The AfD’s obsession with the Third Reich is driving a realignment of Europe’s far right

Momentous change is afoot within Europe’s far right. Just as voters across 27 countries prepare to go to the polls in EU elections, a split over the German far right’s allegiance to the Third Reich is driving a realignment.

The far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the European parliament last week expelled the entire Alternative for Germany (AfD) faction from its ranks after a furore involving the leading AfD candidate Maximiian Krah.

The unprecedented move, initiated by Marine Le Pen, was officially a reaction to remarks Krah made in an interview with an Italian newspaper. Asked if his demand that all Germans take pride in their forbears would include those who were in the SS, the Nazi’s main paramilitary force, Krah said that “not all SS were criminals”.

The cordon sanitaire Le Pen called for around the AfD as a result represents a real rift in Europe’s far right camp: between those who affirm, either tacitly or explicitly, a connection to the Third Reich or to fascism, and those who do not; between the old right and the new.

Le Pen’s party, the Rassemblement National (RN), a key member of the ID group, was formerly the Front National, which was co-founded by collaborationists from the Waffen SS’s Division Charlemagne. For more than a decade, she has been trying to detoxify its successor partyof all blatant Nazi associations, especially antisemitism. The aim of Le Pen’s purge, which she called “dédiabolisation”, is to finally become president of France 2027.

Whether the rift between the old right and the new is real, or merely tactical, remains to be seen. The suspicion of mere tactics also hangs over the head of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who seems to actively encourage the ambivalence by nodding to the middle ground some days and to the extreme on others.

One would expect that of all far-right European parties, the Germans would be most cautious when it comes to the Nazi past. Not so. In fact “Melonisation” – catering to the middle ground, appearing to be “pro European”, supporting Ukraine, being kissed on the forehead by US president Joe Biden – has become a dirty word among their rank and file. “People like Le Pen or Meloni, they don’t change France or Italy, they don’t want to seriously stop migration,” one senior AfD politician told me last week. “All they want is to advance their own careers.”

In April, Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD in the state of Thuringia, was fined for uttering the Nazi stormtroopers’ slogan, “Everything for Germany”. The party’s honorary head, former CDU-Conservative Alexander Gauland, famously called the 12 years of Nazi rule “a mere birdshit” in German history. It is like an obsession with them, a political Tourette syndrome. The Nazi past had to be rehabilitated, at whatever cost.

And why wouldn’t it. Until a couple of weeks ago, the AfD seemed to gain strength not despite, but because of its deepening radicalisation. The inability of successive German governments of any stripe, conservative or social democrat, to stem migration in recent years, has no doubt contributed to its rise. According to the AfD narrative, Germany is overwhelmed, both by irregular migration and the violent crime supposedly associated with it. Its schools, community services, and welfare system are all overwhelmed and struggling as a result.

But the Krah case, as well as allegations about corruption by AfD figures and spying for Russia and China, along with the revelations about “remigration” after an ominous meeting in Potsdam, seem to have turned the tide.

While polls at the beginning of the year promised the AfD a vote share of 23%, support now hovers at about 14%. The patriotism of the party that claims to have love for Germany at its core is now called into question. When pretty much everything the AfD has to say about the federal republic in the 75th year of its democratic constitution is filled with disgust, but warm words are found for Putin’s Russia or the Chinese Communist party, voters may find it hard to see the love in any of this.

But this is the puzzle of all the movements belonging to the so-called “New Right”. The promise of this brand had originally been to leave behind the obsessions and insignia of the old right. “The old right is dead,” pronounced the French philosopher Alain de Benoist, one of the most influential thinkers behind the new right in France and in Germany. “It was well deserved. The old right perished from living off its inheritance, its privileges, its memories. It perished from neither having a vision for the future nor a goal.”

For the new right the enemy was no longer the left – whose social politics, style of action and ideas it rather went to great lengths to copy. The enemy of the new right is liberalism, in supposed cahoots with “globalism”, “wokeism” and capitalism. Human rights in the eyes of the new right are an instrument of oppression and imperialism, of creating “one world” that alienates people from their origins.

Adherents of the new right present themselves as intellectually ambitious. Krah himself recently published a book called Politik von Rechts, and aims at presenting himself as “erudite, friendly, elegant”, not as brooding and “bad tempered” as the old. The new right claims to have replaced the racism of its forebears with “ethnopluralism” – all peoples are equal but should live separately. The “remigration” debate brought the hypocrisy of this concept to the fore. Does “ethnicity” end up meaning “whiteness”?

At any rate, the far right stands to gain a much bigger vote in the European parliament elections, which begin on 6 June but in Germany take place on 9 June. The reshuffling initiated by Le Pen could end up lumping her together within a new “super group” with Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party heads up the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). Le Pen suggested as much this week. If it came to pass, it would make them a force to reckon with.

AfD-led Krah, however, is far from beating a humiliated retreat. He might keep a low profile until 9 June. But behind the scenes, Krah has been busy building an alternative group – with extremist parties and figures such as the Dutch Thierry Baudet, or the Bulgarian Kostadin Kostadinov, who have already expressed their solidarity with Krah on social media.

In other words, any triumph of the far right in the June vote might also become the moment of their most visible divide. Whether their liberal opponents will be able to gain from this is another matter.

• Mariam Lau is a political commentator for Die Zeit