Germany Holds Up a Mirror for America

Alice Weidel during Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s first government statement, Berlin (May 14, 2025) | EUS-Nachrichten / Shutterstock

On May 2, 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that Germany was “not a democracy, but a tyranny in disguise.” True extremism, he said, lay not in the “popular AfD” but in the “deadly immigration policy of the establishment with open borders, which the AfD rejects.” 

Rubio’s post came just two hours after the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne announced its classification of the Alternative für Deutschland (“Alternative for Germany), or AfD, as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” movement because it advocates an “ethnic-ancestral” concept of the people and disparages citizens with a migrant background. According to a previous report by the office released in February, the AfD accuses the German government of a controlled “population exchange” and a planned “national extinction.” (Except where noted, translations throughout are my own, with assistance in some cases from DeepL’s translation software.)

The German Foreign Office was unequivocal in its reply to Rubio’s post: “This is democracy.” The Foreign Office emphasized that the classification had been made after a thorough, independent investigation. Independent courts had the final say—and history has taught us how to stop right-wing extremism.

Earlier this year, at the AfD party conference in Riesa on January 11, 2025, AfD chancellor candidate Alice Weidel presented the party’s election program, which focuses on the issue of migration “Withdraw from the Common European Asylum System! Gender studies? Let’s abolish it and throw those professors out!” Migrants? They should be deported consistently if they have no right to stay. Weidel used a term that she had previously avoided: remigration. The term is borrowed from Martin Sellner, the leader of the Identitarian Movement, and is a euphemism for mass deportation. In concluding that “und wenn das dann Remigration heißt, dann heißt das eben Remigration!” (“And if that means remigration, then so be it!”), Weidel signaled her commitment to the right-wing extremists in her party.

German historian Ulrich Herbert has been researching the history of National Socialism and the genocide of European Jews for decades. He sees the deportation fantasies of the AfD and right-wing extremists as a continuation of the National Socialists’ ethnic ideology. In their worldview, the “principle of descent is decisive” in determining the right to belong, “not the citizenship of the modern constitutional state.” The Nazi Party’s 1932 program, authored by Gottfried Feder, elaborates: “None but members of the nation may be citizens of the state. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation.” (Translation by E. T. S. Dugdale, 1980.)

Herbert also notes the rejection of cultural modernity by AfD supporters, who oppose urban, cosmopolitan thinking and left-liberal values that are “identified with the Greens.” In contrast, there are “the ‘ordinary people,’ or those who feel that way, who are integrated into the region and the nation” and “are allegedly no longer even noticed by the left-liberal bourgeoisie.” 

But the rise of the AfD and the Trump administration’s not-so-hidden sympathy with the movement isn’t just Nazism reanimated. Today’s forms of post-fascism combine ethnic nationalism, religion, and technology in a wide variety of ways, all aimed at the myth of national resurrection. Some Silicon Valley tech billionaires are bewitched by the idea that a new power elite freed from petty laws and regulations can “solve” the world’s problems through the consistent application of new technologies, Christian transcendence, and apocalyptic visions. This hypertrophic self-confidence is a step backward from the Enlightenment. 

At the same time, the White House is ruled by a president of lawlessness, an intuitive and power-hungry politician who causes disorder and chaos. The US is no longer the guarantor of a stable order but rather the biggest predator in the jungle. With his mercantilist tariff policy, Trump could, like former US President Herbert Hoover in the 1920s, plunge the world into an abyss similar to that experienced a hundred years ago during the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler.