Not Every Fake Has to Be Wrong

The poster looked real. Coca-Cola’s Christmas aesthetic—the red, the soft nostalgic warmth—with a line of copy across it: Für eine besinnliche Zeit—Sag’ Nein zur AfD! "For a peaceful season—Say no to the AfD." It circulated on Twitter in early December 2018 and landed with the specific satisfaction of something that should exist, whether or not it actually does.

It was fake, of course. The AfD—Germany’s far-right party, the one that had spent years normalizing open racism as an electoral strategy—was not going to get the Coca-Cola treatment. Large multinationals watch these currents carefully and generally wait until the outcome is no longer in doubt before they take a side. That’s the calculus: you don’t spend your brand equity on a fight you might not win.

The poster came from the AfDentskalender—an advent calendar of activist actions organized by anti-racist groups, one provocation per day through December, all aimed at making the Christmas season slightly less comfortable for people who think the problem is immigration and not the people angry about it. Twenty-four doors, twenty-four disruptions.

The best detail was the response from Coca-Cola’s Director of Public Affairs & Communications in Germany, Patrick Kammerer, who tweeted about it: Not every fake has to be wrong. Clean, noncommittal, and unmistakably pointed. They did not sue. They did not deny hard. They just let it stand there. Not every fake has to be wrong.