Why the far right is surging all over the world

[BootinUp]

The Nazis were born out of disgust with post-World War I Weimar democracy, led by men furious about both the new government’s weakness and acceptance of the Jewish minority into German society. After Nazism brought Germany to ruin, preventing a reactionary resurgence became one of the central goals of the country’s subsequent leaders.

So it’s all the more extraordinary that in the past few years, Germany’s far right has been on the rise.


In 2015, at the peak of the global refugee crisis, German chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy for those fleeing violence in Syria and elsewhere. In response, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, a Euroskeptic faction without a single seat in Parliament, morphed into a virulently xenophobic force calling for Germany to slam Merkel’s open door shut.

In 2017’s national elections, AfD won 94 seats in the Bundestag, turning it into Germany’s third-largest political party.

Opposing the country’s approach to the migration policy did not, in and of itself, make AfD a threat to German democracy. But over time the party’s behavior has become more and more troubling.

https://www.vox.com/politics/361136/far-right-authoritarianism-germany-reactionary-spirit