The evidence makes this clear.
For quite a while, some in the media and on the left side of the political spectrum have taken to excessively labelling any right-of-centre opinion as ‘far-right,’ ‘extremist,’ and ‘fascist.’
As a result, many people understandably dismiss anyone who claims a politician or organization is ‘far-right.’
Unfortunately, this creates an opening for those who are legitimately far-right and dangerous. They can hide behind the lack of trust in the media and can claim that they too are nothing more than victims of the excessive use of the ‘far-right’ label.
This could have severe consequences.
Just as history shows far-left authoritarians – Communists – can end up killing millions of people, history also shows far-right authoritarians – Fascists – can kill millions of people.
If we let our guard down, the far right – the real far right – will return with a vengeance.
This is no longer a theoretical problem.
At this very moment, we are witnessing an attempt to normalize the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), a far-right German political party.
The party is being boosted by Elon Musk, and some North American and Canadian right-wing politicians and media personalities appear to believe the party is nothing more than a normal right-of-centre movement.
But they are wrong.
The AfD is a party that deserves the label of far-right, and they are a danger to the Western world.
Here’s the evidence:
A spokesman for the party talked about ‘shooting’ and ‘gassing’ refugees
“Germany’s hard right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party fired an official on Monday who had been caught on a hidden camera discussing gassing refugees.
In footage, recorded secretly by ProSieben television in February, Christian Lueth, then a party spokesman, was filmed in a Berlin cafe talking to someone he believed to be a sympathiser about the challenges the AfD faced.
Asked if the AfD wanted to see more immigrants, he replied: “Yes.”
“Because then things go better for the AfD. We can still shoot them all afterwards,” he said. “Or gas them, whichever you like. I don’t care either way!”
Die Zeit newspaper said it was shown the footage, which it said was filmed by Lisa Licentia, a right-wing YouTube personality who had decided to leave the far-right scene. Die Zeit said nothing indicated Lueth was joking.
German media reported on Monday that Lueth was dismissed as an employee of the party’s parliamentary group. The group’s spokesman was not immediately available to comment. Neither Lueth nor Licentia could immediately be reached.”
Though Lueth was dismissed in 2020, he has since been brought back into the AfD fold, as he was hired by an AfD Bundestag member:
“However, an AfD member of the Bundestag has clearly forgiven Christian Lüth: As Lüth confirmed to the ZDF capital studio, he has been working there as a consultant for the member of parliament Jan Wenzel Schmidt from Saxony-Anhalt since June 1st .
This is not the first time that Schmidt has attracted attention because of a problematic personnel issue in his parliamentary office: Schmidt has also been the subject of discussion both inside and outside the AfD because of his employment of Mario Müller as a “research assistant”.
Müller is a German right-wing extremist and has been convicted several times as a violent right-wing extremist.”
A longtime AfD party leader left in 2022, warning the party had become too extreme
“The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s co-chair and spokesman Jörg Meuthen is leaving the party altogether, he confirmed to German public broadcasters on Friday.
The 60-year-old said that he was dissatisfied with the right flank of the party and felt that the AfD’s “democratic foundations” were not solid.
“The party’s heart is beating very far to the right today, and permanently at an elevated rate,” Meuthen said. “I do see quite clear totalitarian echoes there.”
The Co-Founder of the AfD left the party in 2019 over concerns about extremism and attacks on democracy
“It was a bombshell that was announced: the former co-founder and recently voted out federal chairman Bernd Lucke is leaving the Alternative for Germany. He will leave the AfD this Friday, the 52-year-old economics professor announced early Wednesday evening in Strasbourg.
He does not want to be “misused as a bourgeois figurehead for political ideas that I reject out of deep conviction,” said Lucke. “These include, in particular, anti-Islamic and xenophobic views, which are spreading more and more in the party, partly openly, partly latently,” as well as “an anti-Western, decidedly pro-Russian” foreign policy.
He also finds it unacceptable that “the ‘system question’ is increasingly being raised with regard to our parliamentary democracy.””
A top AfD candidate tried to downplay the evil of the SS, a move so extreme that the far-right National Rally in France broke ties with the AfD
“A top far-right German politician says he will pull back from campaigning for the upcoming EU elections – although he will remain his party’s lead candidate.
The latest controversy comes after the Alternative for Germany (AfD)’s Maximilian Krah told journalists that SS members weren’t automatically “criminals”.
“It depends. You have to assess blame individually. At the end of the war there were almost a million SS. Günter Grass was also in the Waffen SS,” he told La Repubblica and the Financial Times, referring to the German novelist who wrote The Tin Drum.
“Before I declare someone a criminal, I want to know what he did.”
The SS, or Schutzstaffel, were a Nazi paramilitary group active in the 1930s and 1940s. Among other crimes against humanity, SS members played a leading role in the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews and others during World War Two.
In response to the remarks, France’s far-right National Rally (RN) announced it would no longer sit with the AfD in the European Parliament.
RN leader Marine Le Pen told French radio that “it was urgent to establish a cordon sanitaire” between the parties.
“Cordon sanitaire” is a term used by some political parties to reject cooperation with movements viewed as too extreme. It is often used by French politicians to rule out working with Ms Le Pen’s RN.
“It’s time to make a clean break with this movement,” she added.”
The AfD is pro-Russia at a time when Russia seeks to weaken the free world
“A particularly alarming aspect of the AfD’s platform is its overtly pro-Russian stance, which resonates strongly in parts of East Germany where scepticism towards the West and a nostalgic view of the Soviet era still linger. The party has consistently opposed sanctions against Russia, criticised Germany’s support for Ukraine, and echoed Kremlin narratives that place blame on NATO for the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
This alignment with Russian interests is not merely rhetorical but supported by tangible connections that have raised serious concerns both within Germany and internationally. Investigations have revealed financial ties between senior AfD figures and Russian operatives, along with communications suggesting coordinated efforts to undermine Germany’s stance on Ukraine. These connections suggest that the AfD’s pro-Russian orientation may be part of a broader strategy by Moscow to influence German politics and weaken European unity. In Thuringia, the party’s leadership, under the controversial figure Björn Höcke, has been particularly vocal in its praise for Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian governance model. Höcke, who has a history of using Nazi-era rhetoric, has openly advocated for a European security arrangement that includes Russia, a position that effectively legitimises Moscow’s aggressive actions in Ukraine and undermines the West’s collective security efforts. This pro-Russian stance reflects not just ideological alignment but also a strategic move by the AfD to tap into local grievances in East Germany, where economic disparities and a sense of marginalisation since reunification remain stark.”
Influential AfD politician Bjorn Hocke criticized the Holocaust memorial in Berlin
“Björn Höcke is extraordinary within the AfD because he is really a quite old-fashioned, right-wing extremist,” Kai Arzheimer of Mainz University, a political extremism expert who has studied Höcke’s rhetoric, tells correspondent Evan Williams in the above excerpt. “He’s not just a radical. He’s not just opposed to immigration. He is really one who favors rewriting German history.”
As the excerpt explores, at a 2017 speech in the city of Dresden, Höcke criticized the Holocaust memorial in Germany’s capital, Berlin.
“We Germans — our people are the only people in the world to have planted a monument of shame in the heart of its capital,” Höcke said. “We need nothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance.”
Germany’s remembrance culture, Arzheimer says, “is the idea that the crimes of the Nazis must never be forgotten, and that we should educate future generations in the knowledge that Germany in the past has committed those atrocities, to safeguard our future.”
Höcke, Arzheimer says, wants a “reversal” of this policy — and “is engaged in whitewashing what the Nazis did.”
AfD officials met with neo-nazis to discuss the mass deportation of non-ethnic Germans – including German citizens
The story appeared on the morning of January 10 on Correctiv, the website of a research network most people hadn’t heard of before, but the evidence was unmistakable. In a secret meeting held on November 25 at a hotel in Brandenburg, representatives from Germany’s far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) met with Identitarian and neo-Nazi activists. “It was much more than a coming together of right-wing ideologues,” reported Correctiv. The meeting was to map out a “master plan” for mass deportations should the AfD gain the power to implement it. “Asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and ‘non-assimilated’ German citizens” were all candidates for “re-migration,” explained Austrian neo-Nazi Martin Sellner, who according to Correctiv had been the first speaker at the meeting.
Top AfD members have been linked to Russia & China
In mid-2024, it was revealed that individuals close to top AfD officials were linked to Chinese spying and Russian disinformation networks
“Last month, an assistant to Maximilian Krah, AfD’s top candidate in the European elections, was arrested on suspicion of spying for Beijing, and the duo’s Parliament offices were searched.
The aide, named as Jian G, was an “employee of a Chinese secret service,” authorities in Berlin said. German media have alleged Krah has personal ties to China as well as Russia.
Meanwhile, Petr Bystron, the second name on the party’s list, is facing an investigation after denying allegations that he may have received money from a pro-Russian network.
Then, AfD’s troubles continued on Wednesday when Krah’s former parliamentary assistant Guillaume Pradoura had his home and offices searched as part of Belgian authorities’ sprawling “Russiagate” probe into MEPs and their aides who were allegedly part of a Kremlin disinformation network in Europe.”
The AfD has been linked to Holocaust denial
With fewer and fewer people alive who were a part of the Second World War and the Holocaust, far-right and far-left extremists have been seeking to rewrite history and create space for Holocaust denial.
Unsurprisingly, the AfD has been linked to those efforts:
“Germany—Pulling their scarves and jackets tighter against the chill of a gray winter morning, 38 high-school students walked the grounds of the Sachsenhausen Memorial, a former Nazi concentration camp just outside Berlin.
They had come here to learn about the horrors and crimes committed at Sachsenhausen, where tens of thousands of people were murdered: the prisoners’ cramped quarters in the extreme heat or cold, their starvation after crushing hours of hard labor, the brutal treatment at the hands of their guards.
Even as the students’ tour focused on helping them understand the history of this place, however, the politics of the day inevitably crept in.
At one point, the students’ teacher, Matthias Angelike, interjected to ask their guide about a recent incident involving lawmakers from the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and a group of their constituents. While on a tour here last summer, several members of the group interrupted their host to cast doubt on the existence of Sachsenhausen’s gas chambers and diminish the crimes committed in Nazi death camps. “They questioned whether people were actually killed here,” Angelike said to his students. “They questioned the Holocaust.”
Three AfD members were part of a Nazi terrorist organization
“The far-right Alternative for Germany party on Wednesday said it was moving swiftly to expel three individuals arrested as suspected members of the “Saxonian Separatists” — a far-right militant group seeking to establish a state and society based on Nazism.
A day earlier, police had arrested eight suspected members of the group, who had reportedly planned to take control of whole areas of eastern Germany.
Who are the Saxonian Separatists?
Germany’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office describes the group as a small militant organization of some 15 to 20 individuals hoping to “establish a state and society based on National Socialism” in eastern Germany.
Prosecutors said its members share a deep rejection of Germany’s free and democratic constitutional order and an ideology underpinned by racist, anti-Semitic and apocalyptic beliefs.”
A German court ruled the youth wing of the AfD can be classified as an extremist organization
The AfD itself is under observation for suspected extremism
“Germany’s domestic intelligence agency was justified in putting the far-right Alternative for Germany under observation for suspected extremism, a court ruled Monday, rejecting an appeal from the opposition party.
The administrative court in Muenster ruled in favor of the BfV intelligence agency, upholding a 2022 decision by a lower court in Cologne. The decision means the agency can continue to observe the party.“
Not normal
Even though the far-right label is overused, the far-right still exists. And like the far left, it is a danger. There’s a reason that the centre-left, centre, and centre-right build better civilizations. There’s a reason social democracy and democratic capitalism both allow society to thrive, while fascism and communism lead to economic collapse and mass death.
The 20th century was a massive test of ideologies, and both communism and fascism were proven to be failures.
But that failure doesn’t stop people from embracing communism, nor does it stop people from embracing fascism.
And this means the fight against communists and fascists must be waged constantly. History never really ‘ends’.
With that in mind, and based on the evidence we’ve looked at above, it’s clear that the AfD is not a normal right-wing party. It’s not like the Conservative Party of Canada. It’s not like the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom. It’s not like the CDU-CSU (the Conservative Party in Germany). It’s not like centre-right parties in Australia, or France.
It’s something fundamentally different, something more extreme, something hostile to democracy, something hostile to the historical truth of the Holocaust and the Second World War, and something that seeks to push an agenda that benefits fascist Russia and Communist China at the expense of Germany and the Western world.
For those who still see the value in conservatism at its best – a defender of institutions, protector of personal freedom, advocate for a strong national defence, and believer in the Western alliance – the AfD is something that should never be normalized, and indeed that should be opposed if we are to retain any semblance of core principles.
Spencer Fernando
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