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| Participants shine lights from their phones during a demonstration against racism and far-right politics in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin, on Sunday. (Christian Mang/AFP/Getty Images) (AFP Contributor#AFP/AFP/Getty Images) |
Over the weekend, it seemed a nation’s conscience had stirred into action. In cities across Germany, anti-fascist demonstrators took to the streets, protesting against the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. The spark to the demonstrations came in the form of an investigate report published earlier this month that revealed how AfD members had participated in a November meeting with far-right extremists where they discussed plans to conduct mass deportations should they come to power. That’s not the wholly fictive scenario it once used to be. The surging AfD is polling at 22 percent — a level of support greater than what each of the three centrist and center-left parties in the country’s ruling coalition currently command. It seems poised to break the “cordon sanitaire” erected around it by Germany’s more mainstream parties that have so far refused to entertain coalition talks with the far-right faction and possibly shoulder its way into power in state elections later this year. That AfD officials were openly entertaining the idea of forced repatriation of migrants and even some German nationals of foreign origin horrified many in a country with a deep memory of its dark past. By some accounts, more than a million people participated in the anti-AfD protests. “In Hamburg and Munich, rallies had to be dispersed because significantly more people than expected attended. Aerial images from across the country showed masses of people braving bitter January temperatures to fill city squares and avenues,” reported my colleague Kate Brady. “According to police figures, in Berlin on Sunday, about 100,000 people gathered on the lawns of the Reichstag, which houses Germany’s lower house of parliament.” Signs and slogans at the rallies made clear what many Germans believe is at stake. Banners warned of the return of “Nazis” — and marchers summoned the legacy of the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler and his allies seized control via the ballot box. “Everyone, together, against fascism” was the chant in Berlin. The investigative report by nonprofit research institute Correctiv detailed the extensive private discussions had between AfD members and a coterie of influential right-wing extremists and wealthy business executives at a November meeting in a hotel in Potsdam, outside of Berlin. This included talk of a “remigration” plan that would deport asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights and even “non-assimilated” German citizens. Martin Sellner, a far-right extremist and leader of the Austrian “Identitarian Movement,” attended the gathering and floated a “master plan” that could even see these deportees sent to an imagined “model state” in North Africa. Whatever the unviability of the proposals, it echoed Nazi deliberations in 1940 to forcibly relocate millions of Jews to Madagascar. Sellner once maintained correspondence with Brenton Tarrant, the white nationalist gunmen who carried out the hideous 2019 killing spree at a set of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Top AfD leaders have sought to distance themselves from the meetings, arguing that they were not officially sanctioned by the party and do not reflect its stated agenda. Alice Weidel, the party’s co-leader, said in a recent interview with the Financial Times that the AfD’s views were unfairly stigmatized and criticized the methods Correctiv used to infiltrate the gathering. “It was just an attempt to criminalize the very idea of repatriating people lawfully who don’t have leave to remain here, or are subject to a deportation order,” said Weidel, whose close aide Roland Hartwig reportedly attended the November event. “The AfD is the party that stands for enforcing this country’s laws.” |
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A protester holds a placard showing former Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, left, and Bjoern Hoecke, the top candidate of the AfD in the upcoming federal state elections in Thuringia, on Sunday. (Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters) |
That’s a claim bound to raise eyebrows. In three German states, party officials are known to be under surveillance by the German domestic spy agency for their “certified right-wing extremist” positions. Some of the party’s opponents want Germany’s judicial authorities to intervene and ban the party under provisions in the German constitution that allow for the banning of factions the “seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order.” More than a million people have signed a petition calling on constitutional authorities to strip Björn Höcke, the AfD party chief in the state of Thuringia, of his rights to vote and participate in politics because of the “fascist” threat he poses for the country’s democracy and Germans of migrant background. But there’s a high bar for such a measure and the German political establishment, including deputy chancellor Robert Habeck, is broadly leery of endorsing such efforts, fearful they may backfire. Already, the party is channeling the notoriety of being under surveillance in its favor, wearing the classification as “a badge of honor, using it as yet further proof that it’s the only real alternative to the other parties,” noted Georg Mascolo, political columnist at the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The party’s extended surge in the polls comes on the back of mounting discontent with the ruling coalition. “Even though 2024 is just a few weeks old, Germany has already been rocked by huge farmers’ protests, with thousands of tractors blocking cities and motorway junctions this past week alone,” detailed Spiked’s Fraser Myers. “It has been crippled by transport workers’ and doctors’ strikes. Factories in its much-vaunted manufacturing sector are shutting down and shipping production elsewhere. The federal government is struggling to reckon with a budget crisis and is ushering in a new age of austerity. Data released this week showed that Germany had the worst economic performance last year of any major economy.” In this backdrop, the avowedly anti-establishment AfD is picking up momentum. “Calls for the AfD to be banned are completely absurd and expose the anti-democratic attitude of those making these demands,” Weidel said in a written statement to Politico, echoing the line one may hear from former U.S. president Donald Trump and his supporters as his legal travails follow over the course of this election cycle. In her interview with the Times, Weidel looked confidently ahead to the coming months, when the AfD is expected to perform well in upcoming European parliamentary elections. She even raised the possibility of her nation following Britain out of the European Union. “If we fail to rebuild the sovereignty of the E.U. member states, we should let the people decide, just as Britain did,” she told the British newspaper. “And we could have a referendum on ‘Dexit’ — a German exit from the EU.” For now, the AfD’s opponents hope to kneecap the far right before it gets close to achieving its goals. “You are a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Lars Klingbeil, leader of the Social Democrats, told Weidel during a Bundestag debate last week. “But I’m telling you: your facade is beginning to crumble. People are finally getting to see the real face of the AfD.” |
| (PIB/AFP via Getty Images) |
A Hindu devotee shouts a religious slogan on the banks of Sarayu river ahead of the opening of the temple of Lord Ram in Ayodhya, India. (Adnan Abidi/Reuters) |
(India’s Press Information Bureau/Handout via Reuters) |
Out colleagues Gerry Shih, Karishma Mehrotra and Anant Gupta report from the inauguration of a controversial, $300 million Hindu temple Ayodhya, India: "When Hindu radicals stormed a 16th-century mosque in this Indian river town and tore it to the ground in 1992, the demolition mortified India’s leaders, ignited religious riots that killed 2,000 people nationwide, and spurred figures in the Bharatiya Janata Party, accused of inciting the mobs, to issue anguished apologies. On Monday, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a grand Hindu temple on the site of the razed mosque, he spoke not of contrition but of justice achieved and pride restored — of a glorious “new epoch” awaiting the believers of Lord Ram like him. Thirty-one years after the Babri mosque was destroyed in a seismic event of modern Indian history, Modi’s consecration of a $300 million Hindu temple on the contested hill that many Hindus believe to be the birthplace of a beloved deity marked another watershed for India: the triumph of Hindu nationalist ideology over the secular, multicultural vision espoused by India’s founders." |
| • The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration and cleared the way for border patrol agents to remove razor wire Texas officials installed along a busy stretch of the southern border until the legality of the barriers is resolved in court. • As Gaza’s healthcare system collapses, people are doing amputations without anesthetic, our colleagues Heba Farouk Mahfouz and Loveday Morris report. At home, on his kitchen table, orthopedic surgeon Hany Bsaiso amputated his teenage niece’s right leg — which had been blown off below the knee by an Israeli tank shell — with a normal cooking knife, scissors, a soapy dishcloth and a needle and sewing thread. “Can you imagine I’m amputating her leg at home?” he said on video, his voice cracking from emotion. Machine-gun fire rang out in the background. “Where is the mercy? Where is the humanity?” • The United States and Britain launched a new wave of attacks on Houthi targets — the eighth round on Houthi targets by the United States since Jan. 11, and the second involving Britain. While U.S. officials hope to keep the current operation limited in scope, the Houthis’ defiance and vow to seek revenge raises the specter of a prolonged military campaign. |
| By Pranshu Verma and Gerrit De Vynck | | |
By Marianne LeVine, Sabrina Rodriguez and Dylan Wells | | |
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| By Mvemba Phezo Dizolele | Foreign Affairs | | |
By Salil Tripathi | Foreign Policy | | |
By Richard Fontaine | The Washington Post | | |
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| Hanna Shapiro with her sons Ezra, 2, and Elon, 4, at home in Tel Aviv. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post) |
TEL AVIV — Last summer, the Shapiros gave Israel a deadline. If the right-wing government continued its push to take power from the courts — a campaign that the couple believed put democracy, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ progress in jeopardy — they would leave. “We said, ‘Let’s give it six months,’” recalled Hanna Shapiro, a 35-year-old graphic designer. She protested the government almost weekly, pushing the strollers of two boys she didn’t want serving in the army of a country they saw drifting from their ideals of equity and justice. Then came Oct. 7, when Hamas-led fighters streamed out of Gaza to rampage through Israeli communities. Authorities say they killed about 1,200 Israelis, and kidnapped about 240 more. Now, as the Israel Defense Forces devastate Gaza, rockets fly overhead and war looms in Lebanon, the Shapiros say they can no longer imagine living anywhere else. “I feel more Israeli than ever,” said Shapiro, who immigrated here from Paris a decade ago. “Last year, I thought I don’t need to be Israeli; I can just be a Jewish woman somewhere in the world living my life. “Now, I can’t pretend that I’m not part of these people.” For thousands of liberal Israelis, Oct. 7 spurred an impulse not to flee, but to double down on a nation they had feared was heading toward autocracy and theocracy. Many Israelis overseas hurried home. Military reservists who had been boycotting their training raced back to their units. Democracy activists retooled the movement into a vast civil volunteer network. Some of the progressive, secular, cosmopolitan Israelis who agonized over a political arena that ranged from right to far right are now describing themselves for the first time as Zionists, centering the country’s founding role as a global haven for Jews rather than its current positioning as a creative high-tech hub. “Jewish people in Israel are dying for Jewish people in the rest of the world to have a Plan B one day,” Shapiro said. “We have to be here.” After a year in which leaders warned of civil war, Israelis across the political spectrum have quickly unified around an external enemy. Two-thirds of Israelis back the military goal of eliminating Hamas, polls show. That support has barely wavered in the face of growing international condemnation — much of it from the left — of the deaths of more than 25,000 people in Gaza in Israel’s war on Hamas, most of them civilians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Support for the war isn’t unanimous. Some 2,000 Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel marched through Tel Aviv last week to demand an end to the fighting. A typical sign: “Only peace will bring security.” Speakers included three survivors of Oct. 7. – Steve Hendrix and Itay Stern Read more: They were ready to give up on Israel. Now they’re all in. |
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