The AfD paradox

A realistic scenario? An AI generated image imagines Adolf Hitler as a communist.

Dear Reader,

When AfD leader Alice Weidel told Elon Musk last week that Adolf Hitler was a “communist socialist guy” and “the exact opposite” of right-wing, public outcry was guaranteed.

Now, you might think that the fact that Hitler put the word “socialist” into the name of the party he founded in 1920 would mean that such a comment could be shrugged off as “controversial but not crazy”.

But you’d be wrong.

Historians and commentators took to the airwaves to laugh at Weidel’s ignorance of historical facts, or to suggest that she was deliberately trying to wash her hands of her party’s most controversial forefather.

For Die Welt newspaper, Weidel’s claim was “completely ridiculous.” For historian Andreas Wirsching, it was an “infamous propaganda manoeuvre” meant to “camouflage the right-wing past and the true goals of right-wing extremist policies.”

Media outlets up and down the country found some expert to tell them that Weidel was talking tosh. Public broadcaster ZDF lined up three historians who said that her comment was “complete rubbish,” “fake news” and “disinformation.”

Weidel isn’t the first person in the German-speaking world to find herself in hot water for claiming that Hitler was left-wing. An Austrian journalist was sacked by her newspaper in 2022 after posting to Twitter that Hitler was “a socialist through and through.”

Suggesting that the founder of the National Socialists was a socialist is dangerous territory.

Stepping back from the hysteria though, Weidel’s comments tell us something genuinely interesting about her and her party.

For, as much as you may get another impression from reading the news, there is a long tradition of intellectuals making the claim that Hitler should be categorised on the left.

Most recently, Cambridge historian Brendan Simms ruffled feathers with the thesis that the Nazi leader saw his main enemy as the capitalist Anglosphere, and a world of finance that was run by Jews.

Two decades earlier, Götz Aly, one of Germany’s best known historians of the Nazi era, caused similar controversy by claiming that the Nazi tax system was more left-wing than right.

In the 1970s, Sebastian Haffner’s bestselling biography of Hitler claimed that he was closer to Stalin than Mussolini.

Most famously, Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom” argued that National Socialism and other forms of totalitarianism of the time were an inevitable consequence of the socialist effort to organise society around a common goal.

The recurrent theme in all of these arguments is the opposition between socialism and liberalism. Socialism emerged as a critique of liberalism and advocated that the state should organise society around a common goal - and that the economy should be harnessed for the purpose of achieving this common goal. Liberalism asserts that free markets are a precondition for individual freedom.

Because the Nazis organised society around a common goal - waging war - and subjugated the economy to this goal, they belong to the tradition of collectivism rather than individualism.

That this is what Alice Weidel meant when she called Hitler a communist is the most likely explanation for her comments, given what we know about her.

A trained economist who worked for Goldman Sachs before going into politics, it should hardly shock us that she is influenced by neoliberalism, which sees Hayek as its intellectual godfather.

In her stump speeches she rails against state interference in the markets to the benefit of renewable energy; she hates the idea of a wealth tax because of the effect it would have on the incentive systems in free markets. More fundamentally, she argues that Green politicians are trying to organise society around the collective goal of tackling climate change, allowing them to cream off people's wealth to fund an ideological goal.

This is all classic neoliberalism. And this is where we get back to why her comments on Hitler should cause genuine reflection on what it says about the AfD and its leader.

Would Weidel's AfD use the Nazi toolkit to address the economic crisis of 1933 to address another one in 2024?

Hitler’s response to the Great Depression was to start huge public works programmes such as autobahn construction and rearmament. He funded them by printing money. When this led to inflation, he brought in price and wage freezes. Nazi bureaucrats reorganised the country’s economy and society around the single purpose of going to war. Military imports were prioritised over consumer goods, thus suppressing purchasing power.

This is all anathema to neoliberals, who break out in a rash at the idea of printing money, controlling prices or using state levers to direct private investment. Weidel simply cannot be both a neoliberal and a Nazi. To claim that the two are compatible is intellectual nonsense.

All the evidence suggests that she is a neoliberal rather than a Nazi.

So why did a party that is allegedly a reincarnation of the Nazis just unanimously elect her to be their chancellor candidate? Why did the AfD vote for a manifesto, which a leading left-wing think tank has concluded “stands for a policy of neoliberalism, sees the state as an evil, and strengthening the market and dismantling the welfare state as the solution.”

It is indeed a puzzling contradiction, and one that receives almost no attention in the public debate.

This is partly explained by the fact many on the left see neoliberalism and fascism as “bad things of the right” which logically go together. Most prominently, Die Tageszeitung, newspaper of choice in Kreuzberg, happily tags the AfD as neoliberal while also giving them the Nazi colour brown (rather than the party’s official light blue) in their election polling.

For those aware of the paradox, the AfD's neoliberalism is a front which will only be maintained until the party comes to power, at which point it will throw off the veneer of respect for individual freedom and begin to force its völkisch world view on the rest of the population.

This is an argument that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. There is a faction inside the party, particularly powerful in the east of the country, who are suspicious of capitalism, advocate nationalising industry and use Nazi dog whistles to attract the extreme right.

But, watching a recording of Weidel's speech at the AfD conference this week, one didn’t have the impression of a woman who is just a placeholder for more powerful men in the background.

While her one reference to her chat with Musk left delegates noticeably cold (apparently, not everyone was happy that she talked to the tech millionaire), for much of her speech she had delegates eating out of her hand. Her thunderous attacks on the CDU's “failed” economic policies, were met with rapturous applause, as were her comments on the “Nazi left” who were trying to blockade the conference outside.

Indeed, the women glaring down from the stage, full of acerbic contempt for political opponents, conjured a more obvious historical predecessor to mind than Hitler… Margaret Thatcher.

And that would seem to be the decisive point: how would Weidel’s AfD tackle the economic crisis of 2024 if in power? Would she take a leaf from Hitler’s state-funded Wirtschaftswunder (which almost bankrupted Germany by 1938)? Or would she follow Thatcher’s shock therapy for Britain’s economic malaise by slashing through regulations and cutting state expenditure?

I would suggest that the latter is the more plausible scenario.