The AfD’s obsession with the Third Reich is
driving a realignment of Europe’s far right
Mariam Lau
Marine Le Pen’s rupture with her German allies reveals
a tactical fault line between the ‘old’ right and the ‘new’
Fri 31 May
2024 08.00 CEST
Momentous
change is afoot within Europe’s far right. Just as voters across 27 countries
prepare to go to the polls in EU elections, a split over the German far right’s
allegiance to the Third Reich is driving a realignment.
The
far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the European parliament last
week expelled the entire Alternative for Germany (AfD) faction from its ranks
after a furore involving the leading AfD candidate Maximilian Krah.
The
unprecedented move, initiated by Marine Le Pen, was officially a reaction to
remarks Krah made in an interview with an Italian newspaper. Asked if his
demand that all Germans take pride in their forbears would include those who
were in the SS, the Nazi’s main paramilitary force, Krah said that “not all SS
were criminals”.
The cordon
sanitaire Le Pen called for around the AfD as a result represents a real rift
in Europe’s far right camp: between those who affirm, either tacitly or
explicitly, a connection to the Third Reich or to fascism, and those who do
not; between the old right and the new.
Le Pen’s
party, the Rassemblement National (RN), a key member of the ID group, was
formerly the Front National, which was co-founded by collaborationists from the
Waffen SS’s Division Charlemagne. For more than a decade, she has been trying
to detoxify its successor partyof all blatant Nazi associations, especially
antisemitism. The aim of Le Pen’s purge, which she called “dédiabolisation”, is
to finally become president of France 2027.
Whether the
rift between the old right and the new is real, or merely tactical, remains to
be seen. The suspicion of mere tactics also hangs over the head of Italian
prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who seems to actively encourage the ambivalence
by nodding to the middle ground some days and to the extreme on others.
One would
expect that of all far-right European parties, the Germans would be most
cautious when it comes to the Nazi past. Not so. In fact “Melonisation” –
catering to the middle ground, appearing to be “pro European”, supporting
Ukraine, being kissed on the forehead by US president Joe Biden – has become a
dirty word among their rank and file. “People like Le Pen or Meloni, they don’t
change France or Italy, they don’t want to seriously stop migration,” one
senior AfD politician told me last week. “All they want is to advance their own
careers.”
In April,
Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD in the state of Thuringia, was fined for
uttering the Nazi stormtroopers’ slogan , “Everything for Germany”. The party’s
honorary head, former CDU-Conservative Alexander Gauland, famously called the
12 years of Nazi rule “a mere birdshit” in German history. It is like an
obsession with them, a political Tourette syndrome. The Nazi past had to be
rehabilitated, at whatever cost.
And why
wouldn’t it. Until a couple of weeks ago, the AfD seemed to gain strength not
despite, but because of its deepening radicalisation. The inability of
successive German governments of any stripe, conservative or social democrat,
to stem migration in recent years, has no doubt contributed to its rise.
According to the AfD narrative, Germany is overwhelmed, both by irregular
migration and the violent crime supposedly associated with it. Its schools,
community services, and welfare system are all overwhelmed and struggling as a
result.
But the
Krah case, as well as allegations about corruption by AfD figures and spying
for Russia and China, along with the revelations about “remigration” after an
ominous meeting in Potsdam, seem to have turned the tide.
While polls
at the beginning of the year promised the AfD a vote share of 23%, support now
hovers at about 14%. The patriotism of the party that claims to have love for
Germany at its core is now called into question. When pretty much everything
the AfD has to say about the federal republic in the 75th year of its
democratic constitution is filled with disgust, but warm words are found for
Putin’s Russia or the Chinese Communist party, voters may find it hard to see
the love in any of this.
But this is
the puzzle of all the movements belonging to the so-called “New Right”. The
promise of this brand had originally been to leave behind the obsessions and
insignia of the old right. “The old right is dead,” pronounced the French
philosopher Alain de Benoist, one of the most influential thinkers behind the
new right in France and in Germany. “It was well deserved. The old right
perished from living off its inheritance, its privileges, its memories. It
perished from neither having a vision for the future nor a goal.”
For the new
right the enemy was no longer the left – whose social politics, style of action
and ideas it rather went to great lengths to copy. The enemy of the new right
is liberalism, in supposed cahoots with “globalism”, “wokeism” and capitalism.
Human rights in the eyes of the new right are an instrument of oppression and
imperialism, of creating “one world” that alienates people from their origins.
Adherents
of the new right present themselves as intellectually ambitious. Krah himself
recently published a book called Politik von Rechts, and aims at presenting
himself as “erudite, friendly, elegant”, not as brooding and “bad tempered” as
the old. The new right claims to have replaced the racism of its forebears with
“ethnopluralism” – all peoples are equal but should live separately. The
“remigration” debate brought the hypocrisy of this concept to the fore. Does
“ethnicity” end up meaning “whiteness”?
At any
rate, the far right stands to gain a much bigger vote in the European
parliament elections, which begin on 6 June but in Germany take place on 9
June. The reshuffling initiated by Le Pen could end up lumping her together
within a new “super group” with Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party heads up
the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). Le Pen suggested as much this
week. If it came to pass, it would make them a force to reckon with.
AfD-led
Krah, however, is far from beating a humiliated retreat. He might keep a low
profile until 9 June. But behind the scenes, Krah has been busy building an
alternative group – with extremist parties and figures such as the Dutch
Thierry Baudet, or the Bulgarian Kostadin Kostadinov, who have already
expressed their solidarity with Krah on social media.
In other
words, any triumph of the far right in the June vote might also become the
moment of their most visible divide. Whether their liberal opponents will be
able to gain from this is another matter.
Mariam Lau is a political commentator for Die
Zeit
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