“We have created a monster”

Alternative for Germany supporters march in Berlin. Demotix/Theo Schneider. All rights reserved.A week ago Germany's new
extreme right-wing party “Alternative for Germany“ (AfD) celebrated its up to
date largest electoral victory, gaining landslide victories in
three regional elections. The party jumped from zero to 12%, 15% and
24,4% in the federal states Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Wurttemberg and
Saxony-Anhalt – by far the largest success of the extreme right since the
second world war. Its success can be attributed to surging racism in reaction
to Angela Merkel's stance to not close Germany's borders. But the shifting internal
processes and ideological positions are far more complex than that. The ideology of the national-liberal wing can be
perceived as a form of nationalized neoliberalism on steroids and dominated the
party until the Erfurt Resolution of March 2015. It opposes the Europeanization of politics.

The AfD is a heterogeneous
coalition of various ideological streams from national liberalism to
traditional conservatism and nationalist populism. Those streams are united by
differing degrees of nationalist Euroscepticism and social conservatism. Within
these broad, overlapping discursive formations, two wings struggle for
ideological hegemony. The first brought together Eurosceptic liberals and
conservatives alienated by the fall of the liberal FDP party as well as the
strength of Europhiles within Merkel's conservative CDU/CSU. Conservatives
despising the cultural modernization of conservative politics and the
successive advancement of social rights for women, LGBTQI and ethnic minorities
constitute the second stream. The lines between national-liberalism and
right-wing populism are evidently fluid, but we should recognize their
remaining differences and importance as political formations.

The ideology of the
national-liberal wing can be perceived as a form of nationalized neoliberalism
on steroids and dominated the party until the Erfurt Resolution of March 2015.
It opposes the Europeanization
of politics in favor of a return to national sovereignty,
thereby distinguishing itself from hegemonic currents on the radical left
demanding social and transnational solutions to the contemporary gridlock of
Europeanization. The national-liberal wing thereby incorporates neoliberalism's
demand for (small but) strong states providing order and its social Darwinist
discourses targeting the remains of welfare state institutions on the one hand.
And on the other it integrates racially charged and imperialist discourses
against allegedly less productive southern
Europeans to maintain German hegemony within a more nationalist European Union.

Leading national-liberals
such as Hans-Olaf Henkel and Bernd Lucke initially constructed the party
profile so that the extreme right would not be alienated, but the party could
not be discredited as right-wing at the same time. After failing to make the 5
percent threshold in the 2013 national election, let alone the
aspired 7 percent, however, they deliberately opened the AfD further to the
right, but quickly lost control over this process. Gauland and Lucke later
left to form a new party, the former stating: “We have created a monster.”

The Erfurt resolution

The Erfurt resolution of March
2015 constitutes the symbolic date of changing power relations within the
party: leading characters of the party's right-wing demanded the party to be a
“movement of the people against the societal experiments of the last decades
(gender-mainstreaming, multiculturalism, educational arbitrariness)” as well as
against the “erosion of Germany's sovereignty and identity”, among other
things. They also argued for closer ties to the fascist PEGIDA-movement.

The following months saw
the party's extreme right become more and more dominant. This right-wing populism
differs from traditional national-socialism in that it often employs the
vocabulary of enlightenment and individualism to attack allegedly barbarian
ethnicities. It also often shares neoliberalism's contempt for the poor instead
of poverty, but importantly distinguishes itself from it by adopting cultural
conservatism beyond neoliberalism's love for social stability. Thus marginalized
ethnicities are not perceived as cheap labor to be exploited as long as they do
not threaten the social order – their mere presence is already perceived as a
social ill to be overcome. Marginalized ethnicities
are not perceived as cheap labor to be exploited as long as they do not
threaten the social order – their mere presence is already perceived as a
social ill to be overcome.

Right-wing populist
narratives also perceive “genderism“ as an ideology aiming to confuse men and
women and thereby destroy the organic unity of the German people. They deem traditional
values necessary to reproduce the (implicitly racially purified) German people
and thus pivotally perceive women as childbearers for national success.
Increasing social rights for women and LGBTI are thus not the product of
decades of social struggles, but a “cultural Marxist” conspiracy to infect the
national-ethnic body by either dangerous left-wing lunatics (formerly known as
Jewish-Bolshevist) or “globalist elites”. Along these lines, structural
anti-semitism exists, although less hegemonic so far. The contempt for
capitalist modernity vis-à-vis the supposed simpleness of traditional life is
testament to this, and so are framings of sinister elites controlling press (“Lügenpresse”), politicians and
finance, in more extreme versions planning a genocide against Germany or Europe
via mass immigration. In February 2016, Iris Wassill from AfD Munich lectured on so called power elites (“Machtelite”), catering to
every single antisemitic fetish from Rothschild, bought media and
politicians, George Soros, Federal Reserve to Rothschild, rootless elites, the
deliberate destruction of European culture by controlled refugee flows … to Rothschild. Audience members also learned that
feminism is not a form of historical social struggle, but a conspiracy invented
by the Rockefellers to destroy society.

To be sure, the AfD
strongly tries to rid itself of associations
with national socialism, from leader Frauke Petry suggesting
that the Front National is socialist and thus left-wing – another popular right-wing
narrative to rid oneself of historic responsibility –, to former head Bernd
Lucke arguing that AfD is neither left nor right. However, such strategies
have become increasingly rare with the mentioned move to the (further) right
and, perhaps more frightening, they do not even seem to be necessary according
to recent election results. A recent poll among AfD members has found that the
party base shows striking resemblances to
the national-socialist NPD. Indeed, positions are occasionally even
more radical than those of the national-socialists, as AfD members do not even
want to grant temporary asylum to people fleeing political persecution (in
contrast to some streams of the NPD).

The AfD is part and parcel
of the emergence of twenty first century fascisms, blaming conspiratorial
elites and marginalized ethnic and social groups for the contradictions and
multiple crises of contemporary global capitalism. Instead of overcoming it
towards more social and democratic structures, they want to replace it by a
more authoritarian system – constructed in the name of an invented, putatively more
peaceful tradition that has never existed.