“If it’s going to be called remigration, then it’s going to mean re-mi-gration,” announced Alice Weidel at the AfD party conference in Riesa in early January, to rapturous applause – just one year after the same term sent shockwaves through Germany. Weidel is the AfD’s first candidate for the chancellorship since it was founded in 2013; with the party currently polling at 20.8%, the step appears to have been justified. “Alice für Deutschland!” her supporters shout – sounding very much like the SA slogan, Alles für Deutschland! [Everything for Germany].
This kind of unrestrained rhetoric was previously associated only with hardliners such as the radical right-wing leader of the AfD faction in the Thuringian state parliament, Björn Höcke, whom Alice Weidel had long wanted to expel from the party.
Suspicion of incitement to hatred
Now, though, the spiral of radicalisation is gathering pace, with one previously unimaginable – and in some cases unconstitutional – event after another taking place in Germany of all places. In this election campaign, for example, the AfD has distributed flyers designed to look like deportation tickets: “Passenger: Illegal immigrant; From: Germany; To: Safe country of origin; Gate: AfD”’. In the 1930s, Hitler’s supporters gave Jews train tickets to Jerusalem. The police are now investigating on suspicion of incitement to hatred.
The right-wing extremists are behaving more and more cynically, supported by Trump’s ultra-right-wing associate, Elon Musk, who has chatted with Alice Weidel on X and streamed her speeches. On 26 January, at the launch of the AfD’s election campaign in Halle, he lamented that Germany was too focused on past guilt. “Be proud to be German“, he said – the very day before Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
“Social networks with their algorithms that reward hate and rabble-rousing – X and TikTok, especially – have pushed the boundaries of the sayable. Right-wing nationalist agitators find each other and feel emboldened in the virtual pack – the AfD recognised this potential early on,” says Anette Dowideit, second editor-in-chief of the independent news outlet Correctiv, which exposed the secret meeting in Potsdam a year ago.
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At this meeting, right-wing extremists, including members of the AfD, discussed their plans for remigration. Many people in Germany have not yet grasped the full implications of this term, with the result that they underestimate the threat posed by the party. “In the wake of our Potsdam investigation, the AfD tried to make the völkisch [ethnically nationalist] term “remigration” respectable so that it could now be written into the party’s programme. The party’s tactic is to obscure what it really means by the term, and some media outlets are apparently going along with this smokescreen strategy,” says Dowideit. Correctiv has therefore explained this tactic in detail in an article decoding the terms used by the “New Right” and putting them in their historical context – we have published an extract of it on Voxeurop.
The article shows that the term “remigration”, which may sound harmless at first, actually means the “deportation of millions of people” from Germany. This includes between 5 and 6 million “non-assimilated citizens”’, i.e. Germans with a migrant background who, in the opinion of the far-right, have not sufficiently adapted to German culture. And this, as Correctiv explains, is in line with völkisch ideology, which holds that everything alien to a homogeneous community must be expelled or destroyed – evoking the worst memories of the Nazi era.
Earthquake in the Bundestag
It was therefore all the more shocking when, for the first time ever, CDU-CSU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz tried to make common cause with the AfD in a bid to tighten migration policy in Germany. On 29 January, in an attempt to push a new asylum law through the Bundestag before the election, he tabled two motions that included measures to turn asylum seekers away at Germany’s borders – measures that would be in breach of both the German constitution and EU law. The motions were only passed with the help of AfD votes. Prior to the election campaign, Merz had stressed that such a step would be utterly taboo and an unprecedented breach of trust, and something he would never do.
However, he lost the subsequent vote on the draft law in the Bundestag by a narrow margin, because many FDP members and 12 members of his own party abstained. The SPD and Greens unanimously voted against it but now have to decide whether they would still be willing to enter into a post-election coalition with Merz’s CDU, which is leading the polls with a projected 30.1% vote share. The result: chaos in the Bundestag and a jubilant AfD because the previously inviolable firewall now appears to have fallen in Germany as well as in Austria. Der Spiegel sums up the feelings of many Germans in a single word on its cover: “SCHMerz” [Pain].
More recently, however, and especially after the intervention of US Vice President J.D. Vance in favour of the AfD at the Munich Security Forum, Merz reiterated that he would not form a coalition with Alice Weidel’s party.
After last year’s remigration shock, which drove a million people onto the streets across the country, hundreds of thousands have now gathered in Germany to demonstrate against the shift to the right, and this countermovement is not limited to the streets. “Many of those who took to the streets last January and have done so again now are also involved in democracy movements in their cities and communities,” says Anette Dowideit.
Networking, creating synergies, setting their own agendas
Lorenz Blumenthaler, author and head of public relations at the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which works against right-wing extremism, racism and antisemitism nationwide, confirms this. “There is more and better structured engagement now. I have been an activist for 10 years and I can see how the various protest movements are building on each other and learning from each other. Last year’s mass demonstrations against the AfD were only possible because they had strong links with Fridays for Future. The same kids took to the streets against the far-right because they won’t get climate protection with the AfD.”
The Foundation is tackling right-wing extremism on several levels: from workshops on how to counter far-right slogans, to financial support for democrats (in rural areas of eastern Germany, for example, where right-wing extremists already call the shots), to political activism in the digital space. “Debunking lies on X is a waste of time. It is crucial that we create narratives that the CDU and AfD cannot counter. It’s no use just being against things, that way we make the same mistake as the parties that are running after the AfD instead of promoting their own ideas,” says Blumenthaler.
“Time to show courage”
Set your own agenda, in other words. One way Lorenz Blumenthaler and his press team are doing this is by drawing attention to a proposal from 105 Bundestag Members to direct the Federal Constitutional Court to examine whether the AfD is anti-constitutional and can therefore be banned. The Bundestag first debated the matter on 30 January. The cross-party motion was initiated by Marco Wanderwitz, a CDU Bundestag Member from Saxony, who called the AfD “enemies of the constitution, enemies of our democracy and enemies of humanity”’.
He is also one of the dissenters who voted against Merz’s asylum bill. These dissenters, together with the new mass protests against the CDU and AfD, show that the firewall may be shaky, but has not yet fallen.
