The political turmoil in Germany, which started with the European Parliament elections two months ago, is continuing in interesting ways. In Thuringia’s state election on Sept. 1 the Alternative for Germany (AfD) came first, with 33 percent of the vote. In the state of Saxony—also in the former DDR (East Germany)—it took 30.6 percent, just behind the Christian Democrats’ 31.9 percent. In Saxony the AfD was the most popular party among every age group under 45; in Thuringia, it was the most popular in every age group under 70.

In both races the AfD easily demolished all three parties comprising the federal government, Social Democrats, Greens, and Liberals. Those three parties collected barely 10 percent of the vote between them. In Brandenburg’s state election, scheduled for Sept. 22, the AfD is an undisputed favorite, well ahead of the establishment parties.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there is Sahra Wagenknecht. Once a leading light of the Left Party, heirs of the East German communists (the “Socialist Unity Party,” SED), she started her own electoral alliance, the BSW, less than a year ago, yet she won 12 percent in Saxony and 16 percent in Thuringia. She used to be uncompromisingly non-mainstream. To wit, Wagenknecht declared two years ago that “the Greens are the most hypocritical, aloof, deceitful, incompetent and—measured by the damage they cause—the most dangerous party that we currently have in the Bundestag.”

To sum it up, parties which do not belong to the ruling German cartel comprising the existing tripartite coalition plus CDU-CSU, which is to say the AfD, Wagenknecht, and the rump Left Party, took 47 percent of the vote in Saxony and 62 percent in Thuringia. 

The result prompted a collective hysterical attack in the media machine, in the political and business elite class, primarily in Germany but also all over the “collective West.”

The editor-in-chief of the state-run South German Broadcasting Corporation (ZDF) Bettina Schausten declared on her TV, in a tragic voice, that we are witnessing a reenactment of the Third Reich. She linked the AfD’s victory on Sept. 1, 2024, to Sept. 1, 1939, the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht and the beginning of World War II.

“Germany covered the whole world with suffering and death, murdering 6 million Jews,” Schausten almost wept. Eighty-five years later, “in the German federal state of Thuringia, a party that, according to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, is proven to be right-wing extremist” will become the strongest political force, with a leading candidate, Björn Höcke, “who talks like a fascist and can be called one… That is hard to bear.”

Even in the United States, the AfD Derangement Syndrome absorbed, at least briefly, the mainstream media energy and metaphoric creativity normally reserved for the daily dose of Trumpophobia. “Germany’s Third Reich dog-whistlers are a fringe party no more,” declared The Washington Post.

While woke ideology is on the decline in many U.S. corporations, it is just getting going in Germany. In August, Germany’s already diversity-obsessed Edeka supermarket megachain ($72 billion turnover in 2022, over 11,000 stores) launched an anti-AfD advertising campaign, just ahead of the elections in Thuringia and Saxony, with the slogan “Why blue is not an option at Edeka.” (Blue has been the official color of the AfD since 2023.)

This unprecedented move could have far more serious commercial consequences than the Bud Light transgender disaster in the United States, because in eastern regions one-third of voters— and 16 percent nationwide—have reason to feel offended. Dozens of franchisees have publicly complained to the company’s Hamburg headquarters. Some independent retailers operating under Edeka’s name have launched local information campaigns to explain to their customers the difference between a corporation and a franchisee.

After the debacle in Saxony and Thuringia, federal coalition politicians—the self-styled “defenders of democracy”—have shrugged them off as irrelevant. The SPD national chairwoman Saskia Esken declared that she can “see no reason” for the ruling coalition to change course. She said that the government “had coped well with its tasks,” including the challenges posed by the corona pandemic and the war in Ukraine. She pointed to alleged successes in the areas of climate neutrality, digitalization, and “controlling migration”—an audacious lie.

In addition, it turns out that that there is less antiestablishmentarian zeal than meets the eye in Sahra Wegenknacht’s alliance. The Brandenburg state leader of the BSW, Robert Crumbach, has joined other mainstream politicians in joining the call for an outright ban on the AfD. The reason he gave are recent AfD motions in the Brandenburg state parliament which, inter alia, called for a ban on asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees from taking an active part in public forums. This, Crumbach claimed, was “deliberately reminiscent of the Nuremberg Race Laws” enacted by the Nazis. Furthermore, the former Social Democrat claimed, there are people in the AfD regional structure “with whom one can neither talk nor is allowed to talk.”

So there: the BSW has taken off its mask and is now fighting very aggressively for its place at the feeding trough. Sooner or later, as Wolfgang Koydl noted in the Weltwoche on Sept. 8, all protest parties suffer the same destiny: they smooth out rough edges, make compromises, blend in, and become mainstream. It took the Greens almost a decade, back in the ’80s. The AfD has so far been spared this fate because the other parties need them as a bogeyman; yet no other political group has turned the corner to being a tame cartel party as quickly as the BSW:

As soon as the Wagenknechts get a sniff of power after two successful state elections, they fall into step with the marching column: AfD bad, we good. Walter Ulbricht [the late East German communist leader] would be jealous if he could see how quickly his ideological descendants put up the firewall to the “Right.” It took him much longer to build the Berlin Wall.

The question now is how quickly voters will recognize the BSW as a sham, Koydl concludes, because what they actually wanted was an alternative that wasn’t called an “Alternative.” Once left, always left. The BSW only confirms that the comrades must never be trusted.

“German democracy is in peril,” is the claim made by those in power, the media loyal to them, the approved intellectuals, artists, churches, the entire assembled establishment that is dependent on the state. They cannot do otherwise (“nicht anders,” to paraphrase Luther) because that same state which feeds them has been trying with increasing desperation for years to dissuade Germans from voting for the AfD. Those who make up that state and have been in power for decades want everyone to believe that they and only they embody democracy. L’etat, c’est nous.

This is of course sheer nonsense, the Weltwoche editor Roger Köppel wrote on Sept. 7, but it is astonishing how far you can get in politics with such nonsense. It reflects not just a disdain for German voters: it also reveals pure contempt for German institutions. They treat the Federal Republic as a house of cards, rather than a stable constitutional state.

Germany’s democracy is under pressure, indeed—not from the AfD, which (as Köppel rightly notes) is committed to more direct democracy based on the Swiss model, but from an elite accustomed to power and irritatingly arrogant. This has become astonishingly clear after the two state elections on Sept. 1. It is breathtaking, Köppel stresses, how matter-of-factly the media and the established parties have agreed to keep the clear election winner AfD and its state chairman Björn Höcke away from forming a government in Thuringia:

“Not an option,” everyone says, as if they could simply order it. What is becoming clear, however, is that the respect of those currently in power for Thuringian voters is tending towards zero. There is a consensus, without giving any further reasons for the findings, that Höcke is a “fascist” and a “right-wing extremist.” The basis is an extremely dubious assessment by the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is parroted uncritically in the media and which is now so politicized and taken over by the power elite that even left-leaning Swiss newspapers, which really have nothing to do with Höcke, are beginning to express doubts.

What is happening in Germany is replicated in different ways all over Europe and the U.S. True enemies of democracy‑the ruling elite—claim it is under assault. In fact, no election result in Germany’s post-1945 history has been as democratically legitimated as the AfD victory in Thuringia. Not only did one-third of voters support the AfD, but voter turnout at almost 75 percent was far higher than it has been since 1994. In 519 of the 591 municipalities the AfD received the most votes. It managed to mobilize 67,000 habitual nonvoters. This is what everyone in the Ruling Class had called for in the run-up to the elections: “mobilize voters to support democracy!” They should therefore be grateful to the AfD.

But the opposite is the case. All of the old parties,as well as the new BSW, declared on election night that they only wanted to work with “democratic” forces, as their prearranged language for ousting the democratic election winner AfD demands.

The leading German media, intellectuals, and politicians have never written about the AfD with a pen, but with the club, the Nazi club. Former Federal President Joachim Gauck described AfD voters and people in the East as representatives of “Dark Germany.” At an election event a state TV reporter asked the Thuringian AfD leader in all seriousness how his party differed from the National Socialists. Höcke advised the reporter to seek psychological therapy.

Indeed, a psychopathology of AfD/Trump/Le Pen reporting is needed. Every time you think that hysteria has run its course, that the phrases and black magic conjurations have long since been shattered by reality, they go one step further. With them there can be no compromise. Trying to compromise with madness leads to going mad oneself.