The domestic intelligence service of Germany last week labeled “extremist” the political party that won the second-most seats in the Bundestag in February.
The finding of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV, against the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party will allow for significantly more intensive government surveillance of AfD. It also provides a foundation for further efforts to restrict AfD’s access to public airwaves, public funding, and participation in Bundestag oversight activities. And it puts Germany on a course to ban the party.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized the German government’s action on Friday. As he put it, “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy — it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD — which took second in the recent election — but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes. Germany should reverse course.”
Rubio’s comment advances Vice President JD Vance’s February admonition of European governments for their restrictions on free speech and against certain political parties.
But the German foreign ministry wasn’t happy with Rubio. It responded, “This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”
Neither the German government nor Rubio has it correct here.
On the German side of the ledger, the BfV’s actions are plainly not proportionate to AfD’s threat to constitutional order. They represent an unjustifiably repressive response to a political party that, while unpleasant in many respects, is supported by a significant number of German citizens. More importantly, AfD’s success isn’t a consequence of rising racism and a longing for Germany’s Nazi past. AfD’s success takes its source from those many voters who believe the political establishment has fundamentally failed to address their legitimate grievances.
Most prominent among these voter concerns is the perception of uncontrolled immigration, along with the associated perception that too many immigrants reject German social norms and impose excessive costs on the German social housing and healthcare systems. AfD has also made particular headway in eastern Germany, mobilizing resentment against economic inequality.
That said, it’s a mistake to overestimate AfD’s support. Even though the party is doing very well in the latest opinion polls, measured against a combination of the three establishment parties, the center-left Greens, the center-left Social Democratic Party, and the center-right Christian Democratic Union, the latest polls suggest AfD supporters are still outnumbered more than 2-to-1, hence why the most recent election put a CDU-SDP coalition in power on Wednesday.
What the German political establishment needs, then, is not panic and repression, but rather prudence and introspection. If German political parties want to undermine AfD, they should focus on more dynamic policies to diversify and boost economic growth and more robust measures to reduce immigration and its related social concerns. They should also recognize that the BfV has far better and more moral things to be doing than spying on Germany’s second-most popular political party. These alternative missions include hunting for Russian spies, something the BfV hasn’t been very good at doing at all; detecting Chinese industrial, business, and political espionage; and defending Germany from the varied threat it faces from Islamist, far-right, and far-left terrorist organizations.
At the same time, however, Rubio is wrong to whitewash AfD as “not extremist,” and instead as some kind of rising positive force.
Yes, it’s true that many AfD voters and some of the party’s elected representatives really only want stronger immigration controls, lower living costs, a better economy, and a break with establishment thinking. That’s fine. The problem is that a good number of the party’s most influential politicians clearly do hold extremist viewpoints. That isn’t to say they should be spied on or restricted. But nor is it to say that they deserve the secretary of state’s ardent defense.
AfD’s leader in the central German state of Thuringia epitomizes this challenge. Björn Höcke has complained to the Wall Street Journal that “the big problem is that one presents Hitler as absolutely evil, but of course we know that there is no black and no white in history.” Höcke also once used a political address to joke about the Third Reich’s Auschwitz extermination camp, at which 1.1 million people were killed. Another AfD official, this one a Bundestag member, once donated to a World War II memorial that honored a Nazi militia responsible for massacring Poles.
Nor is AfD’s extremism problem limited to a small group of problematic loudmouths. In late 2017, 48 — yes, 48 — AfD representatives serving in both the Bundestag and various state legislatures were found to be part of a Facebook group that served up a regular supply of antisemitic and racist commentary. One post featured Anne Frank’s face on top of a pizza box with the slogan, “Oven-fresh, fluffy and crispy at the same time.” Frank was a 15 year-old Jewish girl who died at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, just one of 6 million Jews murdered by Adolf Hitler’s regime between 1941 and 1945. After being gassed to death at extermination camps, Jews sometimes had their skin removed as victory trophies. And underpinning the aforementioned pizza box Facebook post, their bodies were regularly thrown into ovens.
This appeal for Nazism runs too deep with too many AfD officials. Indeed, the party’s youth branch was so notoriously sympathetic to Nazi ideology that AfD scrapped it altogether in January. The party’s top two leaders, Alice Weidel and co-chairman Tino Chrupalla, at least recognize the party has a problem. They have made efforts to purge the fanatics and make AfD more mainstream. But their efforts have only been tentative. Both leaders hardly deserve Rubio’s friendship.
AfD has received funding from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, America’s second-most-preeminent enemy. And both Wiedel and Chrupalla revel in regurgitating pro-Kremlin talking points. Chrupalla does so nonstop on just about every issue, and Weidel wants to increase Germany’s reliance on Russian energy exports rather than reduce energy costs by boosting supplies from more secure sources.
Put simply, Rubio knows that the AfD story is more complicated than he presents. But he chooses to deny this reality for two reasons.
The first reason is AfD’s relevance to U.S. domestic politics. Looking toward the 2028 Republican presidential primaries, Rubio wants to boost his support from the GOP’s populist wing. Rubio knows full well that Vance is currently favored by this wing. He needs some of those voters to view his own possible candidacy with an open mind, hence why Rubio is aping Vance’s criticisms of the European political establishment. As the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, copy them.
Second, Rubio wants the new German government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz to understand that Washington is watching closely. Rubio’s reference to AfD is, in part, only a conduit to a broader point because Rubio is also watching to see whether Merz follows through on his pledge to increase defense spending significantly. He also wants Merz to know the United States will be watching to see his policy toward China. Both of these points are important U.S. foreign policy concerns.
The Trump administration rightly views German defense spending increases since the February 2022 start of Russia’s war on Ukraine as grossly insufficient. Former Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government significantly pared back defense hikes for 2024. This is incompatible with Europe’s need to do more for its own defense.
On China, the U.S. wants to see less appeasement from Berlin. Under Scholz and Angela Merkel before him, German policy here effectively began and ended with doing everything possible to protect German car exports. Chinese President Xi Jinping then used Germany’s export desperation to extract its separation from U.S. efforts to better confront Chinese espionage, human rights abuses, and militarism. But with China now dumping electric vehicles into Europe and Germany’s export model fraying, Merz has a chance to change course.
TRUMP IS TOUGH ON STRONG XI, WEAK ON WEAKER PUTIN
Hopefully, Trump can reach a European Union trade deal that benefits both sides. But if Merz fails to adopt a more robust stance toward America’s preeminent global adversary, he can expect U.S. countermeasures. We might see the relocation of U.S. military bases from Germany to Poland, for example.
Regardless, while the AfD factor is set to be a sore point between the U.S. and Germany for the foreseeable future, neither Germany nor Rubio is addressing that concern in the right way. The right way is to allow the AfD to operate without unjust government repression, for other parties to address legitimate voter concerns on immigration directly, and for Trump administration officials to admit that the AfD has a Nazi problem, even if it is not defined by that problem. And to call out the Nazi legacy for what it is: a tale of evil losers crushed into the history books by an American and Allied force of arms.