CNN describes the AfD’s campaign, Vision 2026, as clearly aimed at challenging long-held European values. I was struck by Vision 2026’s parallels to the American far-right’s Project 2025, an extreme outline for an America-first reinvention being widely implemented through a slew of executive orders by President Trump. This same rhetoric can be found throughout the AfD’s campaign, with a Germany first mentality throughout its messaging. The populist messaging of the MAGA-right within America and the AfD in America are able to capitalize off of economic concerns.
The AfD’s goal of “shutting down the asylum paradise” for instance, in order to prioritize resources to native-born Germans, may be an increasingly popular option for Germans as they remain in an economic slump mostly driven by rising energy costs and a declining eligible skilled workforce. By minimizing asylum, the AfD argues it can instead offer greater incentives for skilled immigrant laborers. Those rising energy costs, though, for instance, can be directly traced to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine; still, the AfD aligns itself with the asks of the Kremlin as its talking points relating to the on-going war.
The party’s interest in expanding the list of countries that Germany considers safe for migrants to return to does not take into account the destroyed infrastructure many of those countries continue to suffer from, such as Syria after the fall of Assad. This, the AfD hopes, could make housing more affordable for native-born Germans and free up resources to put towards Germans instead of towards supporting refugee migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Syria, and the Ukraine.
Still, the AfD’s demonstrating of wanting to protect its culture, the German language, and reimagine the priorities of its history curriculum away from Holocaust-remembrance and towards German war legends such as Otto van Bismarck highlights how economic prosperity is not at the heart of all of their initiatives. Economic struggles have historically led to scapegoating, including in and famously in Germany (the rise of Hitler and Nazism as a response to the Great Depression). Still, this correlation creates zero convincing causation of scapegoating tactics and nationalist extremism as improving the economic condition of a nation. Brexit, for instance, resulted in British economic collapse as opposed to solving it. That same German isolationist policy summarized by a “Europe of Fatherlands” and a “sovereign Germany” cultivates hatred for refugees that are stuck between an unsafe homeland and a lack of upward mobility opportunities, such as those that the Ukrainian refugees, who have been encouraged to not work, are experiencing.
