Dresden, Germany

It is early evening on a clear day in Dresden, and a neo-Nazi is telling me the Jews had it coming. “They are never going to tell you in history class what the Jews did to Germany in the Weimar Republic,” Konstantin, a clean-shaven and bespectacled 23-year-old, says calmly. I idly wonder if he can tell I’m Jewish.

Konstantin is among hundreds of neo-Nazis from across Europe participating in a march officially commemorating 80 years since the 1945 bombing of Dresden, when up to 25,000 people were killed by Allied air raids on the city. Unofficially, the demonstration relativises Nazi crimes against humanity by presenting the German people as just as much of a victim of World War II as any other.

The march is politically irrelevant: overt neo-Nazism is a losing proposition in modern Germany. But hard-Right politics is having a moment. Barring a freak polling accident, Alternative for Germany (AfD) will finish second in next week’s federal election, capitalising on government failures to deal with mass immigration.

Ten miles away, in the picturesque town of Pirna, AfD MP Steffen Janich is holding an election rally. He is not politically marginal. Germany’s political centre of gravity is shifting towards places like this small town in Saxony, which in 2023 was the first in Germany to elect an AfD mayor.

In the shadow of the medieval town hall, under a brightly painted sundial, Janich tells the audience of middle-aged locals that Germany should stop funding the war in Ukraine, that the Left’s plan for a €15 minimum wage would bankrupt the country, and that the AfD has a plan for mass deportations. By far the longest section, though, is about the inefficiency of wind turbines. “It is madness! We should use every source of energy available to us!” Janich says. The audience applaud wildly, a reminder that the issues which play well in the media are sometimes not those which have most salience on the ground.

I’m approached after the rally by 56-year-old Dirk Mende, who grew up in communist East Germany and trained as a car mechanic. Life was better back then, he says: CEOs made three times more than workers, not 3,000 times more. Now, life is hard. He’s mentally and physically disabled; his pension isn’t enough to live off, so he receives extra money from the government to help pay his rent.

Dirk usually votes for Left-wing parties, including the successor to the East German ruling party, but he’s come to the AfD rally out of curiosity. “I disagree with almost nothing,” he says, adding that most migrants don’t respect German culture and laws.

Disillusionment with how the mainstream parties have dealt with migration comes up in almost every conversation about the AfD. The party has made much of its plan for “remigration”, a term which originated with the white nationalist Identitarian movement and originally referred to mass deportations of non-ethnic Europeans. Early last year, news of an AfD conference planning for remigration so disgusted French Right-wing leader Marine Le Pen that she publicly condemned the German party.

Janich, however, insists there is nothing racist about remigration. He says it means deporting failed asylum seekers and refugees whose home countries are safe to return to. “Skin colour and religion don’t matter to me at all,” he says. He points to a spate of apparent terror attacks committed by migrants. Just two days earlier, an Afghan bodybuilder whose application for asylum had been refused drove into a trade union demonstration in Munich, killing two people and injuring 37 more.

The sense that Germany has reached breaking point over unprecedented levels of immigration is shared across the political spectrum. Last month, Christian Democratic Union leader and favourite to be next chancellor Friedrich Merz sought the AfD’s votes to pass a motion in parliament, a first in postwar history. After the Munich attack, Social Democratic Interior Minister Nancy Faeser highlighted the fact that Germany is the only country which deports people to Afghanistan “despite Taliban rule”. The “firewall” preventing mainstream cooperation with the AfD is holding — for now — but the party has succeeded in shifting the national conversation on immigration to the Right.

At the AfD’s conference this year, delegates chanted “Alice für Deutschland” in support of party leader Alice Weidel, a play on the banned Nazi-era slogan “Alles für Deutschland”. Prominent party figures have previously called for a “180-degree change” in Germany’s approach to historical remembrance. Officially, the AfD distances itself from people like Konstantin. But in practice, the party’s rhetoric and policies give them a political home. He will vote AfD next week.

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Ido Vock is a reporter and editor based in Berlin, specialising in Europe’s politics and economy. He was previously a senior journalist at the BBC and Europe correspondent at the New Statesman.

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