He has said that “only the AfD can save Germany”, and argued that one of the party’s co-chairs, Alice Weidel, cannot possibly belong to the same political tradition as Hitler because she is in a same-sex partnership with someone from Sri Lanka.
That has not thwarted the rise of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party with well-exposed neo-Nazi connections and a 20% share – second place – in opinion polls going into federal parliamentary elections later this month.
In 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen was expelled from the party he founded – since renamed Rassemblement National – for claiming the Nazi occupation of France had “not been particularly inhumane”, among other offences.
Germans whose living standards have stagnated, whose bills have gone up and who nurture so many of the other economic and cultural grievances that drove US voters to support Donald Trump, want to make Germany great again.
One poster in last year’s regional elections depicted a young blond couple with one outstretched arm each, either side of three blue-eyed children, under the slogan “we’ll protect your children”.
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