German normies took to the streets last weekend. And for good reason. Their right wing is planning mass deportation of immigrants. So is Donald Trump:
Over the weekend, it seemed a nation’s conscience had stirred into action. In cities across Germany, anti-fascist demonstrators took to the streets, protesting against the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. The spark to the demonstrations came in the form of an investigate report published earlier this month that revealed how AfD members had participated in a November meeting with far-right extremists where they discussed plans to conduct mass deportations should they come to power.
That’s not the wholly fictive scenario it once used to be. The surging AfD is polling at 22 percent — a level of support greater than what each of the three centrist and center-left parties in the country’s ruling coalition currently command. It seems poised to break the “cordon sanitaire” erected around it by Germany’s more mainstream parties that have so far refused to entertain coalition talks with the far-right faction and possibly shoulder its way into power in state elections later this year.
That AfD officials were openly entertaining the idea of forced repatriation of migrants and even some German nationals of foreign origin horrified many in a country with a deep memory of its dark past. By some accounts, more than a million people participated in the anti-AfD protests.
“In Hamburg and Munich, rallies had to be dispersed because significantly more people than expected attended. Aerial images from across the country showed masses of people braving bitter January temperatures to fill city squares and avenues,” reported my colleague Kate Brady. “According to police figures, in Berlin on Sunday, about 100,000 people gathered on the lawns of the Reichstag, which houses Germany’s lower house of parliament.”
An estimated 1.4 million people across Germany gathered over the weekend to protest the far-right Alternative for Germany party. (Video: Naomi Schanen/The Washington Post)
Signs and slogans at the rallies made clear what many Germans believe is at stake. Banners warned of the return of “Nazis” — and marchers summoned the legacy of the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler and his allies seized control via the ballot box. “Everyone, together, against fascism” was the chant in Berlin.
The investigative report by nonprofit research institute Correctiv detailed the extensive private discussions had between AfD members and a coterie of influential right-wing extremists and wealthy business executives at a November meeting in a hotel in Potsdam, outside of Berlin. This included talk of a “remigration” plan that would deport asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights and even “non-assimilated” German citizens.
Martin Sellner, a far-right extremist and leader of the Austrian “Identitarian Movement,” attended the gathering and floated a “master plan” that could even see these deportees sent to an imagined “model state” in North Africa. Whatever the unviability of the proposals, it echoed Nazi deliberations in 1940 to forcibly relocate millions of Jews to Madagascar. Sellner once maintained correspondence with Brenton Tarrant, the white nationalist gunmen who carried out the hideous 2019 killing spree at a set of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
We are on the verge of this happening here too. Ben-Ghiat says that protests like Germany’s are far more effective when they happen before the actions are taken than after. So….