German right turns to fascists to support racist policies

Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU, want to work with fascists (Photo: Wikimedia)

The conservative right in Germany is paving the way for the rise of the fascist AfD party.

Election front-runner and CDU party leader Friedrich Merz last week announced that he will introduce far stricter immigration controls if he wins office at next month’s polls. And he suggested his party is prepared to work with the AfD in parliament to achieve this.

That might mean cooperation with fascist MPs to drive through legislation, but it may also signal a potential post-election coalition deal.

The AfD is running second in opinion polls with over 20 percent in the general election battle. It greeted that news with massive applause.

“The firewall has fallen,” cheered party leader Alice Weidel. “That is good news for our country.” The “firewall” was an unwritten agreement between the major parties not to cooperate with the AfD at a local or national level. The idea was to freeze the fascists out of mainstream politics.

But as all the main parties now clamour to back racist policies, that so-called firewall has proving less and less effective.

The labour-like SPD party says that, like the CDU and AfD, it too backs the deportation of “foreign criminals” and says it pioneered “tough border controls”. That only emboldens the right to go further.

The AfD has moved from being a right wing populist party, railing against the European Union, to one increasingly dominated by Nazis. Weidel wants her party to resemble fascist Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and she regularly demands “large scale” repatriation of migrants.

But openly Nazi elements are far more prominent in the AfD than they in the RN. More than 100 dedicated Nazis and “identitarians” work for the party in the German parliament. 

For them, deportations of “foreign criminals” are just the start. They want to cleanse Germany of “foreign influence” and remove families that have been in the country for generations.

Thousands of anti-racists are now regularly mobilising against the threat of the right.

There were anti-AfD protests in many towns and cities across German last weekend. At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Fridays for Future groups said the demos were a “sea of light against the right turn”.

In Cologne, Over 15,000 took to the streets. One of the protesters, Thomas Schneemann, said it was most important for him to “stay united against the far right”.

“Especially after what we heard from Merz, we have to stand together to fight the far right,” he said. The fight against the fascists is at a crucial stage—and the left must seek to give it direction.