Why the AfD doesn’t shock me like it used to

Eleven years ago, I walked into the home of a man I regarded as one of the faces of Europe’s radical right. I was making a documentary tracing the footsteps of members of my family who had been murdered in Auschwitz. As part of it, I interviewed Constant Kusters, leader of the Dutch far-right Nederlandse Volks-Unie.

Inside his home was a mannequin dressed in a black uniform bearing the familiar SS insignia. Before we started the interview, I said: “I want you to know that I am Jewish.” “No problem,” he replied, a little too quickly, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.

“From the far right, I have never heard that we have a problem with the Jews. We have Moroccans, Kurdish people, people from Africa. That’s the new problem for the far right person in Europe,” he said.

The documentary went to air on 20 May 2015.

In the same film, I interviewed Rainer Höss, grandson of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. He had publicly confronted his family’s history. I asked him what he thought about the rise of antisemitism and the revival of neo-Nazism in Europe. “I think it’s bigger than ever,” he told me. He spoke about right-wing parties and movements gaining power across Europe. I asked him whether he thought a Holocaust could happen again. “Of course,” he replied.

I’ve been thinking about those conversations since Sunday’s election in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The Alternative for Germany, the AfD, won 43.8% of the vote. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU took just 17.2%. The AfD won 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats, three short of a majority. It was the best result the party has ever achieved in a German state election and put it close to something Germany has not seen since the Second World War: a far-right party governing one of its states.

In 2017, I was in Germany when the AfD made its breakthrough into the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament. It won 12.6% of the vote and 94 seats. Jewish organisations reacted with alarm. I reacted with alarm. I was a Jewish journalist whose family had been murdered in the Holocaust.

But I also knew Germany beyond election nights. Over the years, I travelled to Germany to report, sometimes three or four times a year. For the best part of a decade, Germany was a country I covered regularly. Much of that period coincided with the fallout from Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to admit large numbers of refugees.

The scale was enormous. Germany recorded net immigration of roughly 1.1 million foreign nationals in 2015 alone. Integrating so many people into schools, communities and the labour market became a huge political and social challenge. I interviewed ordinary Germans who were worried about immigration and integration, about security and about whether their government was listening to them. These weren’t people sitting in rooms decorated with SS insignia; they were people trying to make sense of changes happening around them.

Immigration isn’t the whole explanation for the AfD’s rise. Economic insecurity, frustration with mainstream parties and the particular experience of eastern Germany all play a part. But immigration was one of the issues I encountered repeatedly. While I can’t pinpoint an interview or moment when my thinking began to change, the more people I spoke to, the harder I found it to dismiss concerns about immigration simply because the far right was making political capital out of it.

Being worried about immigration or integration was not in itself an extreme position. That sounds obvious written down. But if mainstream politicians treat people who raise those concerns as though they are extremists, the concerns don’t disappear. It simply becomes easier for parties on the fringes to claim that they are the only ones prepared to listen.

Ulrich Siegmund is an interesting example of how much the presentation of the AfD has changed. At 35, he led the party’s campaign in Saxony-Anhalt. He smiles a lot, takes selfies with supporters and campaigned using symbols of East German nostalgia, including the old Simson mopeds many eastern Germans grew up with. On election day, he and his wife arrived at the polling station on one. He has helped give the AfD a younger, friendlier face.

But the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is classified as right-wing extremist by the state’s domestic intelligence service. It has promised a deportation offensive, calls for refugee children to be taught in separate classes, rainbow flags to be banned from schools and greater emphasis placed on nationalism in education. Cultural institutions deemed insufficiently supportive of its vision of Germany also face losing state funding. Siegmund was also at the controversial 2023 meeting in Potsdam where “remigration”, involving the removal of immigrants from Germany, was discussed. He has denied supporting extremist ideas.

This is the part we can’t afford to lose sight of. A voter can support a party because it talks about a problem they genuinely recognise without necessarily supporting everything else that party stands for. But the vote brings the rest of the programme closer to power too. Almost 44% of those who voted in Saxony-Anhalt backed the AfD on Sunday. I don’t believe that means almost 44% of them are extremists, but their votes have given 39 seats to a party branch that their own domestic intelligence service classifies as right-wing extremist.

There is something else about this that interests me because of the work I now do on information warfare. We usually look for the lie. Who invented it? Who spread it? Who believed it? But nobody had to tell me something false to change the way I listened to the immigration debate in Germany. I heard it for years. From politicians, journalists, voters and people I interviewed. Some of what I heard I disagreed with. Some of it I didn’t. And after a while, the subject, the language and eventually the party itself were no longer unfamiliar.

This doesn’t mean hearing something repeatedly makes us believe it. But familiarity does matter. Something that once immediately sets off an alarm can become part of the normal political conversation.

Perhaps that is part of what has happened with the AfD. When it entered the Bundestag in 2017, its arrival felt like a rupture in German politics. Nine years later, millions of Germans vote for it and in Saxony-Anhalt it has just won almost 44%. At what point does something stop feeling like the political fringe when so many people are voting for it?

I keep coming back to that room in the Netherlands in 2015. Back then, the radical right was easy for me to recognise. I was sitting opposite Constant Kusters. There was a mannequin wearing SS insignia in the room. I was making a film about members of my family murdered in Auschwitz. I knew exactly what frightened me.

It’s much harder when some of the issues being talked about are ones I have heard ordinary Germans worry about too, and I can understand why they worry about them.

Eleven years ago, I asked Rainer Höss whether another Holocaust could happen. “Of course,” he said. I’m not suggesting Sunday’s election means Germany is heading towards another Holocaust. It doesn’t, and careless historical comparisons don’t help us understand what is happening now. But I do react differently to Europe’s far right today from the way I did when I made that documentary. Some of that change has come from listening more carefully to people whose concerns I think deserve to be heard.

I don’t think acknowledging those concerns makes me far right. But somewhere along the way, I have become less shocked by some of the politics that come with them.