EUROPE has been marching rightward for some time, with voters in France, Portugal, Belgium, and Austria following this trend. Germany’s election results continued this trajectory, as Friedrich Merz, leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, was elected chancellor. Merz has yet to form a coalition and announced he would soon begin talks with the Social Democratic Party (SDP) to establish a government by Easter. A record-breaking 82.5 per cent voter turnout was recorded in Germany this year — the highest since the 1990s.
It was not just Merz’s victory that is significant. While his bloc secured 208 seats, the far-right Alternative for Germany party won an unprecedented 150 seats. The AfD — often referred to as the ‘Nazi party’ due to its members’ anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi leanings — was long considered a fringe group. Sunday’s election proved otherwise. The party doubled its vote share from the last election, propelled largely by young voters aged 18 to 24 years. Among its campaign promises were harsher immigration policies and a better relationship with Russia, despite Germany’s current hostilities with Moscow over the Ukraine war.
Björn Höcke, a leader of the AfD, has previously used Nazi-era slogans. At a rally in May 2021, he invoked the phrase “everything for Germany”, once used by SA storm troopers who played a pivotal role in the Nazi rise to power. Höcke was convicted for violating Germany’s anti-Nazi laws and fined, though he evaded a three-year ban from public office. He claimed he had been merely expressing his sentiments and was unaware of the phrase’s Nazi roots — despite being a history teacher. The judges who heard Höcke’s case in court said they were convinced that Höcke was well aware of the ban when he made the statements.
Höcke was not the only AfD politician with ties to Nazi rhetoric. Maximilian Eugen Krah, a member of the party’s executive board, stated that not everyone who belonged to Adolf Hitler’s SS was “automatically a criminal”. The SS was responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews during World War II. Another AfD politician, Matthias Helferich, once described himself in an online chat as the “friendly face of the Nazis”, later claiming it was a joke. Both men had been sidelined by the AfD’s leadership but have now returned following the party’s electoral success — underscoring the AfD’s growing confidence.
This new Europe is uninterested in equality or human dignity.
So far, mainstream German politicians, including outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz, have refused to collaborate with the AfD due to its extremist ideology. This exclusion has kept the party on the fringes of governance. However, if the far-right party continues its upward trajectory, it is uncertain how long this firewall will hold. Merz wants to form a government with the SDP, ensuring that, for now, the AfD remains out of power.
Europe’s collective shift to the right signals two crucial developments. The first is that most of the far-right parties — from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France to the AfD in Germany — stand accused of antisemitism. The persistence of this hatred suggests that Europe has never really dealt with its deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiment, even decades after the Holocaust. Six million Jews may have been murdered by Hitler, but rather than integrating the survivors, decades ago, Europeans with British assistance encouraged them to move to Palestine, where they established the Jewish state of Israel. The great irony of the moment is that Israeli Jews consider poor and impoverished Pa-lestinians a threat while ignoring Eu-rope, some of whose leaders are not averse to mouthing Nazi slogans.
The second shift is that the post-World War II order — designed to prevent another mass atrocity — is crumbling. The hypocrisy of this system became evident as the world watched the mass killing of Palestinians with impunity.
The once noble façades of human rights and moral superiority have collapsed, revealing Europe’s true face — xenophobic, racist and misogynist. This new Europe is uninterested in equality or human dignity; it is preoccupied with white supremacy.
For people in the Middle East and South Asia — regions with long histories of Western colonial oppression and political interference — this revelation is not surprising. Many never believed the West’s claims of espousing human rights. If the past 25 years represented the ‘better’ face of Europe’s centrist and left-leaning politics, one cannot help but wonder how much worse the next 25 years will be.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1895062/rise-of-far-right