What They Said

Every quote on Wir sind AfD—"We Are the AfD"—is real. Not paraphrased, not editorialized. Actual statements from actual politicians in Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s far-right populist party. It doesn’t matter to the refugee whether he dies at the Greek border or the German one. And: We differ from the NPD primarily through our bourgeois supporter base, not so much through our content—the NPD being Germany’s openly neo-Nazi party, a comparison one of their own members apparently felt comfortable drawing. The site adds no commentary. It doesn’t need to.

Nathan Mattes built and ran it. In 2017, the AfD’s media lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist and threatened to sue for the domain, arguing that using their name in the URL constituted impersonation. They couldn’t challenge the content—the quotes are legally solid—so they went after the address. It was a tactic the party had deployed against other critical voices before, not always successfully but often enough: make criticism expensive, and most people stop.

Mattes had two options. Pay the demanded costs, surrender the domain, and let the site disappear. Or fight it. He chose to fight, backed by a Berlin law firm that gave the case a real chance. What made it worth fighting wasn’t just this one instance. No other party sitting in the Bundestag systematically used legal threats against individual critics the way the AfD did. The chilling effect was the point—not to win every case, but to make the cost of speaking high enough that people weigh whether it’s worth it at all.

There’s something both absurd and clarifying about a political party frightened of its own words being quoted back at it. If the quotes were inaccurate or stripped of context, there’d be grounds on the content itself. There weren’t, because there couldn’t be. What they could do was make one man’s life difficult for having the nerve to maintain a public record. That’s not defamation law. That’s intimidation with a filing fee attached.

The domain is still up.