Germany Holds Up a Mirror for America

The rise of the AfD, “Alternative for Germany,” now the nation’s most popular political party

On May 2, 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that Germany was “not a democracy, but a tyranny in disguise.” True extremism, he said, lay not in the “popular AfD” but in the “deadly immigration policy of the establishment with open borders, which the AfD rejects.”  Rubio's ...
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Germany Holds Up a Mirror for America

Goodbye Merkel, Hello … Who?

The German election and what’s to come

One thing is clear about the 2021 German election: it is going to be consequential. Long-time chancellor and ostensible champion of democratic values, Angela Merkel, is leaving after 16 years in office. The consequences of this action are still uncertain.   Germany’s electoral system is unique. Voters elect representatives to the German parliament, or Bundestag, and they cast two votes. The first is for who will represent ...
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Goodbye Merkel, Hello … Who?

Ghosts of Weimar

Is factual accuracy even the point when it comes to the discourse of antifascism?

Alexander Yanov, the emigré historian of Russia and Russian nationalism, was critical of major Western approaches towards post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s. He criticized the "devious simplicity" of the Western logic holding that, because a non-market Russia had been the West’s sworn enemy, a free-market Russia would become its partner. ...
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Ghosts of Weimar

How (Not) to React to the Far Right in Germany

On the attempt to respond to the rise of the AfD Party

Even though this result was in line with the last pre-election polls, this success has come as a shock to Germany’s other parties. Since the results were announced, the country’s political and journalistic classes have been engaged in a collective soul-searching to account for the AfD’s rise. A good amount ...
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