The right wing takes aim at the EU’s linchpin
Bottom lines up front
- Elites and establishment parties in Europe have been losing ground for more than a decade.
- On September 6, Germany’s right-wing populists may be set for a first step to federal power.
- Europe’s future may depend on the ability of mainstream German parties to set a new course.
Alice Weidel, the right-wing populist leader whom JD Vance met—while declining to meet with Germany’s sitting chancellor—at last year’s Munich Security Conference, had sharp words for US President Donald Trump.
Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was unsettled by the US and Israeli bombing of Iran in the summer of 2025. The party was rattled by US military action against Venezuela on January 3 of this year. But it was the bullying of Europe over Danish territory Greenland that struck the clearest nerve. It led AfD cochair Weidel to complain that the Trump administration has broken its pledge to swear off interfering in the affairs of other countries. Weidel’s cochair Tino Chrupalla denounced American “Wild West methods.”
Greenland touched nerves across the continent, and the populist right was no exception. In France, National Rally leader Jordan Bardella said Europe must respond, and suggested reconsideration of the 2025 Turnberry agreement on US-EU trade. In Britain, Nigel Farage froze, wondering whether Trump’s threats were a bluff. “To use economic threats against the country that’s been considered to be your closest ally for over a hundred years is not the kind of thing we would expect,” Farage’s Reform UK party said in a statement.
Italy’s right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni has long been seen as one of the European leaders closest to Trump. Meloni’s criticism was mild. Milder still were the comments from Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who in an online post shared a map meant to illustrate how close Greenland is to Russia. “The US has a long-term interest in Greenland, it is not just an initiative of Donald Trump now,” chimed in the Czech leader.
By the end of January, though, there was a wrinkle from Robert Fico, Trump’s ally in Bratislava. Slovakia’s prime minister told EU leaders that a recent meeting with Trump had alarmed him. The concern had nothing to do with politics or policy, Greenland or trade ties. Rather, the US president’s state of mind was a shock for Fico. Leaks of the EU debrief had Fico describing the American president’s disposition as “dangerous.” (Fico later denied making the comments, calling them “lies.”)
There were signs of energetic populism on the European left before the COVID-19 pandemic. Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht was an interesting figure.
Wagenknecht began to organize and became a fixture in Germany’s left-wing politics in the early 2010s. In 2018, she helped to establish the left-wing movement Aufstehen (“Stand up”). In October 2023, she formed her own party that represented a fusion of workers’ rights with socialist economics and anti-immigration sentiment. In foreign policy, her BSW party—the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht—was pro-Russian and anti-American.
There were left-right alignments and parallels to political trends in the United States. In the 2016 US presidential primaries, the two candidates that excelled were Trump and Bernie Sanders; one from the left and one from the right, both running hard against elites and the status quo.
Across Europe—and in Germany, to be sure—time would show that the left-wing populists were no match for their right-wing counterparts. Wagenknecht’s party faltered, and last year failed to clear the 5 percent hurdle required to win seats in the Bundestag.
But the new European populism had fairly clear sources of discontent. Topping the agenda of voter concerns? Immigration. From this flowed the rest, including economic anxiety, and increasing concerns about the preservation of tradition, sovereignty, national cohesion and identity.
The new populists cast themselves as decidedly anti-globalist and spoke to those who felt left out and left behind by free trade, by rapid and radical change in technology, and by what they characterized as doctrinaire progressivism in social policy.
Long before Trump became president, voter ties to mainstream parties were loosening, trust in elites was eroding. It had been the same in much of Europe.
In 2017, British journalist and editor David Goodhart proposed a framework for understanding the new populist phenomenon. Goodhart saw an emerging split between two groups. He argued that the new fault line was between those with roots in a specific place or community, who were from “Somewhere” and often religious and socially conservative, and those who could come from “Anywhere.” The Anywheres, for Goodhart, were urban, internationalist, socially liberal, and university educated. They were also the group most suitably positioned to navigate the new era’s challenges.
Britons were nostalgic, Goodhart noted. Surveys showed that an increasing number believed that “people led happier lives in the old days.” One YouGov poll from 2011 found that 60 percent agreed that “Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition, it sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me uncomfortable.”
Britain left the European Union on January 31, 2020. Trump returned to the White House in 2025.
In Prague, Czech billionaire Andrej Babis was back as prime minister in 2025, too. In France, Marine Le Pen and Bardella’s National Rally has become a major political force. And from Italy to Finland, traditional elites are still on the run.
In Hungary, Viktor Orban lost to Tisza, the opposition party led by Peter Magyar—a defector from Orban’s Fidesz—in April 12 parliamentary elections. It’s unclear, however, whether this spells an end to Hungary’s populist moment. European populism is complicated and multifaceted. And the demagoguery associated with it keeps getting traction.
Germany as a linchpin
“Germany holds the key to the fate of the European Union,” said the late philosopher Jürgen Habermas. “So many things in Europe depend on Germany,” says Friedrich Merz. That’s not hubris.
If you want to read trends in European populism, watch Germany—and the AfD. The party started in 2013 focused on economics, driven chiefly by euroskepticism and nostalgic Deutsch Mark nationalism. I have tracked the German far right for years, as president of the Aspen Institute in Berlin and as head of Radio Free Europe, and interviewed party members and leaders from 2018 through 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. There were persistent voter concerns going back to the introduction of a single European currency—that the euro would export German monetary virtue while importing an abundance of monetary vice from weaker, less disciplined economies. The AfD was co-founded by Bernd Lücke, an economist, professor, and businessman.
The party quickly became a Sammelbecken, a “collecting bowl” or hodgepodge of disaffected conservatives worried about the future of the German economy as they grappled as well with rapid and disorienting social and cultural change.
AfD leadership was a hodgepodge, too. There were at the outset fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, nationalists, revisionists, radical rightists, and political opportunists all looking for a home. There were demagogues back then whose actual ideological agenda was not entirely clear.
Nearly a decade ago, I set out over the course of a year to get a grassroots sense of things, a decent snapshot at the time that I’ve been revisiting as the AfD closes in on a once unthinkable prize: winning an absolute majority in a state election.
In eastern Germany, near Leipzig, I spent time over a couple weeks with a policeman elected to the Bundestag, a reasonable law-and-order man, in my view, who witnessed family and friends anxious and uncertain.1This interview, as well as those with the dentist in Dresden, Roland Ermer, and Frauke Petry, was first reported in an article for The American Interest, “The Dresden Diaries,” published January 30, 2018. This was three years after Angela Merkel had opened Germany—a country of 83 million and a bit larger than the US state of Oregon—to some one million refugees from Muslim-majority countries.
In the early months of 2018 in Dresden, capital of the state of Saxony, I took copious notes over dinner with a dentist, a Christian Democratic Union (CDU, Germany’s main center-right party) man voting AfD, feeling bad and defensive about it. “I’m no Nazi,” he insisted. The fellow said he simply felt frustrated. He wanted opportunity for his young daughter to learn traditional German folk songs in school. “No offense,” he told me, but he found American pop music and amalgamated international fare crowding out “Germanness.” He also conceded unease over the influx of foreigners. He used to live in an apartment building in West Germany where on the buzzer at the door “foreign names” now dominate; he struggled to pronounce the names of new neighbors.
I went to AfD rallies. I was mixing with and talking to Goodhart’s Somewheres.
One of the more striking days I spent was with a baker in the small village of Bernsdorf. The time was winter 2018. The fellow who gifted me his time was Roland Ermer, a Meisterbäcker.
Ermer’s grandfather Rudolf, also a baker, hailed from a town in lower Silesia called Lubin, today located in southwestern Poland. After World War II, Rudolf was forced westward, part of the “Vertreibung aus der Heimat” (“expulsion from the homeland”), prominently noted on the Ermer bakery’s website when I visited.
To be sure, there are parts of Germany that remain marinated in history. From Bernsdorf, an hour’s drive southwest takes you to Dresden. Keep driving and you arrive at the Czech town of Terezin, site of the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt, where thousands perished from starvation, and tens of thousands passed through on their way to extermination camps such as Auschwitz. Sudetenland is ninety minutes south.
Ermer, then fifty-three, ran as a candidate for the CDU in elections for the Bundestag. The father of three told me he wanted to get into politics to protect tradition and stability for his family. In my conversations, he appeared kind, amiable, and anxious. The values he cared so deeply about were slipping away.
For his family’s future, Ermer told me he wanted traditional Germany, Heimat. “We’ve seen Kreuzberg,” he said, and we don’t want that here.” Kreuzberg is a predominantly Turkish neighborhood in Berlin. It’s also a buzzy, vibrant scene for artists and students, with plenty of ethic food, bars, and colorful cafe life.
Much like in the United States, for the better part of the past decade, globalism and cosmopolitanism have become targets in Germany’s culture wars. The baker from Bernsdorf was lining up on his side of the field back in 2018.
Even as I shifted westward—I spent time in prosperous Cologne, for example—the roots of discontent were becoming clear.
Across Germany, actually, conflict between the Somewheres and Anywheres has been brewing for some time. It manifests, among other places, in a disconnect between political party elites and voters. Businessman, hotel owner, and political philosopher Werner Peters established a Partei der Nichtwähler—Party of Non-voters—in Cologne in 1998.
Eight years later, in August 2026 the AfD was polling at nearly 25 percent nationally.
Political shifts and roots of radicalism
If this started with legitimate voter grievance and what might be considered a more benign populism, something else was bubbling up. Aggressive, authoritarian populism was around the corner.
During my travels, I had a long cafe lunch in Leipzig with Frauke Petry. With Bernd Lücke, Petry had been an AfD co-founder. Lücke was gone. Petry’s star was rising. (She has since left the party.) She was “konservativ aber anständig”—conservative but respectable—or so the slogan on campaign posters said.
By 2019, Germany’s refugee crisis had become an integration crisis and Petry seized the moment; she transformed the AfD into a fiercely anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party. She pushed a hard line. She suggested at one time that firearms be used to turn back refugees heading for the German border.
Petry called for a ban on minarets in Germany, as she underscored her commitment to what she called true, traditional German values.
Critics and mainstream media saw Petry as a radical. Not at all so, she said to me. Petry and her team had just attended a speech by fellow AfD political Jörn Björn Höcke in Erfurt. That was radicalism, said Petry. On the train back to Leipzig, Petry and staff had agreed: “Höcke is a Nazi.” Boundaries were being stretched. Norms were being broken.
Björn Höcke was soon on trial in a state court in Halle in eastern Germany, charged with using symbols of unconstitutional organizations and ending a speech with a Nazi slogan, “Alles für Deutschland”—“Everything for Germany!” In May 2024, a court fined him $14,000 for using symbols of an unconstitutional organization. The same court convicted him a second time and increased the fine to $18,000 for the speech. Few Germans, up until now at least, have been fans of American-style free speech absolutism. Germany has laws that prohibit publicly denying the Holocaust, displaying swastikas, and making statements in support of Adolf Hitler.
Höcke has made his political career in the east; he’s a high-school teacher from west Germany who has a track record of using language in ways that brushes up against Germany’s strict regulations on political speech, designed to prevent a neo-Nazi party from returning to power. He wants education and culture placed in the hands of the federal government, as the states keep “castrating” the Germans. Höcke accuses the left of “Gleichstaltung,” the Nazi expression for coordinating ideological uniformity.
Höcke was early on talk of the “Lügenpress”—“the lying media” and “Volksveräter”—“traitors of the people,” now ubiquitous in AfD circles. The AfD has radicalized year after year, says Caroline Fetscher, a recently retired essayist and culture writer for the Tagesspiegel in Berlin.
The binary, the existential, and shape of the next Europe
Germany is changing and high-functioning liberal democracy is in trouble.
Watch one particular state this year: the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt has elections in September. The AfD is polling at or just above 40 percent. BSW, the Sahra Wagenknecht party, is polling at 6 percent. Watch for the AfD to form a government in Saxony-Anhalt, perhaps even with an absolute majority.
The AfD in western Germany, where the party is not as strong, is a peculiar hybrid. For one thing, the party is pro-Trump but in spirit in some ways essentially anti-American. German conservatives of a certain stripe have always looked down on what they see as the hedonism, superficiality, and unreliability of the Americans. This goes back to legendary publisher Axel Springer, who, according to Springer’s longtime friend and associate Ernst Cramer, saw the Americans as necessary in the fight against Communism but at the same time a crude and fairly uncultured lot.
The AfD in the east advances proposals of social welfare bent—a €4,000 premium for each baby born; free train and museum tickets for young people, for instance. But then there are also calls from some circles for asylum seekers for to face compulsory work requirements. It’s still a fluid, dynamic moment in the party’s formation with socialist ideas and increasingly extreme nationalist impulses mixing together.
Then there is the subject of Israel and the Jews. Today’s AfD is pro-Israel yet bubbling with anti-Semitism. That is, there’s admiration and respect for the resolve and right-wing bent of the current Israeli government. There’s common cause in that the AfD sees itself as sharing what it perceives to be the Israeli government’s dislike and distrust of Muslims. (Alice Weidel champions free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression, but not when she sees Muslims praying in public at a rest stop off the Autobahn).
But then come muddy waters. AfD leader Alexander Gauland stirred controversy in summer 2018 when he minimized the Holocaust and told members of the AfD’s youth wing that “Hitler and the Nazis are merely a speck of bird poop in context of over one thousand years of successful German history.”
Some AfD politicians mixed in the extreme-right scene and echo Hitler’s language about rootless cosmopolitans controlling German politics and finance. In recent years, multiple German Jewish organizations have issued public appeals warning of anti-Semitic, undemocratic trends in the AfD.
Germany’s next federal elections are scheduled to take place in spring 2029. The conventional wisdom has up until now not fared very well. The AfD will never pass the five percent hurdle to enter the Bundestag, it was once said. Double digits? Hardly. Not so long ago, keen observers were convinced that 15 percent was the ceiling. The party now polls nationally well north of 20 percent, with some commentators viewing the CDU as a party in full retreat.
In 2021 Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the AfD as a “suspected extremist” organization, a designation that permits wiretapping of party members and employment of informants. German law defines an “extremist” organization as a group whose activities are directed against the fundamental structure of Germany’s liberal democracy—rejecting political pluralism and separation of powers.
The AfD disbanded its Young Alternative youth wing last spring and founded as replacement the ostensibly more moderate Generation Germany in November. Were things getting out of hand? Germany’s domestic intelligence service reportedly considered the Young Alternatives “more dangerous” than the party it grew out of.
German authorities track right-wing extremism, left-wing extremism, and Islamist extremism. Right-wing extremism gets characterized as nationalism, antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia. It’s obvious why free-speech advocates, particularly those in the United States who follow a more absolutist philosophy toward speech than those in most of Europe, cry foul. It’s equally clear that, at a minimum, German right-wing populism flirts at a minimum with language, policy ideas, and political culture at odds with political pluralism, tolerance, respect for diversity, and the rule of law.
Will the AfD push healthy patriotism toward malignant nationalism?
Will an empowered and emboldened AfD move to weaken independent courts and the system of democratic checks and balances?
To be sure, the AfD will want to tilt Germany toward Russia and away from the United States. Watch for the Kremlin to continue helping with this evolution through disinformation and financial assistance to nationalists and extremists.
European elites have lessons to learn; mainstream parties have long needed to recalibrate and reset. To take one central issue: Brussels-centric federalism crosses too many lines by the ceding of national sovereignty to supranational institutions. Speaking in early February at the Belgian university KU Leuven, former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi called for a doubling down on European federalism. That’s surely tone deaf.
Can Germany set a new course? Europe may depend on it. Establishment parties will have to rebuild trust with voters. It’s a difficult and by now urgent task.
Germany has three important state elections in the next month: Saxony-Anhalt on September 6 followed by Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin on September 20. The country’s mainstream parties have never looked wobblier, and yet only they can stave off the illiberal populism and political fragmentation that threatens to shake Europe now to its core.
About the author
Jeffrey Gedmin is a writer, teacher, and media executive who holds a PhD in German area studies from Georgetown University. Gedmin is a former president and CEO of Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).
Acknowledgments
This publication and its research were made possible by the generous support of the Smith Richardson Foundation, in accordance with a strict commitment to the Atlantic Council’s intellectual independence policy.
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Image: AfD supporters attend a campaign rally in the town square. (Jan Woitas/dpa via Reuters Connect)