How indeed would Alice Weidel's AfD tackle the 2024 economic crisis? In her speech she spelt it out: by immediately re-instating the Nord Stream pipeline. And the AfD draft election manifesto (the final version as agreed last weekend doesn't seem to be in the public domaine yet) goes further: immediately lifting all sanctions against Russia to ensure "unimpeded trade", by strengthening economic, cultural and science-related links with China (especially taking advantage of China's global influence on the back of the New Silk Road) and by building stronger relationships with the Eurasian Economic Union (consisting of Russia and some Moscow influenced states). This needs to be seen in context with their view on the US. While the AfD acknowledges that a "good relationship" with the US is important, they also stress that, in their view, the "geopolitical and economic interests" of America and "Germany as well as some European states" are "drifting apart". A long-term goal of the AfD and therefore part of the cure for the economic crisis is Germany's exit from the EU which the AfD wants to replace with an alliance of "Vaterländer". These fatherlands are supposed to cooperate economically insofar it's in their national interests while keeping their national borders firmly shut and protecting their respective "identities".
The AfD sees the post-war integration of West Germany with the west as mainly an America-driven "psychological warfare against the population of West Germany", a "re-education programme" that had - according to the AfD - profound impact on German identity (speech by AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla as a much honoured guest at a security conference in Moscow in 2021).
In summary, the AfD has plenty of ideas how to tackle the economic crisis and these ideas should set alarm bells ringing not just in Germany but in Europe and beyond.
Vaterländer - isn't this the re-birth of the European Economic Community, which made so much more sense than the silly unified Federal state of 'EU27', where fiscal rules are broken every single day?
I would Not be so sure about the Thatcher analogy. The AfD has two faces: one is neoliberal. The Western Part of Germany therefore is pretty much Like the Stories under Thatcher. But the overwhelming majority in the East is „national and socialistic“. There a „völkisch“ Vision is majority: pro Russian, anti-West and more Like PiS in Pl or Fidez in Hungary. Which is the Opposite of Thatcherism.
Thatcher hated any form of iliberalism - the AfD has no issue with it.
Over the years nothing went against the völkisch AfD Part. They pretty much Control what Happens in the Party.
I suppose It needs a British perspective to break down the clapped out and intellectually impoverished AfD = Nazi view and to provide a more subtle and realistic analysis. Thank you!
Uhh, (neo)liberalism and Nazism is hardly a paradox. The former tumbled into the latter and the latter informed the former. Hannah Arendt lays out aspects of this quite clearly in her work or, among our contemporaries, the likes of Johann Chapoutot. When Weidel says she wants to "free the people of this state" that can be both a liberal and a Nazi idea.
The "Hitler was a communist" line is obviously dumb and wrong, but mostly a red herring. Unless we buy into Germany's flawed Erinnerungskultur that the Nazis just showed up out of thin air, without the Vorgeschichte that Aly has written about, Weidel claiming that the AfD is just "libertarian-conservative" is the actually revealing thing she said.
As an aside, TAZ might be a useful prop in Kreuzbergian virtue-signaling, but there is hardly anything left about Kreuzberg.
Feel the Nazis are left wing argument fails to understand fascism exists as an explicit response to to liberalism in crisis, it's a white blood cell response to pressure from below. An autonomous system in crisis will not right itself by its own heterogenous forces cause if it did then it wouldn't be in crisis. The crisis requires a direct response that centralizes control and action. Fascism exists to ensure that the clique of elites, sometimes a different faction sometimes not, remain in control rather than a bottom up social revolution to address said crisis.
Fascism looks different in different countries because their conditions lead the above process to happen under different cultural and political economies.
The AFD/Thatcher analogy feels correct but think the nazis are left wing debate stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of interwar fascism and its context
Fascism and Nazism is basically off-brand Communism. It's appeal is to the people attracted to Communism but who have noticed how Communism tends to turn out. As such they end up suckers for the "if we wear different colored shirts, maybe things will turn out differently".
In Germany the term "Vaterland" is heavily charged with nationalistic/ethnic/"völkisch" connotations - one of the toxic inheritances from the Nazi past. The AfD does nothing to detoxify that term, on the contrary. The AfD draft manifesto also uses the term "Volkszugehörigkeit" - the ethnic origin of a person - as a defining element of a person's nationality. At least one AfD supporter and one AfD member confirmed to me that this is what more radical AfD politicians want to see: ethnic white, culturally Germanic folk producing lots of white children. As Jörg Luyken rightly observes, the "völkische" Agenda of this party shouldn't be dismissed out of hand and should the AfD (God and voters forbid) ever get a foothold in the corridors of power in Berlin it may well be that it finally shows its true colour - in my experience bluebrown blend.
Talk of -isms almost always obscures as much as it reveals—at least in practical discussions about real world politics—because there are not many rabbles roused by intellectual consistency. The number of voters who could hold forth accurately about the history and conceptual architecture of communism, socialism, capitalism, liberalism, etc., is minimal, and how many even of those still vote according to ideological frameworks? We have seas of variously discontented individuals and factions searching for individuals and factions to blame. These -isms are just epithets tossed around as a tool for causing excitement and a sort of team spirit, and the intellectual folk who try to make cohesive sense of their usage seem to think we live in an age that would bother distinguishing between let alone debating Stalinism and Trotskyism. Maybe some of the politicians today fancy themselves as being ideologically thoughtful and coherent, but ultimately their main concern is satisfying the mercurial and patchwork priorities of the constituencies that brought them whatever power they have.
I enjoy reading these essays which attempt to explain the rise of the new parties in Europe - and even the rise of President Trump’s Republican party which feels more like a reverse takeover than a political makeover - through the left-right, nationalist-globalist paradigms. The old paradigms don’t quite fit whichever way you try to shoehorn these parties into them, a bit like Cinderella’s ugly sisters attempting to put on the lost ballroom slipper. The comments above impliciltly reveal this, as each perspective is correct but only if you ignore the other diammetrically opposed perspectives. The AfD is the most interesting of the emergent European parties (possibly closely tied with Reform in the UK) because their existance is entirely due to the erstwhile centre conservative party (CDU in Germany) lurching ineluctably to the Left and abandoning their centrist Christian and traditionalist principles without having the intellectual capacity to formulate a robust and cohesive political framework to counter the destructive socialist ideology of the New Left.
This lurch to the left executed by that most cynical and unprincipled of modern politicians Angela Merkel and her “Links überholen” (overtaking on the Left) policy , destroyed the coherence of her party (as well as depriving it of any talented politicians who might challenge her rule) and left a large vacuum on the conservative-right of the political spectrum. The AfD has emerged as a natural entrepreneurial response to that screaming void and has been centrifugally formed by a varied assortment of people and programs with all the perspectives you and your commentators list. It’s main political agenda is “enough of this nonsense - we want our country back” and nobody can deny that this reflects a significant proportion of the population’s fundamental desire. The current mess of globo-socialist policies is obviously not working and leading to disastrous outcomes.
The AfD is not yet embedded in any one coherent political framework and as yet has no fundamental economic program that is recognisably of one or other of the traditional “schools”. I can hear echoes of Mises and the Austrians in some of Alice Weidel’s speeches but also enough of the strands of neo-mercantilst industrial policy thinking to make her indistinguishable from the CDU of Kohl or Schroeder’s pragmatic SPD. That there are also Nationalist “Germany First” fans on the fringe of the Party, possibly deeply embedded, with absolutely no coherent economic policy, only highlights the sense political confusion.
The arch Conservative Franz Josef Strauss CSU leader for most of the 1970s and 1980 told the Germans that “there must be no Party to the right of us.” making clear that the Conservatives had the important task of protecting the country from a reemergence darker nationalist forces. The abject failure of the CDU/CSU to maintain its right flank has led to the current confusion, but I would posit that the jury is still out on what sort of a party the AfD will become or whether in this its early stages it is in fact two parties, one closer to Reform (New Conservatives) and one less savoury Nationalist backward looking one. The latter which as a stand alone has no chance of any political influence in Germany may see the former as a Trojan Horse, or may just fall by the wayside. Whatever the outcome we are challenged to reimagine the political trains of thought in far more nuanced ways than we have been used to. As the Germans say, ‘es bleibt spannend’.
The afd dehumanizes minorities and the racist tendencies remind people of jews under hitler. We can also talk about economics since the question is about socialism and communism but also fuck racism.
Worth reading: «Hitler war Sozialist», sagt Alice Weidel. Das ist falsch. Aber nicht ganzhttps://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/hitler-war-kein-kommunist-warum-alice-weidel-falsch-liegt-aber-nicht-ganz-ld.1866200
Franz Josef Strauss may be added to the list of people having pointed to the socialist aspect of national socialism. As to Weidel; I'd expect Höcke to push her aside when real power is to be grabbed.
Another Berlin based author who is spreading anti -opposition propaganda-Berlin is a shithole and infiltrated by the Green Party in every important places in the government,the police and the boroughs-be careful dear reader ,whom to believe ! Its an offensive against the afd to deny a good result at the election…..
How indeed would Alice Weidel's AfD tackle the 2024 economic crisis? In her speech she spelt it out: by immediately re-instating the Nord Stream pipeline. And the AfD draft election manifesto (the final version as agreed last weekend doesn't seem to be in the public domaine yet) goes further: immediately lifting all sanctions against Russia to ensure "unimpeded trade", by strengthening economic, cultural and science-related links with China (especially taking advantage of China's global influence on the back of the New Silk Road) and by building stronger relationships with the Eurasian Economic Union (consisting of Russia and some Moscow influenced states). This needs to be seen in context with their view on the US. While the AfD acknowledges that a "good relationship" with the US is important, they also stress that, in their view, the "geopolitical and economic interests" of America and "Germany as well as some European states" are "drifting apart". A long-term goal of the AfD and therefore part of the cure for the economic crisis is Germany's exit from the EU which the AfD wants to replace with an alliance of "Vaterländer". These fatherlands are supposed to cooperate economically insofar it's in their national interests while keeping their national borders firmly shut and protecting their respective "identities".
The AfD sees the post-war integration of West Germany with the west as mainly an America-driven "psychological warfare against the population of West Germany", a "re-education programme" that had - according to the AfD - profound impact on German identity (speech by AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla as a much honoured guest at a security conference in Moscow in 2021).
In summary, the AfD has plenty of ideas how to tackle the economic crisis and these ideas should set alarm bells ringing not just in Germany but in Europe and beyond.
Vaterländer - isn't this the re-birth of the European Economic Community, which made so much more sense than the silly unified Federal state of 'EU27', where fiscal rules are broken every single day?
I would Not be so sure about the Thatcher analogy. The AfD has two faces: one is neoliberal. The Western Part of Germany therefore is pretty much Like the Stories under Thatcher. But the overwhelming majority in the East is „national and socialistic“. There a „völkisch“ Vision is majority: pro Russian, anti-West and more Like PiS in Pl or Fidez in Hungary. Which is the Opposite of Thatcherism.
Thatcher hated any form of iliberalism - the AfD has no issue with it.
Over the years nothing went against the völkisch AfD Part. They pretty much Control what Happens in the Party.
I suppose It needs a British perspective to break down the clapped out and intellectually impoverished AfD = Nazi view and to provide a more subtle and realistic analysis. Thank you!
Uhh, (neo)liberalism and Nazism is hardly a paradox. The former tumbled into the latter and the latter informed the former. Hannah Arendt lays out aspects of this quite clearly in her work or, among our contemporaries, the likes of Johann Chapoutot. When Weidel says she wants to "free the people of this state" that can be both a liberal and a Nazi idea.
The "Hitler was a communist" line is obviously dumb and wrong, but mostly a red herring. Unless we buy into Germany's flawed Erinnerungskultur that the Nazis just showed up out of thin air, without the Vorgeschichte that Aly has written about, Weidel claiming that the AfD is just "libertarian-conservative" is the actually revealing thing she said.
As an aside, TAZ might be a useful prop in Kreuzbergian virtue-signaling, but there is hardly anything left about Kreuzberg.
Feel the Nazis are left wing argument fails to understand fascism exists as an explicit response to to liberalism in crisis, it's a white blood cell response to pressure from below. An autonomous system in crisis will not right itself by its own heterogenous forces cause if it did then it wouldn't be in crisis. The crisis requires a direct response that centralizes control and action. Fascism exists to ensure that the clique of elites, sometimes a different faction sometimes not, remain in control rather than a bottom up social revolution to address said crisis.
Fascism looks different in different countries because their conditions lead the above process to happen under different cultural and political economies.
The AFD/Thatcher analogy feels correct but think the nazis are left wing debate stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of interwar fascism and its context
What I was planning to write. Thanks.
Fascism and Nazism is basically off-brand Communism. It's appeal is to the people attracted to Communism but who have noticed how Communism tends to turn out. As such they end up suckers for the "if we wear different colored shirts, maybe things will turn out differently".
In Germany the term "Vaterland" is heavily charged with nationalistic/ethnic/"völkisch" connotations - one of the toxic inheritances from the Nazi past. The AfD does nothing to detoxify that term, on the contrary. The AfD draft manifesto also uses the term "Volkszugehörigkeit" - the ethnic origin of a person - as a defining element of a person's nationality. At least one AfD supporter and one AfD member confirmed to me that this is what more radical AfD politicians want to see: ethnic white, culturally Germanic folk producing lots of white children. As Jörg Luyken rightly observes, the "völkische" Agenda of this party shouldn't be dismissed out of hand and should the AfD (God and voters forbid) ever get a foothold in the corridors of power in Berlin it may well be that it finally shows its true colour - in my experience bluebrown blend.
Talk of -isms almost always obscures as much as it reveals—at least in practical discussions about real world politics—because there are not many rabbles roused by intellectual consistency. The number of voters who could hold forth accurately about the history and conceptual architecture of communism, socialism, capitalism, liberalism, etc., is minimal, and how many even of those still vote according to ideological frameworks? We have seas of variously discontented individuals and factions searching for individuals and factions to blame. These -isms are just epithets tossed around as a tool for causing excitement and a sort of team spirit, and the intellectual folk who try to make cohesive sense of their usage seem to think we live in an age that would bother distinguishing between let alone debating Stalinism and Trotskyism. Maybe some of the politicians today fancy themselves as being ideologically thoughtful and coherent, but ultimately their main concern is satisfying the mercurial and patchwork priorities of the constituencies that brought them whatever power they have.
I enjoy reading these essays which attempt to explain the rise of the new parties in Europe - and even the rise of President Trump’s Republican party which feels more like a reverse takeover than a political makeover - through the left-right, nationalist-globalist paradigms. The old paradigms don’t quite fit whichever way you try to shoehorn these parties into them, a bit like Cinderella’s ugly sisters attempting to put on the lost ballroom slipper. The comments above impliciltly reveal this, as each perspective is correct but only if you ignore the other diammetrically opposed perspectives. The AfD is the most interesting of the emergent European parties (possibly closely tied with Reform in the UK) because their existance is entirely due to the erstwhile centre conservative party (CDU in Germany) lurching ineluctably to the Left and abandoning their centrist Christian and traditionalist principles without having the intellectual capacity to formulate a robust and cohesive political framework to counter the destructive socialist ideology of the New Left.
This lurch to the left executed by that most cynical and unprincipled of modern politicians Angela Merkel and her “Links überholen” (overtaking on the Left) policy , destroyed the coherence of her party (as well as depriving it of any talented politicians who might challenge her rule) and left a large vacuum on the conservative-right of the political spectrum. The AfD has emerged as a natural entrepreneurial response to that screaming void and has been centrifugally formed by a varied assortment of people and programs with all the perspectives you and your commentators list. It’s main political agenda is “enough of this nonsense - we want our country back” and nobody can deny that this reflects a significant proportion of the population’s fundamental desire. The current mess of globo-socialist policies is obviously not working and leading to disastrous outcomes.
The AfD is not yet embedded in any one coherent political framework and as yet has no fundamental economic program that is recognisably of one or other of the traditional “schools”. I can hear echoes of Mises and the Austrians in some of Alice Weidel’s speeches but also enough of the strands of neo-mercantilst industrial policy thinking to make her indistinguishable from the CDU of Kohl or Schroeder’s pragmatic SPD. That there are also Nationalist “Germany First” fans on the fringe of the Party, possibly deeply embedded, with absolutely no coherent economic policy, only highlights the sense political confusion.
The arch Conservative Franz Josef Strauss CSU leader for most of the 1970s and 1980 told the Germans that “there must be no Party to the right of us.” making clear that the Conservatives had the important task of protecting the country from a reemergence darker nationalist forces. The abject failure of the CDU/CSU to maintain its right flank has led to the current confusion, but I would posit that the jury is still out on what sort of a party the AfD will become or whether in this its early stages it is in fact two parties, one closer to Reform (New Conservatives) and one less savoury Nationalist backward looking one. The latter which as a stand alone has no chance of any political influence in Germany may see the former as a Trojan Horse, or may just fall by the wayside. Whatever the outcome we are challenged to reimagine the political trains of thought in far more nuanced ways than we have been used to. As the Germans say, ‘es bleibt spannend’.
The afd dehumanizes minorities and the racist tendencies remind people of jews under hitler. We can also talk about economics since the question is about socialism and communism but also fuck racism.
A well written article. It’s the mystery of politics!
9 time out of 10, one never knows until a party is in power, what their true agenda is.
Worth reading: «Hitler war Sozialist», sagt Alice Weidel. Das ist falsch. Aber nicht ganzhttps://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/hitler-war-kein-kommunist-warum-alice-weidel-falsch-liegt-aber-nicht-ganz-ld.1866200
Interesting read.
What really stands out is that journalists lose their jobs for actually writing or daring to question established thinking.
Like the dirty thirties, la plus ca change la plus ca resté pareille
Go AfD!
Franz Josef Strauss may be added to the list of people having pointed to the socialist aspect of national socialism. As to Weidel; I'd expect Höcke to push her aside when real power is to be grabbed.
Another Berlin based author who is spreading anti -opposition propaganda-Berlin is a shithole and infiltrated by the Green Party in every important places in the government,the police and the boroughs-be careful dear reader ,whom to believe ! Its an offensive against the afd to deny a good result at the election…..
Mission creep.