-Analysis-
BERLIN — One of the peculiarities of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is how different their approach has been compared to most other extreme right-wing forces in Europe. While Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and Geert Wilder’s Partij voor de Vrijheid have recently moderated what they say in public, the AfD has undergone a continuous public radicalization since its founding as a euro-critical professors’ party in 2013.
The regional wing of AfD in Thuringian, led by chairman Björn Höcke, has repeatedly attracted attention with its extreme rhetoric. In May last year, for example, the former history teacher Höcke was sentenced to a fine by the Halle Regional Court for using a banned slogan of the Nazi SA group.
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AfD national leader Alice Weidel can often seem like a counterpoint to Höcke. Weidel, who is the AfD candidate for chancellor in Germany’s upcoming national elections, lives in a lesbian partnership and completed a research stay in China. She also regularly gives sharp, populist speeches, even as she embodies a polyglot pearl-necklace bourgeoisie, rather than ethnic revisionism.
For Elon Musk, with whom the AfD candidate for chancellor is having a public discussion Thursday on his platform X, Weidel’s CV is also seen as supposed proof that the AfD cannot be a right-wing extremist. Musk noted in his recently published guest article in the German daily Die Welt : “The portrayal of the AfD as right-wing extremist is clearly wrong when you consider that Alice Weidel, the chairwoman of the party, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!”
Musk’s support of Weidel has been raising concerns about foreign interference in Germany’s elections and European democratic stability.
That’s why it seems all the more remarkable to see Weidel using openly right-wing extremist rhetoric in an interview with the U.S. magazine The American Conservative. In the interview, published in English on January 6, the AfD candidate for chancellor is allowed to speak about her foreign policy positions, without being asked any challenging questions. Weidel describes the Germans as a “defeated people” who are “slaves” of the United States. This existence does have advantages, because as a “slave” you can enjoy peace and do not have to take part in the battles of your “master.”
But the Germans only get this kind of peace at the price of their freedom.
Greetings from Moscow
For Weidel, national freedom is the right to conclude a gas deal with Russia like the much criticized Nord Stream 2 project. If Donald Trump were to insist in his upcoming presidency that Germany spend more money on defense, a potential AfD government would, according to Weidel, seek appeasement with Russia. Weidel asks rhetorically in the conversation whether Germany is “a colony” and “does not have the right to determine its own energy policy.” But in the context of the interview it becomes clear that it’s no joke: it’s exactly how she sees it.
Now, let’s first set the facts straight. It was by no means only the United States that warned against the construction of Nord Stream 2 and criticized Germany’s high energy dependence on Russia as a geopolitical risk factor. Almost the entire European Union, especially Poland and the Baltic states, saw it similarly. And they were right in their criticism. This is already evident from the fact that it was Russia that stopped gas deliveries through Nord Stream 1 in 2022, allegedly due to technical problems.
It’s a nationalist message in a bottle.
Furthermore, it is absurd to call Germany a “slave” of the U.S.. The United States, with its enormous military power and its leading role in NATO, of course pursues its own national interests. But Germany has benefited economically from this, because it was only thanks to the United States’ enormous military spending that it was able to keep its own defense budget well below two percent of gross domestic product for a long time.
As is often the case with statements by AfD representatives, it is pointless to counter them with facts. Weidel’s interview with the American Conservative, for example, seems to be primarily a sort of ideological manifesto. To be more precise: on the one hand, it is a love letter to Moscow, with Weidel playing the full range of anti-American rhetoric. On the other hand, when it comes to internal politics, it is also a friendly nod to the extremist Höcke wing of her own party. It’s a nationalist message in a bottle.
Problematic forefather
There is something else that is particularly striking in the interview. Weidel quotes the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who died in 1814. Alongside Schelling and Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte is one of the great representatives of German idealism. He developed a philosophy of freedom, supported the French Revolution, and was a passionate humanist. On the other hand, Fichte was not only an anti-Semite and participated in the anti-Jewish and anti-women “German Table Society”: he is one of the intellectual founders of ethnic thinking.
This is particularly evident in the Speeches to the German Nation, published in 1808. That is, the text from which the passage quoted by Weidel comes. Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic occupation, Fichte creates a fantasy of national awakening. The Germans may have been defeated for the moment, but could rise again through “the creation of a completely new order of things.” In intellectual and cultural terms, says Fichte, the Germans are superior to the rest of Europe. They are characterized by “naturalness” and a spirit of “piety, respectability, modesty, and community spirit.” Foreigners, on the other hand, are characterized by “arbitrariness and artificiality”.
As the essential characteristics of 20th-century nationalist thinking are already laid out here, it was only logical that Fichte was celebrated by ultra-nationalist forces in the German Empire. After Hitler seized power, the association came under the control of Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. Excerpts from Fichte’s speeches to the German nation were also broadcast on Nazi radio.
Philosopher’s sentence
Now, one might object: if you quote a philosopher’s sentence, you do not automatically associate yourself with his work and, above all, with those who admired it. This is of course true, because a quote is not necessarily an affirmative adoption.
In addition, thinkers have no control over their intellectual afterlife. If you quote Karl Marx, for example, you are not thereby affirming certain anti-Semitic passages in his writings and are not thereby legitimizing Marx’s instrumentalization in Stalinism. In case of doubt, the AfD’s line of defense is likely to run in exactly this direction: Fichte is, after all, a great German philosopher, a thinker of freedom, after whom streets are named in Germany. Why shouldn’t you quote him?
It’s a kind of anti-American talking point.
Still, this line of reasoning does not stand up. Firstly, Weidel refers specifically to the Speeches to the German Nation , that is, the work by Fichte, which is highly problematic in itself. In addition, her reference to the philosopher underlines her claim that Germany is a “slave” of the United States, and is therefore explicitly used in the context of a kind of anti-American talking point.
The fact that Weidel makes these statements in a U.S. magazine, where the reader is perhaps less aware of the historical context of the quote, raises a suspicion: this flirting with German nationalist ideology might also be a sort of secret message. Was it taken into account that German readers would stumble into this? You never know with the AfD. But the message stays the same, whether you approve of it or not: the AfD’s candidate for chancellor is not a moderate counterpoint to Höcke. Quite the opposite.
