The Fear Merchants
The AfD—Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s far-right populist party—is in the Bundestag. No warm-up, no clichés. They won around thirteen percent in the September 2017 federal election, they now have seats in the German parliament, and they’ll be shaping political discourse here for the next four years. That’s the situation.
Most people can see that this is a problem. Far fewer seem willing to actually understand it—which is, in part, how we got here in the first place. I want to try.
The AfD has no real solutions to national or international problems, and it has neither the intellectual capacity nor any genuine interest in developing them. Anyone who looks past the slogans and watches how the party operates quickly sees it only knows two moves: scandal and irritation. Provoke with something that crosses a line, then immediately frame the backlash as overreaction. Push into the news cycle, generate outrage, let the outrage generate coverage. Repeat until relevant.
Scandal and irritation. Scandal and irritation. Scandal and irritation. That’s the full playbook. It gets them into social media feeds, then into the evening news, then into the heads of people who are too mentally exhausted for complex problems but have just enough political awareness to need a simple enemy. Who wants to think through the diabolical feedback loop of arms exports, wars, and the refugee flows those wars create—when you can just be furious at the Afghan guy with an iPhone who is definitely planning to assault women and steal everyone’s job in the same afternoon?
That’s the actual core of what the AfD does: instead of engaging with interconnected problems that have multiple causes, they reach for one word and hurl it at everything. Refugees. "How do you plan to address the housing shortage?" Refugees are taking our apartments. "What’s your strategy for education?" Refugees are taking our university places. "How do you fix the pension system?" Refugees are taking our money. The question never matters. The answer is always the same.
The NSDAP came to power for the same reason—unemployed and left-behind people found it easier to blame a scapegoat than to examine why they had less money and fewer prospects than they’d had twenty years earlier. Jews. Roma. Anyone. Just not me. The AfD is running identical software on different hardware. The ethnic targets have shifted. The logic hasn’t moved.
The AfD promises people who scroll between Russia Today and afternoon television that it will protect them from the dangers gathering at Germany’s borders. Foreigners. The European Union. The old Allied powers. And more than protection—it promises to reverse time. Back to when things made sense. When work paid properly. When women didn’t argue.
While everyone else calls AfD voters stupid and calls the party neo-Nazis, the party and its supporters see themselves as rescuers of a nation being consumed by outside forces. They feel they’ve given a great deal and gotten nothing back. Shopping streets that used to be full are now empty. Jobs that used to support families no longer do. Schools they remember as good are, in their telling, dominated by foreign children with problems.
For the average AfD voter, Germany has been fracturing for twenty years, and the established parties not only fail to see this as a problem—they actively celebrate themselves for it at every election. Angela Merkel isn’t a capable leader steering the country through global complexity; she’s a traitor deliberately transforming the country they love into something worse and calling it progress.
The problem with this worldview isn’t only that it’s factually wrong—it’s that it’s too simple to be useful. Merkel didn’t make Germany into what it is. The world did. You can’t hide from a planet’s worth of challenges by trusting a party that promises the impossible. And those promises are impossible, no matter how desperately some people want them to be real.
Even if you expelled every foreigner, reintroduced the Deutsche Mark, and built a wall around the country, the nostalgically invented past would not return. You’d lose your status as a wealthy industrial nation and shut yourself out of every development happening in a globalized world. Germany the innovator would become a paranoid, hermetically sealed approximation of North Korea.
In a strange way, the AfD entering parliament now might be the best available outcome. Because now the untouchable underdog—the party that had existed only in talk shows and comment sections and local council chambers—becomes a real institution with real accountability. They can’t just shout from outside anymore. They have to function as a parliamentary party, and that means their complete absence of actual policy will become visible in ways it hasn’t been before.
Consider the alternative: another four years in the political underground, accumulating resentment, poisoning the discourse, arriving in 2021 larger and angrier. Instead they’re in the building with a result that barely clears double figures. That’s containable—if the rest of the political system is intelligent about what comes next.
The first genuinely good news is that the AfD is fundamentally irrelevant to Germany’s actual future. They showed up at the right moment to harvest anxieties that had been artificially inflated and packaged those anxieties into a political form. The one thing distinguishing them from the openly neo-Nazi NPD is marketing clever enough that voting AfD doesn’t require you to consciously think of yourself as a Nazi. That’s an achievement, in the most cynical possible sense.
The second good news is that they can only sustain one fear topic at a time. Their entire political existence right now orbits a single idea: refugees. To expose them as hollow and neutralize them for good, two things need to happen. First: the refugee issue has to recede—somehow, in some form. Second: no new fear topic can emerge over the next four years that they can latch onto and ride.
Defeating the refugee panic means working seriously on its root causes while simultaneously making it comprehensible to ordinary people that Syrians, Afghans, and Moroccans are not responsible for Germany’s economic problems—while also acknowledging that yes, some of them have driven vehicles into crowds, assaulted women, dealt drugs. The category of "refugee" isn’t a monolith, and treating it as one is exactly the trap the AfD needs everyone to step into.
Preventing new fear topics means the democratic parties need to do real, effective politics without compromise. People have to feel—not be told, but actually feel—that their anxieties are being heard and that genuine work is happening on genuine problems, without sliding into the extremist trenches the AfD has dug for themselves.
AfD voters need to understand that the pressures on their lives are connected to global forces, and that hiding behind a wall with your eyes shut restores nothing. It never has. The people who will do well are those who engage intelligently with the direction things are moving—not those who refuse to acknowledge it’s moving at all. You can’t reverse the current of history. You can only help shape it.
Without a new fear to feed on, the AfD will collapse over the next four years and sink back into irrelevance. The far right would be pushed out of the mainstream again—unwelcome for the next twenty, thirty, maybe forty years, until the next crisis generates the next wave of dread and the cycle restarts. At least there’d be a pause from the Nazis.
Get this wrong—keep offering the AfD targets to grow fat and powerful on—and 2021 will bring a fully engorged far-right party that leaves the CDU and SPD behind and throws the country into a political crisis from which recovery is slow and uncertain.
None of the name-calling has gotten us anywhere. Calling them Nazis and calling their voters stupid hasn’t shrunk them; it’s handed them the persecution narrative they thrive on. The next four years are decisive. Every one of us can help reduce their influence—locally, nationally, internationally—by supporting actual solutions that improve people’s real lives, rather than performing disgust at the people who, out of desperation and misdirected anger, voted for monsters. Smart politics, lived and used. Germany in the right direction. Without the AfD. But with AfD voters.