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A Nazi-curious party just won big in Germany. The White House approves.

How a very dangerous state election in Germany helps reveal Trump’s real foreign policy.

Germany’s local elections usually don’t matter to anyone but Germans. But Sunday’s contest in the state of Saxony-Anhalt was an exception: It could very well produce the first far-right government anywhere in Germany since the Nazis.

Alternatives fur Deutschland (AfD), a party so extreme that Germany’s intelligence services put them under surveillance, won 43.8 — a plurality that puts them just shy of a majority of seats in the Saxony-Anhalt parliament. Since the election, AfD’s leadership has been negotiating with other factions to form a coalition government; it’s unclear at present how likely they are to succeed.

On its own, Saxony-Anhalt is not a huge prize. A state of a little over 2 million people, it has limited significance for German politics as a whole (let alone Europe). But as a political matter, the AfD coming in first place is an earthquake: Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the result has shaken his party, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), “to its very foundations.” With elections later this month in the states of Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, there’s rising fear that the AfD may parlay local victories into a national tidal wave.

“The national debate is now one of crisis, focusing attention on the success of the AfD and the alleged reasons for it,” said Cas Mudde, an expert on European far-right parties at the University of Georgia.

This, it appears, is the outcome the Trump administration has long desired. The White House has, both in public and in private, lent support to AfD. While he was in the administration last year, Elon Musk spoke at an AfD rally. Prior to the Trump administration, the US had never interfered so blatantly in a European ally’s partisan politics.

As a result, the AfD’s rise is not only a critical political story in Europe, but a revealing one in America as well. In helping boost a truly extreme faction abroad, Trump is pursuing a foreign policy very different from the “America First” slogan it touts at home. The White House is dreaming of a world dominated by the far right — even if that comes at the expense of America’s geostrategic interests.

What the result in Saxony-Anhalt means for Germany — and for Europe

Modern German politics is in no small part built around preventing the rise of another Nazi-like party. The rise of the AfD is the greatest challenge to this mission to date.

Beginning life as a Euroskeptic party, the AfD emerged as the leading critic of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open doors approach to the 2015 refugee crisis. In the 2017 national elections, it went from having zero seats in the Bundestag (Germany’s parliament) to 94. Today, it controls 151 out of 630, second only to Schulz’s CDU. National polls uniformly suggest that it would surpass the CDU if elections were held today.

Typically, European far-right parties........

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