Europe's Far Right Copies Trump--And It's Working

[Celerity]

Leaked plans show Germany’s far right plotting a radical power grab with global implications.



https://www.socialeurope.eu/europes-far-right-copies-trump-and-its-working



The leak of a document from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right party, sheds light on the way Donald Trump’s strategy is being emulated by right-wing parties across Europe. The AfD, which came second in the federal elections with 20.6 percent, has been designated “extremist” by German intelligence agencies, and its racist policies declared incompatible with the free democratic order. As a result, the party is currently shut out of any potential right-wing coalition at a national level, through the adoption of a “firewall” policy by the centre-right CDU-CSU. However, exceptions to the ban have begun at local level, and in January the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had to rely on the AfD to pass a new law restricting inward migration.

In a document leaked to Politico, the AfD outlines the next stage of its plan for power. It wants to break down the firewall by polarizing public debate between itself and the “woke left” – as personified in the Left Party. “Our goal is to create a situation in which the political divide no longer runs between the AfD and the other political currents, but rather one in which a bourgeois-conservative camp and a radicalizing left-wing camp face each other, comparable to the situation in the U.S.,” says the document. By forcing voters of the political centre to take sides on the basis of values, and by stigmatising the left in the same terms as Trump – “radical left lunatics” – the AfD wants to erode support for the firewall at a cultural and narrative level, to the point where the CDU-CSU can no longer justify it to their voters.

Combined with a shift of emphasis in its language, to present a more moderate face to the electorate, the AfD hopes this will finally end its isolation and open a pathway to power. This is exactly what Trump did by stigmatising Antifa, Black Lives Matter, pro-Palestine and trans rights protesters. And it has a long track record. Any student of history knows the playbook this is based on. The AfD is not a Nazi Party, and the Germany of today is vastly more stable and prosperous than the late Weimar Republic. But the strategy of hollowing out the centre, of staging an “us or them” battle against the German communist party, and of moderating extreme language to mollify right-wing conservatism is the one Hitler followed.

The background to this strategy is, of course, the war in Gaza, which has become a polarising issue across Europe and the Americas. Thought the Left Party in Germany has resisted calls from its rank and file to end the party’s historic support for Israel (a product of its roots in the communism of the GDR), the language of the street milieu in which the left operates has moved rapidly. The US Anti-Defamation League, in a report this month, says recorded incidents of antisemitism almost doubled in Germany between 2022 and 2023, to 4,782, with regional figures for 2024 said to match that. The pattern is closely matched by figures from the UK and USA, where justified anger among Muslim communities over Israeli war crimes in Gaza have frequently spilled over into chants and violent actions targeting Jews and Jewish institutions.

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