Why is the far right on the rise in Germany — all over again?

It is a spring evening in the small town of Leinefelde-Worbis and a man denounced by his critics as a fascist and as a Nazi who dreams of becoming Germany’s next Führer is telling a cheering audience of several hundred people how their homeland is going to the dogs.

“Is our democracy dying?” is the theme of the meeting in a community centre called Obereichsfeldhalle. According to 52-year-old Björn Höcke the threat comes not from his party, which is being closely watched by the domestic intelligence service, but from an all-powerful state determined to strip away the rights of its citizens.

The meeting is billed as a Bürgerdialog (a dialogue with citizens). During the evening Höcke talks of deporting illegal migrants, takes swipes at green policies and gender-neutral language, and calls for peace with Russia and an end to the war in Ukraine. In what passes as a lighter moment, the former history teacher jokes about being taken to court for having slipped an old Nazi slogan into a speech, which is an offence under German law.

“I am being put on trial, where normally rapists and murderers are sentenced, for a thought crime,” he says. Such fighting talk goes down well with his audience. Voting AfD is not just about one issue or another, a nurse named Marcel tells me. “It is fundamentally important that we preserve our identity not only as Germans but also as Europeans.”

An urbane and charismatic figure, Höcke is far from a lone voice on the fringes of politics. He is the head of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the central state of Thuringia, in which Leinefelde lies. Co-founded a decade ago by an economist, Bernd Lucke, to oppose bailouts for the eurozone, the AfD was transformed into a highly successful populist anti-immigrant party after 2015 when Angela Merkel, the chancellor, threw open the doors to more than a million refugees. Two years later it entered parliament for the first time and now, amazingly, is Germany’s second-most popular party.

As Germany’s ruling Social Democrat-led coalition under Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, lurches from crisis to crisis, the AfD is on track to win 16-18 per cent in next month’s elections to the European parliament. Thuringia and other parts of the former communist east are its stronghold, with support closer to 30 per cent, but its support is also growing in the more affluent west. Höcke is one of its most successful and controversial figures, not least because of his revisionist views of his country’s Nazi past — which have included denouncing the memorial built in Berlin to the victims of the Holocaust as a “monument of shame”.

Germany’s other mainstream parties have erected a Brandmauer (firewall) against co-operation with the AfD, which has been labelled a “suspected case of far-right extremism” by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic intelligence service. Höcke’s branch in Thuringia has been singled out as “confirmed” extremist since 2021, allowing for greater surveillance.

Some AfD members and supporters have been accused of being too close to neo-Nazi and other fringe far-right groups such as the so-called Reichsbürger which, for arcane historical reasons, refuse to accept the legitimacy of the postwar Federal Republic of Germany. Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, one of the party’s former MPs, has even been charged with involvement in a bizarre plot to oust Chancellor Scholz and replace him with Heinrich XIII — Prinz Reuss, 72, a member of the royal family who once ruled part of Thuringia. She and the other principal suspects are due to go on trial on May 21 accused of participation in the biggest terror conspiracy in postwar German history, after weapons and night-vision equipment were found at her home.

In an alarming echo of the 1930s, several figures in the AfD reportedly took part in a shadowy meeting last November at a villa near Potsdam, outside Berlin, at which a “masterplan” was discussed to deport “foreigners”, including those actually born in Germany. In response, hundreds of thousands of people marched against the party in Berlin and other German cities for several weeks at the start of this year. There have been calls to ban the AfD or at least to strip it of the more than €10 million (£8.6 million) in state funding it receives each year. This appears to have cost Höcke and his allies a few percentage points in the polls, but not to have dissuaded true believers.

Germany certainly is not the only place in Europe where the far right is on the march. Yet the country’s past makes its resurgence here especially sensitive. Jewish people are understandably alarmed: Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has gone so far as to accuse the AfD of embodying “Nazi ideals” and warned that if the party ever became part of the federal government, “one would have to seriously consider whether Jewish life is still possible in Germany”.

Since its foundation after the Second World War, West Germany — and, since 1990, the reunified Germany — has been a model democracy, not least thanks to its constitution, known as the Basic Law, the provisions of which are intended to prevent a repetition of the dictatorship of the 1930s. So far, it seems to have worked: decades of rapid economic growth and rising living standards meant that, until the early 2010s and the aftermath of the global economic crisis, there was little support for parties at either fringe of the political spectrum. The Germans, it seemed, had learnt their lesson.

So why do millions of German voters now support a party that appears to be flirting again with its dark past? Is the AfD really the mainstream conservative party it claims to be, or a threat to democracy? And how dangerous is it for Germany, for Europe and, indeed, for us in Britain?

Höcke’s arrival has caused a stir in Leinefelde, a town of 20,000 people in the northwest of Thuringia, a sparsely populated and forested state known as “the green heart of Germany”. On a patch of ground a few dozen yards from the Obereichsfeldhalle, a noisy but peaceful demonstration against his presence is under way. One banner reads simply: “Höcke is a Nazi.”

It has been organised by Christian Simon, who works as a manager for an American multinational and lives near by. “Every day I have dealings with people from all over the world and they ask me what’s going on here,” he says. “Höcke has the ability to rally people behind him and to radicalise them. He has always been on the right fringe of the party but has moved further and further to the right and taken his supporters with him.” Simon is appalled at the prospect of him becoming state premier. “There’s no question that he would implement things that are not good for democracy,” he says.

Höcke’s fans, roughly equal in number to the demonstrators, stand patiently outside the hall, waiting to be frisked by security before entering. They glower across at the protesters but do not attempt to approach them. They seem innocuous enough: overwhelmingly male, in their sixties and seventies, most dressed in checked shirts. Polls indicate the party is proportionately more popular among people of working age, so where are they?

“They don’t dare to be seen here,” one older man tells me. “But I’m a pensioner and no one can do anything to me.” I finally spot two young faces: Maurice, 18, who is in his final year at school, and his friend Jonah, 17, an apprentice electrician. Maurice claims those who express sympathy for the party’s views are often given lower grades. Jonah says at his workplace it can mean a summons to HR or the boss.

The Thuringia branch of the party’s programme includes an end to state funding for the local wing of the state broadcaster, which it sees as biased against it; getting rid of “climate nonsense”; cutting funding for civil society; and restricting the ability of the local branch of the intelligence service to monitor right-wing extremism.

Ask anyone in the hall their main preoccupation, though, and the answer is immigration. This may seem curious, since the proportion of foreign-born people in Thuringia, like elsewhere in eastern Germany, is less than half that in the west. Nor is the state overcrowded: its population, at just over 2.1 million, is a fifth smaller than it was when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

The issue also worries Germans as a whole: a third regularly cite immigration as their main concern to pollsters — almost as many as those who are primarily concerned by inflation and considerably higher than in most European countries. Local councils across Germany are struggling to find homes and school places for all the newcomers. Immigration is also intertwined with law and order, another hot-button issue. The day of Höcke’s speech in Leinefelde, the popular tabloid Bild carries the headline “Violence by foreigners — the honest figures” and lists the comparatively high proportion of murders, robberies and other serious crimes committed by immigrants.

The AfD’s success in Thuringia and elsewhere in the former East Germany is not a surprise. Since reunification there has been far more violence against foreigners and support for neo-Nazi groups in the region than in the west of the country. This appears to be fuelled in part by easterners’ resentment at being treated, in their eyes, as second-class citizens. But there is perhaps a hangover from the past, too: the former communist authorities are accused of not having come properly to terms with the region’s Nazi history.

The AfD’s attempt to draw parallels between modern-day political correctness and curbs on free speech endured under the communists also appears to strike a chord with some voters.

Höcke is as wary of Germany’s “mainstream” media as they are of him. But he has agreed to talk to me. Once he has finished signing autographs and posing with fans for selfies, we walk to an adjoining sports hall and sit uncomfortably side by side on a bench as his aides hover in the background. He agrees that immigration remains the issue that’s “bothering the people the most … endangering the very existence of our social system and our internal security and ultimately undermining the identity of the people”. Germany, he argues, must tackle the problem of the 680,000 foreigners he claims are in the country without the legal right to live there.

“At some point they will have to be deported if there is no other way,” he says. Would that mean going door to door and removing them forcibly? “If necessary, the police must do it,” he says. More important, though, is trying to reduce the number of newcomers arriving, in part by making Germany’s welfare system less attractive. “If you have a burst water pipe and you call a plumber, the plumber won’t start bailing out the water that’s already in the cellar with a bucket — he’ll turn off the tap first,” he says.

Speaking calmly and in measured terms, Höcke decries Germany’s other parties, whom he accuses of forming a “cartel” by erecting their “firewall” against the AfD. “The basic principle in a parliamentary democracy is that the opposition can become a government and that the government is prepared to go into opposition,” he says. “If this basic law no longer applies and is being undermined, then democracy is at an end.” Nor does he have much time for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s MI5, which, unlike its British equivalent, he claims, is highly politicised.

Höcke reserves particular distaste for the way accusations of Nazism are used by their opponents to close down debate. Some Germans call it “swinging the Nazi club”. “If you said anything against the wave of immigration in 2015, you were called a right-wing extremist or Nazi,” he says. The same was true of those who protested against Covid restrictions or now call for “peace with Russia”. So what about his own use of the phrase from the Hitler era — “Everything for Germany!” — at an election rally in May 2021 for which he was due to be hauled up in court? The slogan is associated with the stormtroopers who played a key role in the Nazis’ rise to power. It was, he claims, a mere rhetorical flourish, though he is careful not to repeat it.

And anyway, he claims not to have been aware of its historical connotations. Even after 15 years teaching history? “It was a faux pas,” he insists. “After the scandal broke, I was called by many people who are smarter, more intelligent than I am and they said to me, ‘Björn, I didn’t know that either’.”

The trial, which began on April 18, is a serious matter. Höcke has had his parliamentary immunity from prosecution removed eight times on charges of incitement, but this is the first time he has actually been taken to court. In the days before proceedings began he presented himself as a free speech martyr on social media — attracting the attention, among others, of Elon Musk. Then, in a television interview, he claimed that the offending phrase was merely a translation of Donald Trump’s call to “make America great again”. During the trial he insisted he was “completely innocent”. The verdict is expected on May 14. But even if found guilty, he will face only a fine, which will not prevent him from standing in this autumn’s election for the Thuringian parliament.

Höcke poses a dilemma for the AfD’s national leadership, which is attempting to woo mainstream conservative voters. No one is trying harder than the party’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, 45, a former Goldman Sachs economist who spent six years living and working in China. She is openly gay and married to a film producer born in Sri Lanka — not the usual profile for a far-right nativist politician.

Attempts in the past to expel Höcke have come to nothing. But if he wins Thuringia for the AfD, the party will bank the gain.

Stephan Brandner, the AfD’s deputy leader, who has made his political career in Thuringia, admits Höcke is “a person who polarises a lot” as we sit in his parliamentary office in Berlin. A lawyer by training, he seems affable enough. I ask him how I should explain to British readers what his party stands for: if the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) — the party of Merkel and, before her, of Helmut Kohl and Konrad Adenauer — is centre right, then how should I describe the AfD? Radical right, nationalist right or far right?

Brandner, 57, takes exception to my premise. The CDU moved so far left during Merkel’s 16 years as chancellor, particularly over immigration, that it can no longer be considered on the right at all, he argues. He claims the AfD has taken its place. “We essentially represent the positions of the CDU from about 20 years ago.” But his analogy has flaws: the AfD wants to leave the euro; Kohl was the one who signed up for it. The AfD would like to transform the EU into something more like the common market used to be. If, as seems certain, there is no majority for this in Brussels, then it will organise a Brexit-style referendum. Kohl, by contrast, was passionate about closer European integration.

And unlike the AfD, the CDU was not being monitored by the intelligence services. Brandner denies his party is a threat to Germany’s constitutional order. “We don’t want a different state,” he says. “We want the state like it used to be.” Just as the other parties have erected their firewall against the AfD, so the party has drawn up its own Unvereinbarkeitsliste (incompatibility list), which sets out organisations whose views are deemed so extreme their members are blacklisted. Among them is the National Democratic Party (NPD), recently renamed Die Heimat (the Homeland), a neo-Nazi group that has achieved minor electoral success since its foundation in the 1960s. Yet how solid a barrier is it? Brandner admits a few extremists “slip through the net”. The intelligence service put the number of AfD with extremist views at 10,000, but he claims this is a question of definitions.

Investigations by the German media have revealed that a number of individual members have links with the NPD, as well as with other fringe groups such as the neo-Nazi German Youth Faithful to the Homeland (HDJ) and the ethno-nationalist Identitarian movement. Payments out of state money to parliamentary assistants provide a way of subsidising such groups as well as funding publishing houses that spread neo-Nazi ideology. Right-wingers of all hues also mingle during regular Monday demonstrations in many eastern cities. Their origins lie in the protests in 1989 that brought down the communist regime, but in recent years they have been directed against migrants, Covid restrictions and the government’s green policies.

A growing concern is the AfD’s cosiness towards Moscow and opposition to western military support for Ukraine, prompting accusations it is becoming a tool of Russian influence operations. Maximilian Krah, who heads the AfD’s list for the European parliament elections, and Petr Bystron, who is in second place, are accused of having accepted money from Voice of Europe, a pro-Russian media outlet whose activities were exposed recently by Czech intelligence. Both men have denied the claim. It has also emerged that three AfD members of the Bavarian parliament were invited to Moscow in March to watch the sham election that gave Vladimir Putin another six years as president.

There are further worries about the party’s links to China. Last month an AfD staffer, identified as Jian G, an assistant to Krah at the European parliament, was arrested on charges of spying for Beijing.

The presence of a former AfD member of parliament among the defendants in this month’s Reichsbürger terror trial is another cause for embarrassment. Malsack-Winkemann, 59, an MP from 2017 to 2021, allegedly made use of her parliamentary pass to take other alleged conspirators on a pre-coup tour of the Reichstag building — like a modern-day Guy Fawkes. A judge by profession, she was slated to be justice minister if the coup succeeded, according to prosecutors. A search of her home is said to have revealed a semi-automatic rifle, a revolver, a bulletproof vest and night-vision goggles. On remand ahead of the trial, she has reportedly been visited by at least three AfD MPs.

To see where extremism led in Germany’s past, you need only travel 12 miles east from Erfurt, Thuringia’s state capital, to Buchenwald, a former concentration camp — one of the first and largest on German soil — in the forest on the outskirts of Weimar. At least 50,000 people died here before it was liberated by the United States army in April 1945. Nearby is Mittelbau-Dora, a subcamp of Buchenwald, where slave labourers were brought by the Nazis from across Europe to build the V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets that rained down on London. Both places have since been turned into memorials that draw visitors from across the world.

Last September history collided with the present, as it so often does in Germany, when local elections were held in Nordhausen, a town of 42,000 people where the former Mittelbau-Dora camp lies. The AfD’s candidate, Jörg Prophet, 61, an entrepreneur, presented himself as the voice of common sense. But he also made no secret of his “revisionist” approach to the Nazi past, calling for an end to the “guilt cult” towards the Holocaust and claiming that Allied troops who liberated Mittelbau-Dora were solely interested in information about rockets and missiles. He topped the first round of the poll but was defeated 45 per cent to 55 per cent in the second by Kai Buchmann, the incumbent, after supporters of the other parties closed ranks against him.

Among those who fought to keep out Prophet was Jens-Christian Wagner, the head of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and a historian of the Nazi era. I meet him in his office at the camp, which lies in a block once used by the SS. Wagner says Prophet’s approach to the past is typical of the party.

“Historical revisionism and downplaying or denying the Holocaust play a central role in the AfD,” he says. Like any nationalist party, the AfD tries to “build a narrative of national greatness and a glorious history to create an identity”, he adds. “But even Höcke won’t claim that the Holocaust was glorious. So what do you have to do? You have to try to minimise the Holocaust.”

When it comes to current policies, the AfD says different things to different audiences. In the mainstream media its leaders strive to come across as “conservative and fact-orientated”, as Höcke did when we met. But in interviews with fringe right-wing websites and other media, they rail against the “global elite” — words often associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories — and lace their speeches with references to the Volk (people), to the “nation”, to its “will” and its “spirit”. “We know all those terms from the 1920s,” Wagner says, “and we know where it led in the 1930s.”

The other parties, meanwhile, have been left with the question of how to respond to the AfD. The Christian Democrats have ruled out having the party as a junior coalition partner if they win the next general election, due late next year. Maintaining the “firewall” against the AfD to keep it out of the state governments of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg will be more difficult if the party tops the polls in this autumn’s elections there. Meanwhile the party has been entering local government since taking control of Sonneberg, a region of 56,800 people in southern Thuringia, last June. Further gains are expected in elections in the state on May 26 and in eight other Länder (states) a fortnight later.

Yet the policy of treating the AfD as if it doesn’t exist has not stemmed its rise, prompting some to call for a change in tactics. To the horror of many in his party, Mario Voigt, leader of the Christian Democrats in Thuringia, agreed to take on Höcke in a televised debate last month — timed to coincide with the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald. Voigt was deemed to have narrowly won. By contrast, Höcke appeared flustered when his opponent accused him of wanting to become Reichskanzler (imperial chancellor), a post last held by Hitler.

In the meantime, calls to ban the party, which began to be voiced last summer, have faded. Securing a ban is, in any case, a complicated process that has been successful only twice before: against the Socialist Reich Party, a small openly neo-Nazi grouping, in 1952, and four years later against the Communist Party of Germany. An attempt to outlaw the NPD was rejected in 2017 by the constitutional court. Although the party was deemed by the judges to be hostile to the constitution, they said it had so little support from voters it had no chance of achieving its aims. This January it was stripped of its state subsidies and its tax relief cancelled for six years.

Wagner insists that a ban on the AfD is ultimately the only way to protect German democracy, even though it would mean disenfranchising the millions of people who support the party. He admits that the Germany of 2024 is very different from the country it was in 1933, when six million people were unemployed, there was widespread resentment at the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War and an epidemic of street violence. Yet there are also similarities, including between the AfD’s ideological positions and aspects of “classical National Socialism”.

“Even if 30 per cent vote for the AfD, they must be denied the opportunity to vote for a party that wants to abolish democracy,” Wagner says. “In 1933 it was not just 30 per cent but 40 per cent who backed the Nazis. But from today’s perspective we would probably have to say it would have been good if the Nazi party had been banned, at the latest, in January 1933. We would then have been spared a lot.”