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Germany, in its commendable efforts to prevent any recurrence of or sympathy for its Nazi past, imposes limits on political activity Americans would find appalling. And the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in its beginnings in the 2000s, as Christopher Caldwell explains in First Things, had members and leaders with disturbing views.
Currently, some of its leaders have views many may consider odious, like supporting Russia over Ukraine, but it appears less likely than some leftist European parties to transgress the boundary between criticism of Israel and incitement against Jews.
The traditional parties’ case for isolating the AfD today is based on one issue, the same issue that has enabled the AfD to sprint ahead of the traditional parties in national polls: immigration. As Caldwell explains, “The Sachsen-Anhalt AfD was classified as ‘proven right-wing extremist’ for its ethnic conception of German citizenship.”
The AfD is not the only European party characterized as “far right” for its advocacy of limiting immigration by establishment organs like the London-based Economist and most dominant news organizations on the continent.
The establishment has looked benignly on immigration, including from Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, as an economic boost for a Europe whose low native birth rates have reduced economic growth down toward zero and jeopardized the financing of its generous old-age pension and medical care systems.
Voters have not been persuaded. In Germany, the AfD, though its strength is concentrated in the former East Germany, leads in national polls over the Christian Democrats, who have led the government most of the time since 1949, and the Social Democrats, whose roots go back to the 1880s.
In France, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, though sidelined by an establishment-rigged court ruling for months, leads by wide margins in polls for the first round and runoff in the 2027 presidential election. One issue that may help her: aid for air conditioning, scorned during this hot summer by intellectuals as an American abomination.
In Britain, the newly installed Prime Minister Andy Burnham, boosted by his popularity in Manchester, has seen his party leap ahead of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. But his party, despite its name and history, is still losing many working-class areas and is reliant on support from high-income, high-education, high-immigration metro London.
As for Italy, the fourth most populous European democracy, its Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, initially labeled a far-right fringe candidate, celebrated early this month her achievement of the longest-serving head of government in the republic.
What do Le Pen, Farage and Meloni have in common? Their objections to immigration, and especially Muslim immigration. For which they have some reasonable basis.
In Germany, former Christian Democrat Chancellor Angela Merkel unilaterally opened the doors to more than a million migrants, most of them young men, in 2015, and, to protests, insisted “Wir schaffen das” - “we can handle this.” But as Germany’s foreign-born population has increased from 8.1 million in 2014 to 13.4 million in 2022, violent crime has soared, and immigrants have dragged down high school student test scores.
Nor has the influx of Muslim immigrants spurred economic growth, as Germany’s economy suffers from self-imposed high energy costs, and Chinese competitors threaten its auto industry. The establishment’s economic arguments for high immigration are in shambles.
What I find most puzzling here is the evident feeling of the European establishment - and one might add that of their American counterparts as well - that opposition to mass immigration from culturally dissimilar sources is somehow morally equivalent to the Holocaust.
Good counsel, in my view, comes from the liberal San Francisco-based economist Noah Smith. “Liberalism,” he writes in his Substack, “needs a new philosophy of immigration.”
AfD voters, he argues, with American Trump voters clearly in mind, are not just protesting COVID-19 restrictions or responding to “economic despair,” as some of his liberal confreres have argued. It’s “anger over immigration.”
But liberals need to recognize certain principles, Smith argues. That “migration is not a human right.” That “immigration law is legitimate.” That “immigration to America must be for the benefit of Americans.”