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How Germany's Extreme Center Fueled AfD's Success
As they united around neoliberalism and an aggressive foreign policy, mainstream parties created a dangerous democratic vacuum. This vacuum can now be exploited in particular by extremist parties on the right.
Feb 25, 2025
According to the preliminary results of the Bundestag, or parliamentary, elections, the extreme right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has become the second-strongest force in Germany. It now has 20.8% of the vote, doubling its result compared to the last election. The conservative CDU/CSU got 28.5%. The Social Democrats and the Greens, who have been in government so far, were punished, receiving 16.4 and 11.6% of the vote, respectively.
However, the party Die Linke was able to achieve a success. For a long time, it was stuck in polls well below the 5%, which is the mark to enter the Bundestag. But in a final sprint, it was able to significantly increase the result and garner 8.7%. Above all, strong speeches by Member of Parliament Heidi Reichinnek against the anti-migration agenda of all other parties and for real social change were able to mobilize.
Now the established parties and the mainstream press are engaging in the usual complaints and soul-searching about how things could have come to this. In the face of the rapid rise of the Alternative for Germany, journalists and political commentators often say that dissatisfaction with the established parties is the reason why more and more people are voting for the AfD. The dissatisfaction is then mostly seen as created by "mass immigration," the rejection of climate protection, and a left-liberal view of society ("wokeness")—in other words, a growing front against overly left-wing, progressive, liberal politics. This is seen to be the central cause of the shift to the right in society. Politicians must now respond to this.
The political class is reaping what is has sown and now is shedding crocodile tears about the results.
This is a narrative that is not only convenient and leads to false right-wing solutions, but also distorts reality by blaming those who are supposedly rebelling against progressive politics and thinking backward. At the same time, the other parties and their supporters appear as a haven of reason and morality, striving to hold society together.
The thesis that a shift to the right in the population is the reason for the rapid rise of the AfD also obscures the root of the problem. Looking closer, large portions of today's AfD voters have by no means been attracted to the AfD and its better policy proposals.
Even significant portions of AfD voters agree with the majority of Germans on polls that favor a fair solution to refugee protection and a quarter believe that the energy transition is indispensable; only a few describe themselves as extreme right and "only" 40% have right-wing tendencies. Most of them demand a social policy that benefits them, as many of them are unemployed or low-income earners, while the AfD takes a diametrically opposed, extreme position on all these issues, and their neoliberal program would make the rich even richer and the poor poorer.
In fact, more and more people were driven from the so-called "extreme center" into the arms of the AfD. In some ways, the political class is reaping what is has sown and now is shedding crocodile tears about the results.
The term "extreme center" was coined 10 years ago by the British intellectual Tariq Ali in his bookThe Extreme Centre: A Warning. It essentially refers to what often is referred to as "bourgeois parties," "parties of the political center," "established parties," sometimes also as "democratic parties" or "parties capable of forming a government." In Germany, these are the CDU/CSU, SPD, the liberals FDP, and the Greens. They distinguish themselves from the "extremes" on the left and right, which they regard as a danger to society and democracy, and see themselves as a force that balances interests and creates harmony.
According to Tariq Ali, the parties of the so-called center have been indistinguishable from each other in important policy areas since the 1980s. In the Western industrialized countries, a kind of "government of national unity" has emerged. It has implemented and maintained extreme policies—including the neoliberal turn and an aggressively oriented foreign policy under U.S. leadership—against the needs of the general population.
In the process, the space for alternative policy proposals and democratic debate has been reduced to a minimum. It created a dangerous democratic vacuum. This vacuum can now be exploited in particular by extremist parties on the right.
Let's take a look at how the "non-partisan political class, beyond particular interests" has operated in Germany in recent decades. Since the 1990s (or even earlier, in the years under chancellor Helmut Kohl, CDU), various governing coalitions have implemented policies that have led to Germany becoming the country in Europe with the greatest material and social inequality.
On the one hand, the established parties created a high concentration of wealth through various neoliberal measures. On the other hand, parts of the middle class were put under financial pressure. A huge low-wage sector was built up, widespread poverty (especially child and old-age poverty) was created, and the welfare state was dismantled.
Many services that people in the country rely on to live in safety have been commercialized, privatized, and "streamlined." The state of Germany's railways, healthcare system, pensions, agriculture, real estate markets, and education systems shows where this has led. Once in comparatively good condition, these infrastructures are now dysfunctional, expensive, unjust, and environmentally harmful.
The austerity for the poor and many ordinary citizens, and the welfare state for the rich and super-rich, has led to Germany becoming increasingly divided—especially the eastern federal states that were hit hard by the inequality policy after reunification.
The Agenda 2010, introduced and enacted under the red-green government in the early 2000s, was pushed forward by massive pressure from corporate and business lobbying groups (see the tens of millions of euros spent on the so called "reform movement," including the Initiative für Soziale Marktwirtschaft led by the employers' federation of metal and electronics industry Gesamtmetall) has finally turned on the inequality turbo. As a result, the lower and middle classes have become poorer and the rich and hyper-rich fantastically richer.
This process is uncontroversial today. According to the Global Wealth Report, in 1970 the top 1% of the German population (around 800,000 people) owned 20% of the total private wealth. That, too, is enormous, meaning that Germany was by no means a balanced or even just society at the time.
By 2020, the share had risen to 35%. The super-rich, the top 0.1% (around 85,000 Germans), can now claim up to 20% of the national wealth for themselves (as much as the top 1% in 1970). The top 10% own around 67%, which corresponds to two-thirds of total private wealth. Like many large properties, corporate assets are almost exclusively in the hands of the top 1%. The lower, poorer half of the population in Germany, on the other hand, owns practically no wealth, apart from a few small credit-financed and self-occupied apartments, houses, or cars.
This extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of very few continues to grow without countermeasures being taken. For example, the number of millionaires in Germany rose from 2.1 million to 2.8 million between 2019 and 2024, an increase of 30% in just a few years. A similar curve can be seen among billionaires. In 2001, there were 69 billionaires in Germany; by 2022, this number had already risen to 212, and last year there were 249 (including extended families) who own a billion or more.
According to the Global Wealth Report and other studies, "wealth inequality in Germany is higher than in other large Western European countries. For example, the Gini coefficient [it measures inequality: 100% means that all wealth is in one hand, at zero everyone would own the same] for wealth in Germany is 82%, compared to 67% in Italy and 70% in France."
In other rich industrialized countries, a comparable process of concentration and inequality can be observed, despite slight differences. The division of society is increasing everywhere in Western democracies, deliberately set in motion and nourished by the politics of the extreme center.
The regime of inequality has been further expanded in the United States and Great Britain than in Germany. There, neoliberal programs were initiated under former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s, and were implemented particularly rigorously in the U.S. by the business class and the political establishment.
Above all, these were drastic tax cuts for the rich and super-rich, i.e. for capital, and the deregulation of the financial industry, while the real wages (purchasing power adjusted for inflation) of the lower and middle classes fell and the welfare state, on which large sections of the population depended, was forced to retreat.
The U.S. extreme center, both Republicans and Democrats, wanted it that way. The media celebrated the policy as a dynamic growth strategy, even though growth rates and productivity were significantly lower than in the three "golden decades" before.
The direct effects of these neoliberal measures are mind-boggling. A 2020 study by the U.S.-based Rand Corporation shows that the top 1% of income earners in the U.S. have siphoned off $50 trillion (50,000 billion) from the bottom 90% in recent decades.
If the more equitable distribution of the approximately 30-year post-war period had continued, with wages rising in line with productivity, the total annual income of the bottom 90% of American workers in 2018 would have been $2.5 trillion higher, or about 12% of gross domestic product. In other words, the upward redistribution of income has enriched the top 1% by about $50 trillion at the expense of American workers.
Or to put it another way, the average income of a full-time employee in the U.S. in 2020 was $50,000. If wages had kept pace with economic output since the mid-1970s, the average worker's salary would be around $100,000 today.
But politicians and corporations blocked wage increases in the wake of the growing national income and handed out ever greater proportions of it with "reform measures" (i.e., redistribution measures) to the hyper-rich. U.S. labor unions speak of a "trillion-dollar robbery," criticizing an extremely successful "class war from above."
For decades, the extreme center has offered the right something that it continues to deny the left to this day: mobilization platforms for its political proposals.
A similar redistribution from bottom to top has taken place in Germany, albeit not as blatantly as across the Atlantic. Even though there is no comparable study for Germany to that of the Rand Corporation, most Germans would earn significantly more today if it had not been for the neoliberal redistribution policy.
The structural change, or rather the structural break, has had of course far-reaching effects. Studies show that the effects of inequality range from very negative to destructive. Accordingly, inequality generates and promotes economic crises and ecological catastrophes and intensifies conflicts, wars, global injustice, and the plight of refugees. Kate Pickett, professor of epidemiology at the Department of Health Sciences, and Richard Wilkinson, professor at the University of York, have been systematically studying the effects on living standards in rich countries for many years.
Their research, summarized in the books The Spirit Level and The Inner Level, shows that income inequality—the gap between rich and poor—has a strong influence on people's health and well-being, as well as on human capabilities and social cohesion. Inequality causes health and social problems.
This ranges from lower life expectancy and lower levels of education and social mobility to higher levels of violence and mental illness. The scientists argue that inequality hinders the creation of sustainable economies that ensure the well-being of people and the planet.
Above all, inequality undermines solidarity, provision for future generations, and social cohesion, and encourages more and more people to vote for right-wing or even far-right parties—initially as a form of protest, but then increasingly out of conviction.
In general, inequality and isolation lead to selfish, even authoritarian and irrational attitudes that lack solidarity. When a large part of the population sees a tiny minority amassing enormous wealth and bathing in luxury while many others do not know how to make ends meet in the face of skyrocketing rents and prices and a lack of public services, this is toxic for any society.
Instead of addressing these problems and their causes, the parties and the major media have chosen a different strategy to counter the growing dissatisfaction in the country. And that has created a second mobilizing factor for far-right answers, alongside inequality.
In principle, it is the well-known logic of "Divide and Rule" or "Us" against "Them" that allows frustration to be deflected and groups to be set against each other. It is simple but very effective: It is not the hyper-rich, entrepreneurs, and profiteers of the redistribution from bottom to top (the 0.1 or 1% class), including the political extreme center and their accomplices in the media, who are responsible for the conditions and frustration. It is "the others." They take away the prosperity of the Germans and make them dissatisfied.
This has allowed the privileges of those who own the companies and large portions of German wealth, as well as the politics that serve their interests, to be protected from real reform, while also deflecting people's anger at inequality and grievances from the causes of that frustration.
To illustrate this, Guardian columnist Fatma Aydemir cites a joke: A banker, a welfare recipient, and an asylum-seeker are sitting at a table. In front of them are 12 biscuits. The banker takes 11 biscuits and says to the welfare recipient: "Watch out, the refugee wants your biscuit."
In this way, minorities were declared scapegoats, marginalized, and stigmatized as a danger to the lower and middle classes. In the 1990s, after the Yugoslavian wars and the NATO bombings, opinion makers and prominent politicians blamed refugees from the Balkans for social and economic problems and ultimately shredded the right of asylum enshrined in the German constitution.
The same spectacle has been taking place since 2015. In major waves of campaigning, people fleeing from war, persecution, and misery have been presented by the media and politicians as the central threat to the social order.
They are portrayed as illegitimate "social parasites" and ungrateful "misogynists" (see the artificially scandalized "Sodom and Gomorrah" of Cologne during New Year's Eve 2015-2016, of which nothing remained in the investigation committee of the NRW state parliament) or terrorists and knife murderers (see the exaggerated coverage of isolated acts by mostly traumatized asylum-seekers and refugees) who want to snatch the last biscuit from the Germans.
The AfD was finally able to reap the political rewards, the grapes of wrath. In 2015, the party was in a tailspin after a desperate attempt to capitalize on anti-E.U. sentiment. Internal squabbles weakened it more and more, so that in September 2015 it plummeted to 4% in the polls and was on the verge of disappearing into insignificance.
But then came the dramatic turnaround. In the fall of the same year, the party's unstoppable rise began when the extreme center decided to spread a historic moral panic through all channels in the wake of the so-called "refugee crisis" of 2015-2016. A year later, in September 2016, the AfD was at 16% in the polls. Riding the wave of success, it was able to push ahead with political radicalization and spread "Vogelschiss" (bird droppings) theories about the insignificance of the Holocaust.
The AfD did not become what it is today on its own. It was the political class and the mainstream press that served and continue to serve up the "illegal intruders" as the perfect scapegoats for the authoritarian right. Only then did the far-right experience a rapid rise, successfully campaigning on the issue of refugees, who were widely vilified, and winning votes.
It is often claimed that the refugees, their influx, and their numbers have strengthened the right wing. The blame lies with the "migration pressure." But that is not true. As stated in the 2018 annual report of the Mercator Forum Migration and Democracy (Midem) Migration and Populism, it was not the influx of refugees that was the central factor, but the media and political discourse about the crisis.
As long as the reduction of inequality and social grievances are not placed at the top of the political agenda and addressed properly, while the extreme center keeps pursuing right-wing cultural wars as a distraction, rational answers to frustrations will have to swim against a powerful current.
Support for the AfD fell, as already mentioned, to four% in the opinion polls between 2015 and late summer of the same year (from 9% the previous year), while—calculated from 2014—750,000 refugees came to Germany during this time. Support for the AfD was indeed negatively correlated with the sharp increase in the number of refugees in Germany. During this period, more refugees actually led to a decline in support for the AfD.
From October 2015, when the discourse of crisis was launched by politicians and the media, the AfD's poll numbers rose sharply, reaching a preliminary high of 18% in September 2018. During this "AfD growth phase," the number of refugees coming to Germany and the E.U. dropped significantly, so that by the end of 2018, when the AfD reached its peak, almost no refugees were able to enter Germany thanks to the brutal sealing of the country's borders under the leadership of the Merkel government.
Hence, also during the "crisis phase," support for the AfD correlates negatively with the influx of refugees, according to the rule: fewer refugees, more support for the AfD. The actual influx of refugees is obviously not the reason for the success or failure of the AfD. What the AfD has actually benefited from since 2015 has been the political discourse of permanent crisis and alarmist reporting on asylum-seekers and "illegal migration."
Even today, the rise of the AfD is still associated with a conjured up second "refugee crisis." Although asylum-seekers from the southern Mediterranean region make up only a small proportion of those admitted (190,000 compared to over a million Ukrainians in 2020), they are once again the focus of media debate, which, as with the last "refugee crisis," focuses on deportation and strengthening "Fortress Europe"—a "refugee crisis" that in fact was a crisis of the European repulsion regime that was met with even more sealing off.
Meanwhile, the Germans at the bottom of society are also being discredited in order to deflect the frustration of the groups above them, especially the middle classes, onto them (and not upward, onto the culprit of the frustration). Thus, journalists and politicians discredited the unemployed and welfare recipients as "social parasites" and "work-shy" in order to push through the Hartz IV reforms to pressure the unemployed and the dismantling of the welfare state against popular resistance. As surveys show, majorities were against it and wanted a different, more solidarity-based modernization.
And while today the multimillionaires and billionaires in the country can hardly walk because of all their wealth, property, and investment portfolios, more and more money is being put into their pockets, while for those who (due to a lack of jobs, low wages, or exploding rents and prices) have to stay afloat with state support, every euro is questioned. So the political opinion makers argue about a too-high support for the long-term unemployed, the so called "Bürgergeld" (now 563 euros for a single person per month), with the adjustment in recent years barely offsetting inflation, but they don't talk about the constant pampering of millionaires and billionaires.
The mainstream media continue to spread the myth that basically everything is fine and a few Band-Aids here and there would suffice: a euro more minimum wage, for example—which would do no more than compensate for inflation and is often undermined by companies anyway.
But anyone who wants to address the extreme salaries and wealth, the capital gains of investors and companies (often parked in tax havens), is either met with ignorance (see the left-wing demands in the Bundestag) or attacked with economic doomsday scenarios.
And yet another group has become the target of the political establishment. Politicians and journalists have fueled toxic narratives on climate protection. To appease fossil lobbies and slow down the transition to renewable energy, the establishment (or rather, significant parts of it) sabotages the energy transition, denounces calls for immediate action, discredits demonstrators as "eco-terrorists" and presents climate protection as an economic burden and a brake on prosperity, especially for the lower and middle classes. At the same time, wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars are drawn into culture wars.
This makes it easy for the AfD and right-wing forces to present climate policy as an elite project and to portray themselves as guardians of ordinary people, protecting them from the burdens and costs of the energy transition. Similar things could be said about the "wokeness" debate—pushed by conservative sectors of the extreme center, while the resulting defensive reactions in the population could be used by the extreme right for campaigns.
The "political center" has created an extreme social situation, from which only the AfD is profiting in Germany. Its rise is closely linked to the failures of the establishment, which has shifted the overall frustration onto the weak, while the representatives of the political class shed crocodile tears over the popularity and election wins of the AfD. The same is true in other European countries and the United States.
The question remains as to why left-wing solutions have not been able to fill the gap created by the extreme center in the same way as right-wing extremist ones could—although the surprising election result of the Left Party on Sunday shows that this does not have to remain the case. Certainly, mistakes have been made by left-wing parties. But the real reason lies elsewhere. For decades, the extreme center has offered the right something that it continues to deny the left to this day: mobilization platforms for its political proposals.
While AfD talking points such as the threat posed by refugees, an energy transition that is harassing citizens, and a mass indoctrination of wokeness have been flooding the media for decades, a debate on progressive measures that address the social causes of frustration is suppressed.
As the asylum law and the sealing-off regime are tightened ever further and the energy transition is blocked, people continue to wait for the reintroduction of the wealth tax in Germany (suspended in 1997), a real inheritance tax for the hyper-rich, a closure of tax havens and loopholes, the end of destructive subsidies, the regulation of the finance industry, or a revival of the welfare state. If anything, Germans are put off with vague promises before elections. After that, the popular ideas are put on ice or not seriously addressed.
The progressive political climate, as it existed to at least some extent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has been systematically deprived of oxygen ever since—a very significant process that effectively blocked democracy. However, as long as the reduction of inequality and social grievances are not placed at the top of the political agenda and addressed properly, while the extreme center keeps pursuing right-wing cultural wars as a distraction, rational answers to frustrations will have to swim against a powerful current. To the detriment of society, its prosperity, and stability.
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JD Vance's Hypocrisy Was a Trap. Many in Europe Walked Right Into It
By getting European political allies to rationalize or tolerate Trump's attacks on democracy and law, what Vance was doing was carefully setting the stage for an environment where the same things would be rationalized or tolerated here in Europe.
Feb 24, 2025
U.S. Vice President JD Vance threw a molotov cocktail into European politics with his speech in Munich last week where he said that Europe was abandoning “fundamental values” on democratic issues such as free speech and free press. “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” Vance said, “there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people.”
The broader European reaction to Vance’s speech was a mixture of shock, outrage, satisfaction, and glee.
For the outraged, Vance’s hypocrisy was staggering. The man who represented a government that had voided the convictions for all who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in an effort to overturn a democratic election was lecturing Europe about values and democracy. The man who represented a government that has banned research funding based solely on the presence of specific words in the grant applications was lecturing about being offended by words. The man who represented a government that banned a news organization from being in the White House because it used the term “Gulf of Mexico” was lecturing Europe about free press. And, as a cherry on the cake, the man who represented a government whose leader would say that Ukraine was responsible for the Russian invasion was lecturing Europe on geopolitical security.
But there was a second category of responses to Vance’s speech—those who praised it as “refreshing” and important—where his blatant hypocrisy was both rationalized and diminished.
Vance knew he was being a hypocrite and these responses were precisely what he wanted.
Those who said, "Yes, it's hypocritical and I don’t like everything that’s happening in the U.S., but that doesn't invalidate his point” fail to understand that Vance's hypocrisy was the point. It was a conscious tool to undermine the very democratic values those in Europe who support him claim to protect.
Attacking European democracy, while representing a government that undermines democracy, fits perfectly with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon's famous political strategy of "flooding the zone with shit." You pump so much contradictory information into the public sphere that citizens can no longer distinguish truth from lies. Or, they simply don’t have the energy to care. And, in a sea of shit, everything stinks equally and thus everything is of equal value.
Here’s the central problem: if one minute you say “rule of law, democracy and free press are non-negotiable values,” you can’t then then turn around the next minute and say, “I don't like everything that's happening in the U.S., but JD Vance has a point.” If European politicians and opinion-leaders are willing to waive off Vance’s hypocrisy because he made some points with which they agree, what they are saying is that undermining the rule of law, the free press and free speech isn’t actually that important. And that's precisely the morally and ethically relativistic political ecosystem Vance wants to cultivate.
By getting European political allies to rationalize or tolerate Trump's attacks on democracy and law, what Vance was doing was carefully setting the stage for an environment where the same things would be rationalized or tolerated here in Europe. Those who waive off Vance's hypocrisy as secondary to his "main point" encourage the erosion of the very rights they claim to defend.
In short, if undermining democracy in the U.S. is dismissed as a mere rhetorical inconvenience, we set the stage for rationalizing and tolerating the same undermining process in Europe.
The hypocrisy wasn’t a mistake. It was a trap.
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Musk-Backed AfD Loses in Germany, But Party's Growth Seen as 'Warning' to West
"Worryingly and shockingly, they doubled their vote share, partly in thanks to a boost from U.S. special government employee/world's richest man Elon Musk."
Feb 23, 2025
The conservative Christian Democrats party in Germany was the winner of the country's elections on Sunday, with leader Friedrich Merz expected to be the next chancellor, beating the far-right Alternative for Germany.
But with the latter group coming in second place and doubling its vote share—winning 20.6% of the vote in the latest exit polls that were out at 4:00 pm Eastern time—progressives in other Western countries suggested the election results should still serve as an urgent warning for political parties like the U.K. Labour Party and the Democrats in the United States.
"Working-class communities need tangible improvements and hope—not more austerity or pandering to Reform in a race-to-the-bottom on immigration," said British member of Parliament Zarah Sultana, referring to the right-wing British party that purports to be populist and prioritizes anti-immigration policies.
Progressives in the U.S. have pointed to the 2024 election, in which working-class voters from across racial demographics swung toward President Donald Trump, as evidence that Democrats must unequivocally support policies that benefit low- and middle-income people to win elections.
At Drop Site News, James Jackson wrote on Saturday about how Germany's embrace of Staatsräson, making the country's vehement support of Israel—and rejection of the push for Palestinian rights—a "reason of state," helped pave the way for AfD's rise:
Almost all German political parties, alongside local authorities and even cultural institutions have joined together in an alliance reaching from right and far-right through the center and even parts of the left to defend the "Reason of State" and crack down on migration from supposedly antisemitic countries, citizenship for foreigners, and civil liberties such as freedom of speech and assembly and academic freedom.
As a result, recent years have seen drastic repression against solidarity with Palestine in Germany, with criticism of Israel often portrayed as antisemitic. This has obviously only accelerated since Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and Israel's brutal war on Gaza.
[...]
"The nationalist party has questionable interest in protecting Israel, but doing so helps wave away Nazi allegations while also pushing the notion that Jewish life is at risk from imported antisemitism," say Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes in their forthcoming book about German decline, Broken Republik. The idea that antisemitism comes from abroad is "much easier for mainstream Germans to accept than the domestic variety. The assertion, which isn't backed up by official statistics, helps promote an agenda that seeks to clamp down on migration from Muslim countries," fitting right into the AfD's agenda.
In Germany, both the Christian Democrats and Alternative for Germany (AfD) pushed anti-immigration platforms ahead of the election. The issue is a top priority for AfD, which has been classified as a suspected extremist group by German intelligence agencies and which has platformed candidates who have minimized the Holocaust, used Nazi slogans, and been linked to plots to overthrow the government.
The far-right party campaigned largely on claims of threats posed by refugees who have arrived in Germany from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world in recent years.
AfD garnered support from billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, who addressed a rally held by the party days after displaying what appeared to be a Nazi salute at an event for U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump's vice president, JD Vance, also signaled support for AfD this month when he met with its leader, Alice Weidel.
At the Munich Security Conference, Vance admonished German political parties for the "firewall" that prevents them from forming government coalitions with extremist, anti-democracy groups like AfD.
"I expressly reject what U.S. Vice President Vance said at the Munich Security Conference," said current Chancellor Olaf Scholz. "From the experience of National Socialism, the democratic parties in Germany have a common consensus: This is the firewall against extreme right-wing parties."
In the U.S., journalist Mehdi Hasan expressed relief that AfD lost the election.
"But, worryingly and shockingly, they doubled their vote share," he said, "partly in thanks to a boost from U.S. special government employee/world's richest man Elon Musk who has no objection to their far-right extremism."
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