Leaked plans show Germany’s far right plotting a radical power grab with global implications.
The leak of a document from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right party, sheds light on the way Donald Trump’s strategy is being emulated by right-wing parties across Europe. The AfD, which came second in the federal elections with 20.6 percent, has been designated “extremist” by German intelligence agencies, and its racist policies declared incompatible with the free democratic order. As a result, the party is currently shut out of any potential right-wing coalition at a national level, through the adoption of a “firewall” policy by the centre-right CDU-CSU. However, exceptions to the ban have begun at local level, and in January the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had to rely on the AfD to pass a new law restricting inward migration.
In a document leaked to Politico, the AfD outlines the next stage of its plan for power. It wants to break down the firewall by polarizing public debate between itself and the “woke left” – as personified in the Left Party. “Our goal is to create a situation in which the political divide no longer runs between the AfD and the other political currents, but rather one in which a bourgeois-conservative camp and a radicalizing left-wing camp face each other, comparable to the situation in the U.S.,” says the document.
By forcing voters of the political centre to take sides on the basis of values, and by stigmatising the left in the same terms as Trump – “radical left lunatics” – the AfD wants to erode support for the firewall at a cultural and narrative level, to the point where the CDU-CSU can no longer justify it to their voters.
Combined with a shift of emphasis in its language, to present a more moderate face to the electorate, the AfD hopes this will finally end its isolation and open a pathway to power. This is exactly what Trump did by stigmatising Antifa, Black Lives Matter, pro-Palestine and trans rights protesters. And it has a long track record.
Any student of history knows the playbook this is based on. The AfD is not a Nazi Party, and the Germany of today is vastly more stable and prosperous than the late Weimar Republic. But the strategy of hollowing out the centre, of staging an “us or them” battle against the German communist party, and of moderating extreme language to mollify right-wing conservatism is the one Hitler followed.
The background to this strategy is, of course, the war in Gaza, which has become a polarising issue across Europe and the Americas. Thought the Left Party in Germany has resisted calls from its rank and file to end the party’s historic support for Israel (a product of its roots in the communism of the GDR), the language of the street milieu in which the left operates has moved rapidly.
The US Anti-Defamation League, in a report this month, says recorded incidents of antisemitism almost doubled in Germany between 2022 and 2023, to 4,782, with regional figures for 2024 said to match that. The pattern is closely matched by figures from the UK and USA, where justified anger among Muslim communities over Israeli war crimes in Gaza have frequently spilled over into chants and violent actions targeting Jews and Jewish institutions.
In Germany, where the AfD opposes circumcision and Kosher slaughter, the Central Jewish council reports: “A front has formed, cutting across the left and right, from Islamists to the very centre of society. This coalition questions the self-evidence of today’s Jewish life as well as Germany’s culture of remembrance”.
The ADL report contains a catalogue of evidence from other national Jewish councils that should make stark reading for progressives. In France, “a very high proportion of antisemitic acts are related to the Israel-Hamas war…” with more than 10 percent of incidents involving physical assaults — an all-time high.
In the online space, it is now common to see the most extreme opponents of Israel reposting and interacting with fascist antisemites, while Islamophobia and stigmatisation of migrants runs riot. There has emerged, in many countries, a situation where people on the pro-Palestinian progressive left and the racist far right are in a state of “mental civil war” with each other.
In this situation, the strategy adopted by progressives of the centre-left has to change. What is driving people towards parties like the AfD is no longer simply economic hardship, or hostility to migrants, but a sense that the rule of law is breaking down; that in the absence of sustained growth, both geopolitics and domestic politics have become a zero-sum game, in which for my family or community to prosper, yours must fail.
In the UK, the situation is set to be exacerbated by the formation of a new left party, involving former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the dissident Labour MP Zarah Sultana and four “independent” Muslim MPs elected on religious conservative politics and fuelled by anger over Gaza.
When Parliament voted to proscribe the organisation Palestine Action under anti-terror law, after it sabotaged two aircraft vital to the maintenance of Britain’s defences against nuclear attack, Ms Sultana attempted to shout “We are all Palestine Action” from her seat in Parliament, before the Speaker cut her off. Supporters of Palestine Action have since begun chanting “Death, Death to the IDF” – following the disastrous airing of the slogan by the BBC in its coverage of the Glastonbury music festival.
In short, by mobilising anti-Israel rhetoric from the streets into electoral politics, Corbyn looks set to fuel exactly the kind of polarising atmosphere that the British far-right party Reform, currently polling up to 30 percent, can feed off. We are now at the stage of far-right radicalisation where, to be frank, Britain needs a gestural ultra-left party prone to divisive rhetoric like a hole in the head. But that’s what we are about to get.
In response, I think social democratic and liberal parties of Europe need to accept something that will come very hard to their political traditions: that both geopolitics and economics have become, for now, zero sum; and that rapid and demonstrative policies of redistribution need to start delivering change up front, not promises of long-term betterment in the future.
The Labour Party, of which I am a member, has no memory of having to operate in a zero-sum world: from its foundation in the Edwardian era, through to the major redistributive governments of the 1940s, 1960s and Tony Blair, its mission was to redistribute the proceeds of growth, and to reap the rewards of an open, global, multilateral system.
If these premises are gone, then constructing new coalitions of centrist voters – drawing in the “old” manual working class alongside the urban salariat – looks the only way to avoid the goal that the AfD has set for Germany: the hollowed-out centre.
The problem we face is not that “the Devil has all the best tunes” but that he owns the jukebox: Facebook, X and TikTok have rapidly become vectors for extremist language and incitement, with Trump’s vice president JD Vance publicly decrying all attempts by European states to limit racist “free speech”.
In a zero-sum world, the priorities of liberalism and social democracy have to change. Front and centre has to be the militant defence of democracy itself: more restrictions on parties like the AfD; stronger laws to trace and prevent foreign funding of parties like Reform, which has pledged to accept donations in cryptocurrency; and tougher policing against protest movements that stray into violence and intimidation, no matter how justified their motivation.
We need to win an argument with voters of the centre-left that, in a world where Trump rules America, and where Putin’s hackers and proxies are running riot within European civil society, the defence of our own democracies against subversion and foreign interference means changing our approach to politics.
At the core of our offer has to be redistribution not just of wealth but of economic and physical security. Everyday life has to feel not just more prosperous but safer and more predictable.
Because for those who study the rise of fascism in history, it is this intangible aspect of mass resignation, hopelessness and tiredness that really tipped the balance. When there are tens of thousands of people who really hate each other’s values and lifestyles, only a vigorous centre, with a clear story about how things can get better fast, stands a chance of halting the slide to the extremes.
This is a joint column with IPS Journal
Paul Mason is a journalist, writer and filmmaker. His latest book is How To Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance (Allen Lane). His most recent films include R is For Rosa, with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. He writes weekly for New Statesman and contributes to Der Freitag and Le Monde Diplomatique.