BERLIN — In Germany, as in a number of European countries, support for the far right is surging.
Buoyed by discontent over the economy and energy policy, Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) has been gaining in the polls ahead of regional elections in East Germany in 2024 and in Bavaria later this fall. An anti-migration, climate change-denying party, AfD won its first district council election in Sonneberg — a town in eastern Germany — this past June and holds 78 seats (a little more than 10 percent) in the national legislature.
The backing it has picked up is notable: National polling averages currently show the party with 21 percent support, higher than that of the 18 percent held by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). And in recent polls of specific German states, AfD has become one of the most popular political parties in some regions, getting up to 34 percent support in Thuringia, for example.
AfD’s gains have raised alarms among historians and political leaders, given the country’s history with Nazism. The AfD says it is not interested in neo-Nazism and has publicly tried to distance itself from neo-Nazi organizations. Its ties to right-wing extremists are deep, however, and, as with the Nazis, nationalism and the scapegoating of minorities — including Muslim migrants — are key to its ideology.
Thus far, the major German political parties — the center-left SPD, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the environmentalist Greens — have declined to work with AfD at the federal level. But there is concern that mainstream parties may begin to normalize the AfD in order to build governing coalitions and to consolidate power.
“One thing is: never underestimate [the AfD]. Never,” says Christoph Kreutzmüller, a Holocaust historian and former curator at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Vox sat down with Kreutzmüller, who now chairs the Aktives Museum, which is dedicated to confronting the history of…
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