Germany is an important country. It has Europe’s largest economy, and until recently was one of that continent’s most powerful nations. Germany is now in decline, mostly on account of horrific government policies. The only significant force for change is the Alternative For Germany [AfD] party, which has recently been labeled a “right-wing extremist” organization, incompatible with the “free democratic basic order,” based on a secret 1,000 page report by Germany’s security service. This opens the door to wiretapping AfD members and barring them from public employment, e.g. as police officers.
Germany currently has a coalition government that consists of the moderate Christian Democratic Union and the leftist Social Democrats. These parties, historically adversaries, have united for the sole purpose of preventing the AfD–Germany’s most popular party, according to current polling–from participating in government. It is much as though our Democrats and Republicans joined forces to prevent an anti-illegal immigration party from playing a role in Congress.
The German government’s ostracism of AfD is meant to analogize them to the Nazi party, but that is ridiculous. AfD is the most pro-Israel and pro-Jewish of German parties, and its platform is mostly Reaganite. Ironically, as Heather Mac Donald points out, one of AfD’s supposed crimes is telling the truth about the Nazis:
Professor Andreas Zick noted several promising signs. An AfD leader (that would be [Alice] Weidel, in her January 2025 X interview with Elon Musk) had called Hitler a “man of the left,” Zick said. Never mind that Weidel was asserting the lack of harmony between the AfD and Hitler; to Zick, she was trivializing Hitler as a prelude to a full-out embrace of National Socialism.
Never mind, too, that Hitler was in fact a man of the left, as he himself said. The word “socialist” in the Nazi party’s name was a clue.
All of that is prelude. Heather Mac Donald’s City Journal piece is great even by her lofty standards. And it is important because Germany’s situation is closely analogous to ours. You should read Heather’s entire essay, but I want to highlight these paragraphs, which could well be written about the United States:
The AfD is not neo-Nazi; it is not a threat to the democratic order. Its constitutional crimes come down to this: a belief that a nation has the right to decide whether it wants to change its historic character through mass Third World migration.
Such change is the whole point of multiculturalism. If immigrants were expected to assimilate fully into the receiving culture, they would lose their value. They are supposed to bring lasting difference to Western nations and to shake the majority culture out of its traditions and identity, replacing the latter with desperately needed diversity (Germany’s much-touted Vielfalt).
The elite establishment never claims that the non-West needs comparably transformative diversity. No one argues that Sub-Saharan Africa or the Muslim Middle East should import millions of Danes and Irish to counter racial, ethnic, and religious homogeneity. Only the West engineers its own demographic replacement out of a belief in its own illegitimacy.
The AfD opposes that replacement out of a love for German heritage and a belief that the German culture is as unique and as worthy of preservation as any non-Western culture. For that belief, it must be crushed and its voters denied their rightful representation in Parliament. This exclusionary cartel is the real democratic coup, not anything that the AfD has ever proposed.
I can only add that the phony “elites” who are trying to destroy Germany are more or less identical to the phony “elites” who are trying to destroy the United States.
