I’ve struggled to ascertain from afar the true nature of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland. Progressive media love to quote its supporters’ politically off-key comments, but no party can answer for a membership’s every daft remark; even the odd dodgy politician comes with the territory.
Yet the country’s two mainstream but increasingly unpopular parties – a disenchantment Brits will recognise – portray the AfD as chocka with swastika-waving Nazis building scale models of Treblinka in their basements. After anti-Trump Democrats screamed ‘Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!’ until they were blue in the face last year, I can’t help but view the German elite’s hyperventilation with scepticism. These days, the ‘far right’ comprises everyone not cock-a-hoop over abdicating their countries to droves of destitute, undereducated foreigners –in which case the AfD, now polling almost even with the leading Christian Democrats, certainly qualifies as ‘far right’, and so do two-thirds of their compatriots.
From an arm of the German political establishment, of course, this conclusion was foregone, but on what basis did its domestic spy agency formally classify the pariah party earlier this month (a label now ‘paused’ due to the party’s bid for an injunction) as ‘right-wing extremists’? The AfD has an unacceptable ‘ethnicity and ancestry-based understanding of the people’. Thus the party perversely insists that there’s such a thing as being German; that the qualities intrinsic to Germanness cannot be bestowed by a piece of paper alone; that in comparison to the indigenous population on whom these visitors have imposed themselves, the millions of often-Middle Eastern immigrants who’ve poured into the country in the last decade are ever so slightly, well, less German.
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