Yes, Elon, the Alternative for Germany Really Is Far-Right

Mainstream failures bear responsibility for the deadly attack in Magdeburg. That’s no excuse for ignoring the flaws of the extremists who seek to supplant them.

Photo by Jan Oblak on Unsplash.

The attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg is deeply tragic. Once again, scores of innocents—including a 9-year old boy—were senselessly murdered. Once again, a nation mourns and grows fearful, forced to wonder whether it is safe to go out to that concert, that football match, or that shop around the corner.

It is also increasingly likely that the attack on the Christmas market is, once again, a failure of German institutions. Since a similar attack on a Christmas market in Berlin—one that felt particularly personal to me since it is located a few hundred yards from my mother’s apartment—the risk of such attacks are well-known. So why did the precautionary measures not prevent a car from plowing through a defenseless crowd of people?

Even more enragingly, it is now clear that Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the alleged attacker, has openly been making threats about perpetrating a mass atrocity on social media for a long time. A number of his acquaintances proactively warned the German authorities about him, begging them to do something, and apparently did not even get a response. Did the German authorities underestimate the danger he posed? Did they even bother to look into these reports?

Finally, Saudi Arabia has supposedly sought to extradite al-Abdulmohsen for serious crimes. There is as of yet little reliable information about the nature or the validity of those claims. It is perfectly possible that they were an attempt by an authoritarian government to silence a critic. But it is also possible that, like many others, al-Abdulmohsen was able to abuse a dysfunctional asylum system to evade responsibility for real crimes. Should he long ago have been expelled from Germany?

Mainstream institutions earn trust by living up to their responsibilities. Protecting innocents from mass slaughter is arguably the most important job a modern state has. If it fails at that task, it is unsurprising—and, yes, right—that many people will ask tough questions. But none of that is an excuse for jumping to conclusions so simplistic that they are simply wrong.

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Al-Abdulmohsen is a Saudi asylum seeker in Germany who apparently attacked a market that has a close symbolic connection with the most important Christian holiday; it is hardly surprising that many people initially assumed that, like the attacker on that Christmas market close to my mother’s apartment, he was a terrorist inspired by extremist Islam. But as more facts emerged, it became evident that this narrative is far too simple.

Al-Abdulmohsen had long ago left Islam. He was active in organizations trying to help young Saudi women find their freedom in the West. On social media, various people speculated that this was all a ruse. One user confidently claimed, without providing any evidence, that al-Abdulmohsen must have been practicing Taqiyya, the art of concealing one’s true faith to sustain or advance Islam in hostile conditions. She was quickly retweeted by the world’s richest man and the owner of arguably the most influential social media platform for politics. “Most people in Europe still think the legacy press is real, when it is pure propaganda,” Elon Musk tweeted. “The atheist angle was a scam to avoid extradition.” But Musk’s claims to the contrary, there is no serious indication that Al-Abdulmohsen used his stated convictions as cover for a secret desire to commit Jihad.

Nor does the official story presented by German authorities—and credulously repeated by mainstream outlets from NBC to the BBC—make much sense. With unusual rapidity, Nancy Faeser, the German Interior Minister, claimed to have figured out the true motivation for the attack: it was, she told the press, Islamophobic. But that is doubly wrong. It implies that anyone who leaves Islam or criticizes practices like the extreme repression of women practiced in Saudi Arabia is in the grips of an irrational phobia. And it wrongly insinuates that al-Abdulmohsen tried to target Muslims rather than a random subsection of Germans.

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The truth about the attacker’s motives, so far as we can surmise, is simply that he has long been in the grip of paranoid delusions, ones which made him act in ways that had some convoluted internal logic but little connection with the real world. He really does appear to be an ex-Muslim—one who had somehow convinced himself that various ex-Muslim organizations were trafficking and exploiting young women. He really did have a deep-seated hatred for Germany—a hatred driven by paranoid fantasies about German authorities secretly doing the bidding of Saudi Arabia. He really does seem to have set out to kill and injure as many Germans as possible—but the goal was neither to kill Christians (as Christians) nor Muslims (as Muslims) but rather to attract attention to his erratic cause.

Schizophrenia is never a complete answer as to why terrorists do what they do. But from what is publicly known at this juncture, it seems likely that, in al-Abdulmohsen’s case, severe mental illness of some sort is an unusually big part of the explanation.

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Musk also jumped to another simple yet wrong conclusion. Going far beyond understandable questions about the failures of established parties and institutions, he has repeatedly tweeted that “Only the AfD can save Germany.” When his support for such an extreme party elicited criticism, he rejected it out of hand: “Obviously NOT far-right,” he commented on a post about Alice Weidel, one of the party’s leaders. “Just common sense policies.” Musk even went so far as to claim that “the AfD policies are identical to those of the US Democratic Party when Obama took office!” Does he have a point?

Many right-wing parties in Europe have moderated over the course of the past decade. The Sweden Democrats have roots in an actual neo-Nazi movement. But while I continue to disagree with plenty of their policies, it is clear that they have now moderated and expelled many of their most radical supporters; the fact that the country’s current center-right government relies on the party’s votes for its majority does not make me fear that Sweden is about to descend into fascism.

The case of Giorgia Meloni is similar. She got her start in the youth organization of a post-fascist movement and is on record defending the legacy of Benito Mussolini. But while she is not nearly as consistent in distancing herself from nostalgia for certain aspects of fascist-era Italy as one would hope, she has clearly rejected the anti-democratic tendencies of her youth. While I have plenty of bones to pick with her government, it is not nearly as extreme as was widely feared when she took office.

There are even reasons to think that the same may prove true if Marine Le Pen wins French presidential elections scheduled for 2027, as many polls now predict she will. Founded by her father, Jean-Marie, the Front National was a deeply racist and antisemitic party that consistently made excuses for the collaborationists who ran the Vichy Regime. But in an attempt to “detoxify” the party’s image, Marine expelled her own father and rebranded it as the National Rally. While it is hard to predict how Le Pen would govern, it is perfectly plausible that she might choose to emulate Meloni.

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All of this has convinced some very eminent political scientists that the danger from far-right movements in Europe has declined. As Sheri Berman, Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University, has written in the pages of Persuasion:

Far from being a sign that democracy is imperiled in Western Europe, the evolution of the Brothers of Italy, the Sweden Democrats, and the French National Rally should make us cautiously optimistic. These parties have come to recognize that in order to win votes and political power they had to move away from their far-right roots, moderate their appeals and policy platforms, and pledge to play by the democratic rules of the game.

When it comes to much of western Europe, Berman’s argument is at least plausible. But the problem—as she herself explicitly recognizes—is that the AfD doesn’t fit that story.

The typical trajectory of successful parties on the populist right is that they start out extreme and moderate over time. That makes the AfD, whose trajectory has been the opposite, a massive outlier. The party started out in 2013 as a moderately eurosceptic movement animated by economics professors who wanted to abolish the Euro. Since then, its comparatively moderate leaders have again and again been driven out by more extreme challengers. In the process, Der Flügel, the party’s most extreme wing, has gone from being a small faction within the movement to its dominant voice.

The AfD’s first de facto leader was Bernd Lucke, a conservative economist who had been a member of Germany’s Christian Democrats before leaving Angela Merkel’s party over his opposition to the Euro. After two years in office marked by growing tensions with more radical recruits to the party, Lucke was displaced by his deputy, Frauke Petry, in 2015. He soon left the party, warning that those who wanted to call in doubt the very legitimacy of parliamentary democracy and favored Russia over the United States now had the upper hand. The AfD, he warned, has “irretrievably fallen into the wrong hands."

During Petry’s short tenure as party leader, the most famous representative of Der Flügel dragged the party even further to the right. Speaking in Dresden, Björn Höcke attacked a famous speech by a former German president which characterized the defeat of the Nazis on the 8th of May 1945 as a national liberation rather than as a catastrophe for the German people. Höcke dwelled at length on the war crimes perpetrated by America and the great historic achievements of the German people, all without saying a single bad word about the Third Reich. He criticized a prominent memorial to the Holocaust in Berlin as a misguided “monument of shame.” And he concluded his speech by calling for a “180 degree turn in how we remember our history.”

Even for Petry, the ensuing scandal was too much. She sought to have Höcke removed from the party. But like her predecessor, she was destined to lose the fight against the extreme wing in her own party. At a party conference in September 2017, Petry was pushed out by Jörg Meuthen and Alexander Gauland. Like Lucke, she wound up leaving the party, complaining that it proved unwilling to reject “outlandish statements.”

Can you guess what happened next? Though Meuthen was seen as being well to the right of Petry, his attempts to limit the influence of the AfD’s most extreme wing quickly made his position untenable. Like his predecessors, he left the party he once led, complaining that it had become hostile to Germany’s constitution and open to totalitarian temptations. The true leader of the party, he said in 2023, was now Björn Höcke.

This detour through the AfD’s various failed leaders and palace coups may seem arcane. But it speaks to the party’s true nature. Most right-wing populist parties in Europe have recognized that they need to make some serious attempt to distance themselves from the extreme right to grow their share of the vote and have a realistic prospect of entering government. In the case of the AfD, the voices that proudly reject that strategy have, again and again, proven to have the upper hand. Le Pen’s decision to dissociate herself from the AfD in the run-up to this year’s European elections—during which the party’s lead candidate, a key Höcke ally, had defended members of the SS—was only the logical consequence.

To be sure, not every AfD politician fits the stereotype of a mouth-breathing reactionary making excuses for the Nazis. Weidel, the comparatively moderate party leader praised by Musk, for example, is a PhD economist who once worked for Goldman Sachs and the Bank of China, speaks fluent Mandarin, and is married to a Swiss woman with roots in Sri Lanka. Some of the party’s positions, from calls for term limits for politicians to a ban on the financing of German mosques by authoritarian countries like Turkey, are perfectly reasonable. It is still imaginable that the AfD may one day follow in the footsteps of other right-wing populist parties across Europe, in part because doing so would likely be in its electoral interest: Though the AfD now polls at 18%, giving it a good chance of becoming the second strongest party in elections for the Bundestag scheduled for February 2025, its share of the vote remains low compared to right-wing populist forces across much of Europe.

But whatever might happen in future has not yet materialized. For now, the center of gravity within the party lies with those who persistently flirt with racism, antisemitism and nostalgia for the Third Reich. Meanwhile, the “moderates” in the party have learned their lesson from the fate shared by Lucke, Petry and Meuthen: Unless they want to be driven out, they must not criticize the extremists and fanatics in their own ranks.

So, yes, Elon: the AfD is definitely far-right.

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Musk loves to claim that “X is the media now.” But both in the case of media outlets and in the case of political parties two things can be true at the same time: Incumbents are deeply, infuriatingly flawed. And the challengers to them are often even worse.

For the most part, my own takeaway from this is to do the hard work of reforming incumbent institutions. We shouldn’t cheer for the downfall of moderate political parties or for mainstream media outlets to go bankrupt. Rather, we should demand that moderate political parties do a better job of fixing serious problems and responding to the views of voters. Similarly, we should push and prod publications like the New York Times until its journalists once again live up to the virtues to which members of their guild have traditionally aspired.

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That is not the only legitimate strategy. There is also a good case for pouring energy into creating political and journalistic alternatives to the mainstream. Perhaps, new and better institutions can supplant old ones—or perhaps the new alternatives can at least create the competition that will force incumbents to course-correct. (That, as it happens, was part of Persuasion’s founding mission.)

But all such efforts will fail if they are not grounded in reality. Credulously boosting false claims about the true motivation of murderous terrorists is not going to fix anything. And nor is pretending that one of the most extreme political parties in western Europe shares its ideology with Barack Obama.