On November 23 of last year, leaders of AdF (Alternative for Germany), the most extreme formation of the current right, met in Potsdam at the Adlon mansion (very close to Wansee, where the extermination camps were planned in 1940) with leaders of the Christian Democratic Union and some notable businessmen. Martin Sellner, the leader of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, presented there a plan to deport several million migrants and Germans with migrant origins to “some African country.” The reasons: “They degenerate the value of the German worker, they are not qualified, they make poor use of social preventions and they orientalize the landscape.” A couple of years ago, Austrian playwright Hermann Holtz described Sellner as “the lowest and most dangerous rung of the spirit of race phobia and the sword.” The meeting in Adlon was supposed to be secret. However, Korrectiv, a collective of democratic journalists, revealed the details of the meeting. Sellner’s plan provided for a strategy of propaganda campaigns in public opinion and social networks to raise awareness among the population of the need for a “remigration” (read: deportation) policy.
In the following weeks of January, called by the social democracy, the party Die Linke (The Left) and NGOs defending migrants, millions of protesters in the main cities of Germany launched themselves to demand the illegalization – that is, the official ban – from AdF. Given the unique German past, which between 1929 witnessed the rise of Nazism to the zenith of State power, a force that used the channels of democracy to finally abolish the democratic regime, since 1945 all German constitutions contain a section that provides for the possibility to prohibit political formations that, calling themselves democratic, attack the republican order.
The massive response from the main parties of the German left was not coincidental. In the most recent polls, AdF has already positioned itself as the second national force only after the Christian Democratic Union (UDC), Angela Merkel’s center-right party, leaving far behind the social democracy that currently governs the country and La Left, which barely gathers 5 percent in the polls.
This story could get even worse. In the summer there will be elections in the provinces of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg. Neofascism could obtain absolute majorities there and go on to govern three key regions located in the east of the country. A threat to the “health code” that today dominates national politics. It is the peculiar term that the parties represented in Congress coined to define the agreement that none would establish alliances with AdF. Alliances that could be necessary to form local governments.
The scandal of the November 23 conclave lies not only in the electoral extension that the extreme right could obtain, but (above all) in the participation of prominent leaders of the UDC, as well as some notable businessmen. That would be precisely the path for those who today embrace the idea of imposing a regime of racial exclusion to enter the first steps of national power.
What explains the sudden rise of neo-Nazism in a nation that believed itself freed from that ghost?
AdF was born in 2013 under the shadow of anti-Europeanism. Already at that time, he promoted Second (Germany’s departure from the European Union). In 2017 she lost the vote, as in 2021. The rise of the German economy and the skill of the chancellor managed to extinguish the surprise effect. But in 2022 it took off again, now with much greater intensity. The reasons are at hand.
Firstly, the indecision of Chancellor Olaf Scholtz regarding the war in Ukraine. As in Spain, France and Italy, the ultra German was supported and cultivated from its origins by Vladimir Putin. The cessation of Russian gas imports and submission to Washington brought with them inflation, shortages and reductions in investments. For the first time since 2008 the economy entered a severe crisis, now attributed to Scholtz’s ineptitude. As never before, Germany has revealed itself to be vulnerable to the White House. AdF capitalized on a nationalist sentiment that was believed to have been buried, only under a new orientation: the anti-Americanism.
Secondly, a racist discourse against emigration in a population that today brings together a large racist fringe. The delirium of this narrative is based on the theory of the “great replacement” created by the Frenchman Renaud Camus: the liberal order, to benefit the business elites, would be willing to replace the German working class with migrants from the Maghreb.
Today more than ever, AdF insists on withdrawing Germany from the euro agreement. The difference is that today it is on the way to making this possibility feasible, just as the conservative party did in England. Only without Germany, the EU would not last a single day.