of them to Poland and liquidated them there. The Verfassungschutz was implemented after WWII to prevent that element in society from taking power again.
I find the vociferousness with which clueless Americans have decided to defend the AfD bizarre. You don't know the political context, you clearly don't know the history, but you've decided that "Germany has a democracy problem." Why are you so entitled to an opinion?
> "I disapprove of your stated objective to expel german citizens who don't meet your ethnic/cultural standard of German-ness, but will defend to the death your right to govern."
I can't believe you're still insisting on this complete straw man. AfD's stated position on immigration is very easy to look up and it's NOT this. At all. You are parroting a leftwing lie.
They want to deport undocumented migrants and remigrate certain refugee groups, such as Ukrainians. You're free to disagree with that position, but lying about it and then descending into such an absurdly histrionic spiral over the matter does your argument absolutely no favors. That only supports what people like Caldwell are saying and, ironically, precisely bolsters AfD's argument about suppression of the discourse and an honest discussion of Germany's problems.
In fact, you've offered a perfect demonstration of what Caldwell covered in the first section of this very essay.
> you clearly don't know the history
Are you seriously trying to imply I'm not aware of the Holocaust?
You just said:
>I'm not German and knew little of this subject
Yet now you know their party stance by heart and come to their rescue? That is Sus, with a capital S.
>They want to deport undocumented migrants and remigrate certain refugee groups, such as Ukrainians.
This is not what they really want, is it now? They also want to deport Germans with attained citizenship. It's what they said out loud. There are records of this. Anything else is
>parroting a
right wing
>lie.
> They also want to deport Germans with attained citizenship. It's what they said out loud. There are records of this.
It's what who said aloud? When and where? At the referenced Potsdam meeting where certain extremist CDU politicians did the same?
If I judged Democrats in the US by what their most extreme members have said, I would have to assume a vote for them would be a vote to end private property. But I don't assume that, because I'm not a moron.
So, show me a trusted source that argues a plurality of mainstream AfD politicians are claiming they want to deport German citizens. Show me where this is the official policy of the party. I see no good source to support that accusation.
And that's likely because it is in fact what it appears to be: a desperate smear campaign generated by extremists arrayed at the opposing political polarity. And it's also apparently failing since large percentages of the German population are moving the other way.
This is entirely reminiscent of the foolishness that sunk the Democrats in the US and put us in the mess we now find ourselves in. "Why moderate our policy stances when we can just call them bigots and Nazis instead?"
I expect the outcome of this strategy will be much the same in Germany.
By your own admission, (top of your first comment) you don't know what you're talking about. I never implied you aren't aware of the Holocaust. Thinking that the Holocaust is the only history to know here is indicative. You don't seem to understand the history of the BRD or how its constitution is structured, and you clearly don't know the internal history of the AfD, which started as a mixed center-right libertarian anti-EU party and has become more and more extreme over the past decade. You being angry doesn't make anything I've said wrong.
> “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
This has not led to positive outcomes currently in the US.
I agree with it in theory, I truly do. I think it also gets used as a tool for politicians, companies, and governments to say unhinged shit not based in fact to drive emotional reactions that actually hurts other people in various ways.
> This has not led to positive outcomes currently in the US.
I can't disagree. But, paraphrasing Churchill, (true) democracy is indeed 'the worst form of government except for all the others.'
And Americans will be given opportunities to remedy their mistakes. Both this year and especially in 2028.
We might find that MAGA having the freedom to speak their mind will turn enough of the electorate against them. Or we will continue to choose poorly and suffer the consequences.
But those consequences will have been arrived at honestly. And that matters.
> But those consequences will have been arrived at honestly
The problem with that is that Republican voters will not be the first, and certainly not the only, people to experience those consequences. Nor will they be the ones to suffer the majority, and especially not the worst, of them.
The electorate at large eventually learning their lesson is cold comfort to anyone that warned of this, and suffered regardless
Why on earth did the mods decide to remove flags on this?
The main reason AfD won the election is the incompetence and arrogance of all other political parties.
Since Covid times every other political parties in Germany seems to be under the impression that they are somehow holier and knows what is best for the people and what people wants doesn’t matter and the politicians decide what people deserves. The pinnacle of this is the current Chancellor of Germany which is arrogant, completely broke his election promises and keep on pushing the voters that are in the centre right or centre left towards the respective extremism.
Another important factor is the current German economy. When the economy was somewhat in good shape after Merkle’s government people mainly voted for the Greens whose main agenda is climate change back in 2021 because people had good living standards and they could afford to focus on solving world problems. But the current economy is imploding and a lot of people are losing their well paid jobs and no other party seems to be even talking about it except for AfD and somehow the current government is under the delusion that economy is doing far better than they have thought. This again is a reason for a lot of people to vote for AfD.
Last but not least is the Islamic extreme/terrorist attacks that happened past years. There have been multiple incidents of cars been driven into crowd including in Christmas markets and latest attack in the Gay pride in Berlin this year. That has been used by AfD to emphasise the incompetence of the current and previous governments to ensure the internal security of the country to gain even more votes
The Economy is not imploding. While 2025 was a lost year for growth Germany‘s GDP is consistently growing since q4 2025 - despite a very interesting geopolitical situation. It is part of the problem that every media outlet from progressive to far-right paints the economical situation in the worst light. What is decreasing are nominal wages at least for parts of the population which is a pure allocation problem. Sure the automobile sector has structural problems and the chemical industry needs cheaper energy but Germany is still an economical powerhouse even without a strong domestic ICT industry, which is, in comparison, the most important driver of growth in the US. During the pandemic something went terribly wrong and public institutions seem to be incredibly weak in the moment. Don’t be fooled though, the problems are solvable, the question is how to find political majorities for doing so. The tale of the weak economy is taken as a reason to cut down welfare and thus the CDU/CSU have a vested interest in writing down the economy. This policy will soon lead to even more people turning to political extremism and the CDU is going to suffer most from this development. On the other hand, with the AfD in charge in Sachsen-Anhalt, a small part of Germany with only 1.7 million voters, France, which has its own political problems, is already getting wary of chancellor Merz's plan to build the largest conventional military forces in Europe. Maybe this mechanism explains why so many Germans in the pacifist movement are so compatible to so called nationalists (who also want to withdraw from helping Ukraine against Putin). The biggest irony is that Germany is gaining so much through the Euro currency (most of the exported goods stay within the EU) and a German national currency, which the AfD wants to implement, would appreciate so hard and quickly that exports would go down enormously. That would easily cripple GDP by 10% or more leading to substantial problems.
The mere few bips of GDP growth doesn’t justify the negative GDP growth Germany has for the past few years. That had a huge impact on people’s lives and their wages. In fact people are taking home even less money due to the increased social contributions imposed by this government. So many companies are moving they factories away from Germany due to high energy prices and that has a huge impact on jobs. Not everyone works in IT branch.
Euro is a ticking time bomb and the currency would collapse when France cannot pay its debt anymore. They are literally borrowing money to pay pension and the only way the Euro has survived so far is due to the fiscal discipline of Germany. The lenders trust Germany to keep Euro stable and that has been weakened by the current government when they borrowed more than half a trillion Euros.
Fact check before posting. German gdp growth was negative in 2023 and 2024 since then its positive again. And it was positive before. Wage growth was nominal 28% since 2017.
>I face people are taking home even less money due to the increased social contributions imposed by this government.
You face what? Anyways, the only thing they did was raising the ceiling for contributions which has no effect on low and middle incomes, which you seem to care a lot about.
>Euro is a ticking time bomb and the currency would collapse when France cannot pay its debt anymore
France is not going to default anytime soon.
I remember watching a movie about Hitler coming back and became a media and political star. That movie was probably more than ten years old but I still find it very relevant.
"Er ist wieder da", or "Look Who's Back" in English.
Yeah that's the one.
Extremely high budget for ads and posters, social media campaigns, etc., all paid from foreign countries under dubious circumstances by straw men. It's all copy & paste across EU countries, far-right parties even copy the slogans they put on their posters, they just exchange the country name.
That's kinda implying that they only got elected because they had money and a good campaign instead of addressing issues that are not addresses in an effective way by the other parties.
This is probably the case of both things being true at the same time.
This says more about the electorate than the candidates. You can’t have a segment of your population that refuses to connect ideas and expect a working society to come out the other end.
they connect ideas all day. xenophobia is that, making fast and loose connections.
unfortunately we are deep into the TikTok times, and simple, but catchy ideas dominate. it's flat Earth, QAnon, anti-vax, anti-economics but now in 4K.
I don't disagree but I see this more psychologically by now. Certain mechanisms are just tried and tested, what worked for Mussolini works just as well today, and it's always the same kind of people who are attracted to it.
Of course, it's not just the support by various enemies of Europe and Germany, there are many factors like always. In this particular case there are also historical reasons for the rise of Neonazism in parts of the former GDR and many other former East Bloc countries. I don't want to go into the details, everybody knows that story, but it's worth noting the Skinnheads Sächsische Schweiz of the 90s are now the fathers of young voters and particularly few things had been done against this trend in Saxony. When you allow Neonazi movements to become a major youth culture, you're bound to get serious problems. Since the AfD has absorbed the NPD, it's just the political arm of a vast movement there.
It is not just the money but social media is controlled by right wing ideologist. Musk has openly supported right wing parties in Europe.
They lie loudly and often and face no punishment for it because a lie is halfway round the world before the truth gets its pants on.
"They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats."
Did the Brexit campaign address the issues of the people who voted for it? Are all those people now better off because of it? Did Trump and his 'no new wars' and '$1.99 gas' and 'Drain the swamp' and 'Balance the budget' address the issues of the people who voted for him?
Or did they just lie out of their ass and leave everyone worse off?
> Or did they just lie out of their ass and leave everyone worse off?
This, but I guess I should've been more clear in my parent comment in saying that by "addressing" should come in heavy quotation marks.
I mean, they also get elected because hate motivates.
yes, but also there's a real obvious unserved/underserved voting bloc
https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-boring-theory-of-the-populist...
without convincing the people (winning their hearts and minds, and so on) it'll continue to be a profitable political strategy, unfortunately
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Is this what you truly believe?
I know it. "Salvar Portugal" "Deutschland retten" ROTFL
desperation
Because people want Nord Stream, fewer immigrants, more apartments, nuclear energy and no forced state TV payments.
Weidel is of course living the woke WEF lifestyle in Switzerland with her Sri Lankan lesbian partner and was at Goldman Sachs.
So a betrayal of the voters, Meloni or Trump style is very likely if the AfD should manage to have the federal majority.
I fully admit TLDR but where do you live?
...Should we also point out that the people who actually lived Nazism and Fascism are basically gone, so we are very probably looking at nostalgics who do not believe it was that bad, simply because to them it's just another third-hand story?
We can have billionaires, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both, because the billionaires have declared war on democracy. We have to imagine a world without billionaires because the billionaires are imagining a world without us. --Gil Duran, author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy
This is a question for the AI chatbots to answer.
If a right wing party can win in Germany, that’s a sign the left wing and centrist parties completely sucked and ignored voter concerns for too long. Let’s start there.
The left party in Germany is basically organising anti-Semitic rallies and call for the eradication of Israel which is quite problematic given the history of Germany.
Nothing in this sentence is true. There is a network that is not part of the left that is trying to do this. But the official party line is different.
Anyone can join a party and make it look bad, if they bring their friends even doubly so.
Not to mention that a honest discussion about Israeli war crimes, their government and its members, and finally settlements is long overdue in german society.
I live in Berlin and have seen many rallies organised by left party with antisemitic slogans. Especially in Neukölln and that’s the hard truth (https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/politik/nach-yalla-yalla...). Even the CDU (the current governing party in Germany) is distancing itself from the left party due to its antisemitic stance.
> Anyone can join a party and make it look bad, if they bring their friends even doubly so.
That’s funny because then people can say the same thing about AfD as well. Like they are bad people unwanted people joined AfD to make it look bad just like they do for the left party.
Citing the jüdische Allgemeine while discussing antisemitism is a joke, they call you an antisemite if you say out loud that Palestinian children are humans and have a right to live.
>That’s funny because then people can say the same thing about AfD as well. Like they are bad people unwanted people joined AfD to make it look bad just like they do for the left party.
Not really, no. At the beginning when they were small, maybe. But the difference is that the left is distancing from antisemitism while the AfD is not and will never distance themselves from racism.
This is happening to the technocratic centrist parties all over the world - such as the Democrats losing in '24 to Trump. The irony is that if the technocratic center would stop being paralyzed by fear (fear that the the right wing parties will take over and so we must play it "safe") and get imaginative in proposing actual solutions we could actually stop this slide to the far right. This is kind of starting to happen in the US with the DSA challenging the status-quo, schlerotic leadership within the Democratic party.
It may be that in the US we now have a bit of an advantage at stopping the slide to the extreme right wing. The advantage being the total incompetence of the Trump administration which is now become obvious even to those outside of the left-leaning bubbles. His approval ratings are now right around 33% which is really quite abysmal for a president at this point in their 2nd term.
Because all other parties both want more immigration and two do their best to ignore the crime statistics by the immigrants. There is also the high percentage of immigrants who require public assistance coupled with a reluctance to assimilate definitely drives people to make these choices.
It comes down to ignoring voters will drive them to people who don’t ignore them.
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Beautiful, are you proud of yourself?
good refuting argument
Without reading the article, here are my guesses as to its content:
- claim that AfD only represents a tiny minority of "bad faith actors" who "threaten democracy"
- 4-5 direct Hitler comparisons.
- "Even though we all said Never Again!"
- "Hate has returned."
- "...fueled by conspiracy theories and Elon Musk"
- "white mediocrity", "festering undercurrent", "non-college educated white men"
- "If we don't arrest and jail the AfD, Putin will get elected."
The guesses are overwhelmingly wrong.
... quite the reverse.
As a right wing / afd ally said in France litterally said yesterday:
Do you know where extreme-right is low ? in Danemark. You know why ?
because the SOCIALIST PARTY implemented the end / started being tough ob illegal immigration.
it never was about anything else than the majority of people tired of being force-fed immigration by european elites
solve this issue, solve "extreme right"
and it was the same in the US
at that point people not seeing this are mentally ill in my opinion
Also fixing the economy as well. People are pushed to extremes when they are made to felt unsafe in their own country by foreigners that gets free handouts by the government when the citizens can barely afford a living
How much illegal immigration did Denmark have?
Enough legal/illegal/asylum drama for it to become an election issue. Hard to hide rape statistics.
Because German economy is imploding.
“Germany's economy will grow by 1.3% in 2026, RWI said, upwardly revising its forecast of 0.8% growth in June.”
https://www.reuters.com/business/germanys-rwi-institute-upgr...
No, economy does not explains it at all.
But the right wing is demonstrably indistinguishable from left at making good economies. Same thing in the US.
That seems to not matter for the people that think the way the GP points.
(And they are quite distinguishable. The far right is way worse at it than the kind of left party that wins anything.)
Yes but somehow conventional wisdom is that leaning right is a vote for “fiscal responsibility” and the economy, a misconception that the left needs to deal with.
Except it’s starting to grow again and indicators look positive.
This was true right when Weimar Germany fell to the Nazis also. There's a degree of inertia to politics. We're also talking about a region of Germany that has been economically depressed for decades, with an unemployment rate twice the national average.
Congratulations to democratically elected leaders!
Hitler was also put in power legally
Just because you don’t like the result of the election doesn’t make it undemocratic. It was a fair and just election and people have voted what they want and that’s how democracy works.
So is democracy always good? Or not? If you say you’re anti democracy, a certain cohort gets upset. If you say you’re anti fascist but fascists get elected via democracy, another cohort gets upset.
“Democracy always works” has been shown to be objectively false, and so I’m unsure how we can say it is an optimal governance system. Works sometimes, but sometimes it doesn’t. Can we tolerate the failure modes until reversion to the mean? Depends on your tolerance for the costs.
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/06/afd-saxony-anhalt-germany-f...
> Why it matters: Germany rebuilt its democracy after Nazi rule with unusually strong safeguards against extremism. AfD's breakthrough shows those barriers aren't stopping Europe's far right from becoming dominant electoral forces.
> Context: Germany's postwar system was built in the shadow of the Nazis' destruction of the democratic Weimar Republic.
> The 1949 Basic Law embraces the concept of a "militant democracy" to defend against movements that seek to abolish the constitutional order.
> “Democracy always works” has been shown to be objectively false
Citation needed, never heard this said by anybody.
"democracy" is a wide, wide thing. Technically Russia is a democracy. Also in Europe democracies' presidents don't have the same level of power as Trump, and are more limited.
Democracies only work as long as the people are smart, invested, informed and politicians are accountable and changed often to avoid concentration of power.
Bureaucracy is hell, until you realize it's a feature since it complicates power grabs.
Even Churchill said "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others", so I really have no idea where you got the "it always works" from.
much of it can be expressed via this visual which made the rounds a few years ago
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144/photo/1?
the topics have different emphasis than in the US, but the principle remains. immigration, de-industrialization, green politics, erosion of trust based society
The real underlying issue is the economic pressure - much worse in East Germany than in West Germany. People have problems, but the real problems are not immigration or green politics.
IMO they explain it well here:
Inside The Rise of Germany's New Far-Right
https://youtu.be/l2SjWowpynY?si=9P4R6CtrNrXEsYx0
I guess this must be extremely subjective because for 15 years now in my country the far-right has been "on the rise" and all the politicians, and a lot of the media, now only talk about the immigration, the immigration and all the "normal" right-wingers, centrists and even soft left try to compete for being the one who will say the least "politically correct" thing, that is something about how immigration is not compatible with our culture or something. The right-wing party has split and one part is now allied with the far-right party.
My impression is that the overton window has gone further and further to the right so chacun voit midi à sa porte
This is a very obviously biased argument that both sides make about themselves.
The AfD literally published a manifesto of new and notably more conservative policy goals in 2017.
They do not claim to have the political stance of Germany 25 years ago, they themselves say that they are something new (For example, point 1 is an adoption of Swiss-style direct democracy, which is a notable shift to the right).
I encourage you to think much more deeply than "I saw this meme and it resonated with me," because the same is true of the American Tight, despite Elon's claim (Regan, for example, was very famously against Tariffing Canada).
> For example, point 1 is an adoption of Swiss-style direct democracy, which is a notable shift to the right
Since when did direct democracy became a right wing concept?
anyone who thinks "woke" is a valid counterargument is not worth listening to.
A rose by any other name etc. The moniker may change once every few years - even A. Occasional Cortex recently agreed that 'Woke 1.0 was craaaazy' [1] - but the beast never loses its stripes. Maybe the next term will be 'Woke 2.0', maybe something else but seeing how as this terminology comes from inside the narrative generator it can not be denied that it describes something real and as such claiming that those who use such terms that have fallen by the wayside '[are] not worth listening to' is the equivalent of loudly saying NA NA NA I DON'T HEAR YOU NA NA NA.
Woke 1.0 was 'crazy' indeed, good that this can now be said. The successor will probably be just as crazy but in some different way. It most likely will be some throwback to classical marxist tropes instead of the intersectional mess which best describes 'Woke 1.0' because younger generations never experienced the reality of the Soviet bloc, never were taught the reality of life under communism in school and as such are easy targets for socialist propaganda, viz. the success of the DSA. This time it will surely work, people, real socialism has never been tried after all...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/15/aoc-wo...