I remember when I first heard, at a closed-door conference in Berlin, the statement: “Germans need to be proud of their nation and nationality again. We will no longer look to the past,” made by an American political strategist close to MAGA (the Make America Great Again movement of the U.S. president).
The reaction also struck me. What began with timid applause from the right-wing audience turned into an emotional standing ovation.
The year was 2024, and I felt that the winds were changing in the country. Because until then, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party that had been classified multiple times by German intelligence as dangerous and far-right extremist, was isolated not only within parliaments by a sanitary cordon imposed by other parties but also by the far-right itself in Europe. This idea of “German national pride” was not often heard even in the most radical circles.
I then began to follow the AfD more closely and try to decipher what had gone wrong in Germany's post-Nazi memory work, which is globally recognized as a good effort. At every corner, there is a monument to the victims of the Holocaust, a museum recounting the atrocities committed by the Nazis, or the Stolpersteine – small metal plates placed on the ground in the streets, with personal information about Jews who were kidnapped, persecuted, or killed in the area. In schools, children also learn about the horrors of the Holocaust and are taught from a young age to say “Nie Wieder,” never again.
I even wrote about this in a piece for ICL last year, stating that while memory is essential to prevent atrocities from recurring, guilt is a complex feeling, as Freud already showed, because it relates to desire, conflict, repression, remorse, but also neurosis. And the guilt for the Holocaust has developed in various ways within the subjectivity of German society, even generating resentment, which seems to be the feeling driving right-wing extremism in our time.
In these two years, the AfD has been gaining more and more space and popularity. Trump, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and other figures from the American and European right began to promote the party and its ideas without shame. During this time, fascism has also been increasingly “unashamed” around the world. The anti-immigration agenda became the quick response of populist right to all the crises brought by neoliberal capitalism: from unemployment to social inequalities, from rising crime to the supposed loss of “cultural purity.”
Also in 2025, I interviewed AfD members and attended two party events in Thuringia, in eastern Germany, and understood that this German pride, and at the same time hatred for immigrants, has been gaining strength in a society that has been going through an economic crisis for several years. The main agenda is mass deportation; there are no half-measures. The opening of Germany to refugees in 2015 is pointed out by the party as the biggest mistake in recent history, and young people say they want to hear the German language in the streets again.
One young person even told me, when I asked what made him support the anti-immigration agenda, that it was not exactly related to facts; it was more “a feeling.”
There are also, of course, various other factors contributing to this popularity, from the more specific and national, such as the division between east and west — which has never truly ended — to the more global, such as protest voting and the seductive image of the outsider who speaks their mind without fear of consequences.
For all these reasons, the AfD's victory in the elections in Saxony-Anhalt this past weekend is not surprising. It is sad, alarming, symptomatic, but not surprising. With 43.8% of the votes cast (39 out of 83 parliamentary seats), the AfD has already announced that it will move this week to try to obtain a majority coalition.
In Germany, the formation of state governments is parliamentary. A party that obtains more than half of the seats in the Legislative Assembly secures the position of state governor. Since none of the parties achieved the necessary majority in Sunday’s election, they will have to form alliances. Parties can unite in coalitions to govern together in the majority or garner support from others to lead a minority government. To govern, in practice, the AfD would need to surpass the “sanitary cordon,” a commitment from other parties not to cooperate with the far-right and thus keep it away from power.
During the campaign, all parties ruled out partnership with the AfD, except for the small party Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Rationality (BSW), a populist “antiwoke” party led by former communist Sahra Wagenknecht, which garnered just over 5% and shares anti-immigration and pro-Russia rhetoric with the AfD.
The German electoral system is super complex and can open up various possible scenarios for negotiations, coalitions, and new elections, so it is still unclear what will happen.
But how effective is it, in a democracy, to make all possible maneuvers to prevent a more voted party from governing? Is this the best way to confront the far-right? Or would it be better to understand what is at the root of the AfD's popularity so that Nazism and fascism, in their various forms, do not repeat?
Germans have a word for the spirit of the time: Zeitgeist. Last Sunday’s election represents a grim and unsettling alignment of Germany with the Zeitgeist, in a country that less than 100 years ago elected Hitler.
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