AfD Part 1: From anti-EU neolibs to Nazi front party

Readers of this blog may be wondering just what is going on with the right in Germany. So here’s the first of a series of entries focusing on the AfD. This is not because I want to give that party yet more publicity, but what is happening is important at least for the rest of Europe and is fascinating in it’s on right. And a warning should anything similar develop in Ireland.

The anti-EU neolib / monetarist phase

The AfD started initially as a ‘professor’s Party’ with a number of rightist academics – mainly jurists and economists – who were dissatisfied with the political establishments Europhilia and a Germany supposedly propping up lazy foreigners, while the sacred tenents of monetarism were being watered down, and political correctness had gone mad – Germany should return to a more nationalist but rigidly neoliberal capitalism and the Deutschmark. And cultural uniformity, where real Germans could feel at home. Total idiocy given the nature of contemporary capitalism – but so far so mainstream.

At the same time, the party portrayed themselves as being excluded from the mainstream discourse, and discriminated against by the media. This self-defined (and also illusory or propagandist – they got plenty of exposure in the media even before 2015) victimhood persisted into the second phase of the party’s development – the movement further rightwards towards an militantly anti-migrant party, housing a large Nazi wing.

The revolt against Merkel’s moment of humanity

Then came the latest proxy war in Syria, and large number of refugees fled from there over land routes into Europe. Large sections of German and indeed Austrian society spontaneously came out to welcome the refugees. And Angela Merkel, for the second time in her long chancellorship, did the unexpected and refused to close German borders.

This enraged the large pool of latent and not so latent racists and authoritarians in German society. Some sociologists estimate this to be about 20% of the population. The AfD saw its opportunity, and turned its focus to portraying migrants as competing for scarce resources with the indigenous working class and bringing with them a wave of criminality. The media acted as their reliable amplifier – more on this later.

And more is due on the social context in another part of this series – suffice it to say that there is no evidence that migrants lower wages and conditions etc. and the scarcity of resources is an artificial one imposed by political neo-liberalism. There is also no evidence that migrants are more criminal than the indigenous population, despite the massive pressure they are under.

Stoking the fear and recruiting the fearful

Some invaluable insights into the rapid growth of the AfD can be gained from ex-members of the party. For example in a podcast by by Jenny Günther (in German), two youngish women describe their reasons for joining the AfD and what they experienced within the party. One of them, Franziska Schreiber, went on to write and important book “Inside the AfD”, after she left.

Both women describe heavy Facebook usage during bad times in their lives, and how they were sucked into a bubble of self-reinforcing paranoia about refugees, and the imminent danger of German society falling apart led by the left-green ‘do-gooders’ who sought to welcome the refugees. The support and recognition of having like minded people around them legitimate them sucked the pair further in and they became active members of the party.

The AfD operates like a mixture of cult and strict Leninist party. It love-bombs its new members, particularly women and the young – the AfD knows that it needs to cease to be mainly a party of older men to grow. But once inside, any open dissent against the party line is disciplined and seen as an attack on the party.

Die Flügel – the Nazi engine of the AfD train

Over the last couple of years the ‘moderate’ wing on the Party has either been driven out or made to dance to the tune of ‘der Flügel’n organised wing of the party, based in East Germany, the core members of which are entryists from the German extreme right scene.

This Flügel has its own Führer, a sports and history teacher called Björn Höcke, from a family of East Prussian refugees. Höcke is a revolutionary national socialist who saw the AfD as ripe for entryism by the extreme right. He believes that the current political decay means that Germany requires and is ready for a putsch by a core cadre with sufficiently large support among the ‘concerned citizens’.

Under his leadership (from the second rank in the Thürigen state parliament) all significant personnel and political decisions have to approved by the Flügel. Where AfD members of parliament are not aligned to the Flügel at federal or state level they will be forced to take on advisers associated with the Flügel.

He commands a fanatical following among younger male party members in the East who stand to attention when he enters a room, chant his name and delight in the way he edges close to what is illegal in Germany in terms of Nazi propaganda. Hitler salutes are confined to private gatherings.

The Flügel is based in Eastern Germany, but their power dominates the party in the west of Germany as well.

Nazi generations and heritage

The ideology of the AfD is now tightly focused around hatred of migrants, of social liberalism and of the left. It sees itself as defending the purity of German or European ‘culture’, a stand-in term for ‘race’, since organising around the latter is not allowed by the German constitution.

These themes it inherits from generations of Nazi activists and sympathisers who have remained stubbornly present in postwar Germany, partly underground, partly represented by a series of parties. They are joined by ‘modernising’ identitarians, nostalgics for Germany of the Kaiser (Reichsbürgers), and self-organising groups of ‘angry citizens’ like Pegida in Dresden and its imitators. All these groups cross-pollinate each other and share members.

There is also an unspoken antisemitism deep in there with talk of media and politics being steered by dark forces in the background. They’ve learned however not to refer to ‘the Jews’ – under the German constitution it would be illegal to be as explicitly antisemitic as Victor Orbán. So their world-puppeteers dare not speak their name, for now. At the same time the European fascist-spectrum admires the Israeli state for its wall-building, readiness to kill and the clear mastery of one ‘culture’ over others.

The Flügel also has an (at the moment hidden) dream of the regaining of the Eastern Prussian territories lost after WWII, another theme common to generations of German Nazis.

The social and economic conditions in the East of Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall proved particularly fertile ground for the growth of extreme right parties, for reasons that I’ll deal with in another of this series.

Chemnitz – the Afd rehearses a putsch

The growing alliances between the AfD, Nazi groups, elements of the state and police came together in the recent demonstration following the stabbing a Cuban-German man in Chemnitz. The AfD ensured that their people came together in a common demonstration with Nazi groups, football hooligans and Pegida-style ‘enraged citizens’ which went on to chase foreign looking people off the streets and attack and intimidate journalists. The minimal police presence looked on.

This time no-one was killed during this proto-pogrom. But it represents a new explicitness about the role and political armoury of the AfD. How the rest of German reacts remains to be seen, but there are signs of hope.