AfD

 The disturbingly strong showing for the far-right AfD party in Germany's state elections in Saxony-Anhalt over the weekend fortunately does not immediately change anything about the policies of the German central government. Nor does it presage some inexorable global tide of the extreme right (the AfD is strongest only in historically depressed ex-Communist areas of the country, not nationwide). 

Still, I do think these results underscore that electoral politics across the West are no longer a contest between the center-right and the center-left as we once knew them. Rather, the struggle is between a loose coalition of anti-fascist parties, and a resurgent populist far-right that is deeply xenophobic, wears its historical ties to European fascism on its sleeves, talks about mass expulsion of nonwhite immigrants, and displays a weird affinity for Vladimir Putin. 

It used to be seen as a closing argument in any Western democracy to show that one's opponent had ties to fascism. A German political party winning a state election while making dog-whistles about Nazism would have seemed as unthinkable a few years ago as an American party openly adopting the discredited slogan of "America First" was before Trump. Now, the choice in every election in the democratic West is just overtly between fascism and non-fascism. 

This must strike us as odd, since you would think that no set of ideas had ever been more comprehensively tested and disproven in the eyes of history than fascism. After all, our societies already tried this exact combination of isolationism, appeasement, fascism and xenophobic nationalism across the West in the 1930s. The result was a global conflagration that caused the deaths of 60 million people—wreaking havoc most of all in the countries that chose the fascist path. 

Liberal democracy won the war in the 1940s, lest we forget. Whereas the countries that embraced fascism and started the war brought on their own cataclysmic defeat and destruction. 

In his book about the horrors of fire-bombing during World War II, W.G. Sebald writes with a sympathy for the civilian victims of these atrocities that some German readers at first mistook for an attempt to draw a moral equivalence between the Allies and the Axis. Sebald therefore felt moved to set the record straight: "The majority of Germans today know," he wrote, "or so at least it is to be hoped, that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived." (Bell trans.)

Likewise, Friedrich Reck, in his immortal Diary of a Man in Despair, depicted better than anyone the grim horrors of the destruction of German cities during the Allied raids (which were—let's be clear—an inexcusable violation of the laws of war); but he was very clear in his mind who was primarily to blame: Hitler and his generals. 

Indeed, that is what the German people have to thank the far-right for, the last time they came to power—the destruction of much of their country. 

It might seem odd that the AfD, like Trump's MAGA movement and the French National Front, should combine an extreme xenophobic nationalism and constant rhetoric about "invaders" with a pathetically supine and accommodating attitude to a large foreign power—Putin's Russia—that is actually invading a sovereign allied nation on Europe's borders—and which has reportedly staged a number of low-profile strikes on NATO territory in recent weeks to test the strength of the alliance. 

Part of the AfD's policy agenda, after all, is reportedly to "end[...] sanctions on Russia and German aid to Ukraine." This at a time when the German government credibly alleges that Putin's regime recently sent explosive drones to an airport on German soil, apparently as a trial ballon to see whether NATO still possesses any commitment to collective security. 

Isn't it rather odd that a bunch of German nationalists apparently have no objection to another country attacking their precious Vaterland? 

But perhaps, like all bullies, they only feel big when they are picking on those smaller than themselves. They are comfortable smearing refugees and asylum-seekers as "invaders" because these are politically helpless to fight back. But as soon as Russia expresses disapproval of German policy, the AfD falls over itself to placate them. They say "a good kind bear is angary/ We fear for the quo pro quid" (as E.E. Cummings mocked the West's accommodating response to Russian aggression in Hungary in 1956). 

This paradox would surprise us more if it was not exactly what the European and American far-right did in the 1930s too. It's essentially the Vichy approach. Koestler was always writing about the absurdity and self-defeating character of the French nationalists' reaction to German aggression in 1939: first, they arrested all the anti-Nazi German refugees, in a spasm of xenophobia, calling them "enemy aliens" and "scum." Then, when an actual German army was invading French soil, they welcomed them, and collaborated with their occupation, and ceded much of their territory. 

The American far-right is doing the same. Trump, Musk, Hegseth, Miller, and the rest of them have all echoed the AfD's rhetoric about "remigration" and have joined them in depicting refugees and asylum-seekers as "invaders." But when faced with an actual ongoing invasion of the West—by Putin's forces—they blench and try to soothe the hackles of the "good kind bear." Trump, after all, when asked about the alleged Russian sabotage incident at the German airport, undermined the German government's allegations and said Putin had no intention of attacking NATO. 

All the worst people seem to have an instinctive way of finding each other and joining efforts, it would seem. Putin, Trump, German quasi-Nazis, French fascists—they all, strangely enough, have managed to overcome their national differences and work together in a spirit of fraternity. What a victory for international brotherhood! As Nabokov once put it: 

[A] kind of family circle has gradually been formed, linking representatives of all nations—jolly Empire-builders in their jungle clearings, the unmentionable German product, the good old church-going Russian or Polish pogromshchik, the lean American lyncher, the man with the bad teeth who squirts anti-minority stories in the bar or the lavatory, and, at another point of the same sub-human circle, those ruthless, paste-faced automatons in singularly wide trousers and high-shouldered coats, those Sitzriesen whom—or shall I say which?—the Soviet State has brought out on such a scale after thirty years of selective breeding.