September 7, 2026

CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: Why the AfD Wins.

For the past several months, in the course of the Sachsen-Anhalt election, accusations of fascism have been brandished against a candidate who not only wasn’t born when Nazis held power but wasn’t even born when the Berlin Wall came down almost half a century later.

Without a direct emotional link to its darkest days, Germany’s version of democracy—in which certain political parties are constitutionally entitled to encourage a court to ban others—has become too bizarre to maintain. Harald Martenstein, a conservative columnist for Welt and hardly an AfD backer, took part in a debate in Hamburg last winter over whether to ban the AfD, and shocked the audience by contemptuously throwing the question back at his mostly progressive audience. “You know that you are not trying to prevent the Fourth Reich, but only to eliminate your political competition,” Martenstein said. “It would be child’s play to keep the AfD down. All you would have to do is tackle a few problems that are real problems.”

As Melissa Chen tweets, “This is the inevitable result of the mainstream media stretching the label ‘far-right’ until it covered any opinion to the right of Lenin. Once a term is used on sensible opinions on border control, energy policy, crime statistics and school admissions, it just becomes noise and people start resenting the attempts at manipulation. Gay race communism became the only position that was ok to hold.”

To be fair, this isn’t your grandfather’s “far right” party: Why do so many gay men support the AfD?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll