Why the AfD Wins

https://firstthings.com/why-the-afd-wins/

33•cwwc•50m ago

Comments

yogthos•40m ago

Because German economy is imploding.

earthnail•38m ago

Except it’s starting to grow again and indicators look positive.

dbspin•33m ago

This was true right when Weimar Germany fell to the Nazis also. There's a degree of inertia to politics. We're also talking about a region of Germany that has been economically depressed for decades, with an unemployment rate twice the national average.

LastTrain•38m ago

But the right wing is demonstrably indistinguishable from left at making good economies. Same thing in the US.

marcosdumay•32m ago

That seems to not matter for the people that think the way the GP points.

(And they are quite distinguishable. The far right is way worse at it than the kind of left party that wins anything.)

LastTrain•29m ago

Yes but somehow conventional wisdom is that leaning right is a vote for “fiscal responsibility” and the economy, a misconception that the left needs to deal with.

watwut•35m ago

No, economy does not explains it at all.

JaggerJo•31m ago

“Germany's economy will grow by 1.3% in 2026, RWI said, upwardly revising its forecast of 0.8% growth in June.”

https://www.reuters.com/business/germanys-rwi-institute-upgr...

gjsman-1000•37m ago

If a right wing party can win in Germany, that’s a sign the left wing and centrist parties completely sucked and ignored voter concerns for too long. Let’s start there.

mc32•30m ago

Because all other parties both want more immigration and two do their best to ignore the crime statistics by the immigrants. There is also the high percentage of immigrants who require public assistance coupled with a reluctance to assimilate definitely drives people to make these choices.

sajithdilshan•25m ago

The left party in Germany is basically organising anti-Semitic rallies and call for the eradication of Israel which is quite problematic given the history of Germany.

kuerbel•16m ago

Nothing in this sentence is true. There is a network that is not part of the left that is trying to do this. But the official party line is different.

Anyone can join a party and make it look bad, if they bring their friends even doubly so.

Not to mention that a honest discussion about Israeli war crimes, their government and its members, and finally settlements is long overdue in german society.

13415•37m ago

Extremely high budget for ads and posters, social media campaigns, etc., all paid from foreign countries under dubious circumstances by straw men. It's all copy & paste across EU countries, far-right parties even copy the slogans they put on their posters, they just exchange the country name.

ballon_monkey•35m ago

Is this what you truly believe?

13415•34m ago

I know it. "Salvar Portugal" "Deutschland retten" ROTFL

pas•33m ago

yes, but also there's a real obvious unserved/underserved voting bloc

https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-boring-theory-of-the-populist...

without convincing the people (winning their hearts and minds, and so on) it'll continue to be a profitable political strategy, unfortunately

dewey•32m ago

That's kinda implying that they only got elected because they had money and a good campaign instead of addressing issues that are not addresses in an effective way by the other parties.

This is probably the case of both things being true at the same time.

cyanydeez•

deusex_•36m ago

much of it can be expressed via this visual which made the rounds a few years ago

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144/photo/1?

the topics have different emphasis than in the US, but the principle remains. immigration, de-industrialization, green politics, erosion of trust based society

aappleby•28m ago

anyone who thinks "woke" is a valid counterargument is not worth listening to.

RC_ITR•28m ago

This is a very obviously biased argument that both sides make about themselves.

The AfD literally published a manifesto of new and notably more conservative policy goals in 2017.

They do not claim to have the political stance of Germany 25 years ago, they themselves say that they are something new (For example, point 1 is an adoption of Swiss-style direct democracy, which is a notable shift to the right).

I encourage you to think much more deeply than "I saw this meme and it resonated with me," because the same is true of the American Tight, despite Elon's claim (Regan, for example, was very famously against Tariffing Canada).

cassepipe•22m ago

I guess this must be extremely subjective because for 15 years now in my country the far-right has been "on the rise" and all the politicians, and a lot of the media, now only talk about the immigration, the immigration and all the "normal" right-wingers, centrists and even soft left try to compete for being the one who will say the least "politically correct" thing, that is something about how immigration is not compatible with our culture or something. The right-wing party has split and one part is now allied with the far-right party.

My impression is that the overton window has gone further and further to the right so chacun voit midi à sa porte

karol•31m ago

Congratulations to democratically elected leaders!

oulipo•31m ago

Hitler was also put in power legally

sajithdilshan•23m ago

Just because you don’t like the result of the election doesn’t make it undemocratic. It was a fair and just election and people have voted what they want and that’s how democracy works.

toomuchtodo•23m ago

So is democracy always good? Or not? If you say you’re anti democracy, a certain cohort gets upset. If you say you’re anti fascist but fascists get elected via democracy, another cohort gets upset.

“Democracy always works” has been shown to be objectively false, and so I’m unsure how we can say it is an optimal governance system. Works sometimes, but sometimes it doesn’t. Can we tolerate the failure modes until reversion to the mean? Depends on your tolerance for the costs.

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/06/afd-saxony-anhalt-germany-f...

> Why it matters: Germany rebuilt its democracy after Nazi rule with unusually strong safeguards against extremism. AfD's breakthrough shows those barriers aren't stopping Europe's far right from becoming dominant electoral forces.

> Context: Germany's postwar system was built in the shadow of the Nazis' destruction of the democratic Weimar Republic.

> The 1949 Basic Law embraces the concept of a "militant democracy" to defend against movements that seek to abolish the constitutional order.

Luker88

asmodeuslucifer•30m ago

We can have billionaires, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both, because the billionaires have declared war on democracy. We have to imagine a world without billionaires because the billionaires are imagining a world without us. --Gil Duran, author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

TheMayorOfDunce•27m ago

Without reading the article, here are my guesses as to its content:

- claim that AfD only represents a tiny minority of "bad faith actors" who "threaten democracy"

- 4-5 direct Hitler comparisons.

- "Even though we all said Never Again!"

- "Hate has returned."

- "...fueled by conspiracy theories and Elon Musk"

- "white mediocrity", "festering undercurrent", "non-college educated white men"

- "If we don't arrest and jail the AfD, Putin will get elected."

MandieD•24m ago

... quite the reverse.

mtmail•17m ago

The guesses are overwhelmingly wrong.

sajithdilshan•27m ago

The main reason AfD won the election is the incompetence and arrogance of all other political parties.

Since Covid times every other political parties in Germany seems to be under the impression that they are somehow holier and knows what is best for the people and what people wants doesn’t matter and the politicians decide what people deserves. The pinnacle of this is the current Chancellor of Germany which is arrogant, completely broke his election promises and keep on pushing the voters that are in the centre right or centre left towards the respective extremism.

Another important factor is the current German economy. When the economy was somewhat in good shape after Merkle’s government people mainly voted for the Greens whose main agenda is climate change back in 2021 because people had good living standards and they could afford to focus on solving world problems. But the current economy is imploding and a lot of people are losing their well paid jobs and no other party seems to be even talking about it except for AfD and somehow the current government is under the delusion that economy is doing far better than they have thought. This again is a reason for a lot of people to vote for AfD.

Last but not least is the Islamic extreme/terrorist attacks that happened past years. There have been multiple incidents of cars been driven into crowd including in Christmas markets and latest attack in the Gay pride in Berlin this year. That has been used by AfD to emphasise the incompetence of the current and previous governments to ensure the internal security of the country to gain even more votes

Luker88•26m ago

I don't know why this happens, but I would caution against assigning rationality to the voters.

In Italy voters have been electing one party after the other without consistency for the last several elections, which I would use as a point to general desperation and not feeling represented.

I would like to know how many other countries have a similar attitude, like "let's try these ones, we have not voted them yet so maybe this time it's better"

juancn•2m ago

Voters are mostly emotional, not rational. The people that actually sway the elections vote by feel.

You have to always remember that about half the population has an IQ under 100.

qw12j•25m ago

Because people want Nord Stream, fewer immigrants, more apartments, nuclear energy and no forced state TV payments.

Weidel is of course living the woke WEF lifestyle in Switzerland with her Sri Lankan lesbian partner and was at Goldman Sachs.

So a betrayal of the voters, Meloni or Trump style is very likely if the AfD should manage to have the federal majority.

rvz•24m ago

This is a question for the AI chatbots to answer.

RGS1811•13m ago

Caldwell is a Claremont guy, which is key to understand where he's coming from. First Things is an christian nationalist / natcon outlet funded by (among others) Peter Thiel. That doesn't prevent him from being correct about things in this article, but it's worth noting the outlet and source.

Caldwell systematically elides the völkisch-nationalist character of the AfD and their adjacency to neo-Nazism. He underplays Höcke's extremism, ignores the Potsdam meeting, and leads us to believe (falsely) that the identification of the AfD as rechtsextrem was somehow a biased political stunt. It wasn't, there is plenty of backing for the classification, and it would not have been undemocratic to apply the Verfassungschutz and ban them permanently.

Luker88•3m ago

...Should we also point out that the people who actually lived Nazism and Fascism are basically gone, so we are very probably looking at nostalgics who do not believe it was that bad, simply because to them it's just another third-hand story?