Nazi Slogan-Chanting Leader Secures Victory in German State Election
The first time a hard rightwing entity gains this amount of political traction since World War II
Much to the dismay and horror of many a German, the Country’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has won in one state and came a close second in another.
The polls found that said party walked away with 32.8% of the Thuringia State vote while the next party in line, Germany’s Christian Democratic Union(CDU) trailed by more than ten percentage points.
In the next state (Saxony), the disputed political party took second place in the race to the polls, falling short of the top position by 1.3%.
This is the first time a hard rightwing entity has gained such traction since World War II.
Who is Germany’s AfD
The AfD first appeared on the scene in 2013 and missed the election qualifying threshold by 5%. In 2014, the fledgling party showed significant success in its bid for relevance when it won seven seats in the European Parliament.
There, it joined ranks with the European Conservatives and Reformists ECR, and come 2017, its fortune on the German domestic front was unprecedented.
The AfD had by that point gained seats in 14 of 16 of its country's parliaments and this translated to 94 seats by the next German federal election in 2017, making it Germany’s third-biggest political party.
Upon the commencement of the 2021 federal election, a significant portion of their support base seemed to have rethought their loyalties and the AfD receded to the fifth-largest political party in Germany.
At its birth, the organization's Eurosceptic ideals were moderate but clear.
Along with the CDU — which is somehow able to tout itself as both conservative and liberal at the same time — it opposed the Eurozone policies with their main bone of contention being Germany bailing out its floundering EU neighbors during Europe’s financial crises of 2009 and 2010.
At that point, the AfD called for the abolishment of the Euro.
Two years after its founding and one year after its European Parliament victory, the AfD made clear its anti-stance on Islam, immigrants in general, and its nationalist ideals, and today it is the only German political party denying human-instigated climate change.
In addition to the aforementioned political policies, the party has also been accused of under-the-radar affiliations with extreme-right organizations like Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of The West (PEGIDA), Neue Rechte (a far-right nationalist organization that failed in their bid to enter German politics), and the Identitarian Movement (pan-European ethno-nationalists founded in France).
In 2021 Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), started surveilling the AfD.
In January 2022 the party’s leader Jörg Meuthen, walked out after admitting that the organization had veered too far to the right and was dabbling in undemocratic ideologies.
By April 2023, the BfV designated the AfD’s youth league an extremist organization.
One landmark controversy triggered by the AfD was a meeting held in secret. Said get-together took place at the Adlon Mansion Hotel in Potsdam, Brandenburg.
Organized by Gernot Mörig, a retired dentist and far-right activist, the attendees were from different walks of life but they all had one thing in common: they harbored far-right sentiments.
One of the attendees at the meeting was Identitarian leader, Martin Seller. He was introduced to the room by Mörig as the man with the “masterplan”.
Seller’s so-called masterplan was the forced “re-migration” of all non-ethnic individuals in Germany — naturalized or otherwise — to their countries of origin.
The World Is Watching
The new state leader Björn Höcke has been accused of mouthing Nazi rhetoric and as a testimony to the latter, was pulled into the defendant's dock twice in 2024 for the same reason.
More specifically, he had uttered the Nazi slogan during campaign rallies as many times.
Nazism's biggest historical foe during its early 20th-century reign was the United Kingdom. Perhaps coincidentally, a new book titled Opening The Gates of Hell: The Untold Story of Herbert Kenny (the first UK soldier to discover the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp) has been released and depicts first-hand accounts of the atrocities at said facility.
“People were walking around with a glazed, empty look in their eyes, so terribly thin that they looked like skeletons, and some simply dropped dead right in front of me,” Kenny was quoted saying.
“I saw a grave the size of a football pitch, stacked with emaciated bodies, 8ft high. What sort of fiends could do this?”
Rubbing Shoulders with Russia
Part of the Russian narrative justifying Putin’s so-called war in Ukraine claims that there are Nazi elements in the West and Ukraine.
While the term “Nazi” is used loosely by Putin and his henchmen, they have made no mention of the AfD and their policies nor their visits to Russian-occupied Ukraine.
Editors note: This is not a representation of all Germans. Left-leaning masses have taken to the streets in protest of the AfD’s victory.
