VENI, VIDI… DID I UNDERSTAND?

Does This Road Lead to Another Führer?

There are numbers that force us to ask uncomfortable questions. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has just won 43.8 percent of the vote. We are no longer talking about a fringe party or a protest vote that can simply be dismissed. At the national level, the picture is no longer confined to eastern Germany either: the latest DeutschlandTrend puts the AfD at 27 percent, ahead of the CDU/CSU.

Something similar, though involving very different parties, is happening across Europe. Le Pen and Bardella in France, Meloni in Italy, Vox in Spain, the FPÖ in Austria, the Sweden Democrats. The right is advancing. And in Germany, one question inevitably follows: haven’t we seen this movie before? The short answer is no. The interesting answer takes a little longer.

First, we need to get the words right. Conservative right, radical right, far right and neo-Nazism are not synonyms. Germany’s CDU or Spain’s PP belong to the traditional democratic right. Vox, Rassemblement National and the FPÖ belong, with considerable differences between them, to the radical right. Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia has proved far more institutional and Atlanticist in government than many expected before she came to power.

The AfD is a more troubling case. It is a radical-right party containing ethnonationalist currents, and some of its regional organizations have been officially classified by Germany’s domestic intelligence authorities as right-wing extremist. In Saxony-Anhalt there is little ambiguity on that point: the state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies the regional AfD as gesichert rechtsextremistisch — confirmed right-wing extremist.

Does that make the AfD a Nazi party? I would not use that description. Not because there is any reason to soften what the party represents, but because words have meanings. Neo-Nazism implies something considerably more specific: identification with central elements of National Socialism, including biological racism, antisemitism, the Führer principle, a racially defined Volksgemeinschaft, rejection of democracy and, in its more extreme forms, historical revisionism. Calling everything to our right “Nazi” may be emotionally satisfying. It does very little to help us understand what is actually happening. And what is happening may be worrying enough without bringing Hitler into it.

The differences from the 1930s are enormous. The Weimar Republic was a young democracy battered by defeat in war, first by hyperinflation and then by the Great Depression. Millions were unemployed. Political murder, street fighting and paramilitary organizations were part of everyday political life. Powerful parties openly declared that they wanted to destroy the democratic system.

Europe in 2026 does not look like that. We have established democracies, welfare states, constitutional courts, the European Union, NATO, pluralistic media and highly developed civil societies. Germany went further: after 1945, it deliberately constructed a constitutional system intended to make another 1933 extraordinarily difficult.

The Basic Law is not the Weimar Constitution. And the AfD is not the NSDAP. It has no SA, no party army fighting political opponents in the streets. It does not openly advocate a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)