Germany's new populist party : The AfD

Having examined Germany’s radical-right AfD party from four recent perspectives - Bensmann’s Black Book, Grigat’s AfD & FPÖ, Wildt’s Volksgemeinschaft and AfD, and Wiegel’s The Stoppable AfD—a comprehensive picture of the party has emerged. What started off as a nationalistic, neoliberal, and anti-Europe party mutated into radical-right (first) and völkisch-nationalistic, and perhaps even crypto-fascist party (later). Some, like the former foreign minister and deputy chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, have called the AfD, the new Nazi party. Perhaps one of the real dangers of the AfD is not to see the danger. This is the risk of seeing the party as just another European populist party—a political force that Germany did not have until 2017. The idea that Germany was somehow simply “catching up” with other European countries is a dangerous illusion. Germany has always been different and Germany’s radical-right was always different. Only Germany’s radical-right became a Nazi party furnished with the technological and economic machinery to almost complete destroy Europe. More crucially, Germany was also the country that created Auschwitz—nobody else has ever created massive death factories with organized railroads running throughout an entire continent. The Shoah remains uniquely German. In that respect Germany’s radical-right has been—and is— more dangerous. Nobody, except Germany, had ever the goal of “destroying the Jewish race in Europe” as Hitler once said, and nobody ever came close in fulfilling this kind of racist nightmare. More than ever before, enlightened forces need to keep watching, but also fighting Germany’s new crypto-Nazi party, the AfD. Publication details: Marcus Bensmann, Schwarzbuch AfD: Fakten, Figuren, Hintergründe (Essen:Correctiv Press, 2017). Stephan Grigat, ed., AfD & FPÖ: Antisemitismus, völkischer Nationalismus und Geschlechterbilder (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2017). Michael Wildt, Volk, Volksgemeinschaft, AfD (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition Press, 2017). Gerd Wiegel, Ein aufhaltsamer Aufstieg—Alternativen zu AfD & Co. (Cologne: PapyRossa Press, 2017). Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer.