N ot all that long ago, Europe was a beacon of liberal idealism. One memoir recalls it as an era “comfortably saturated with confidence in the unfailing and binding power of tolerance and conciliation”. The economic system seemed obviously preferable to barbarous alternatives. “People honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity,” the author added.
Those words could describe the spirit of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. They were written in the 1930s by Stefan Zweig , reflecting on the optimism of late 19th-century Vienna from the perspective of a Jewish émigr é whose world had been destroyed by murderous nationalism. Zweig took his own life in 1942. He never saw fascism defeated. He couldn’t have imagined a renaissance of liberalism in the second half of the 20th century so complete as to attain a pitch of complacency rivalling the one he remembered from his childhood.
Now momentum is with the nationalists again. Victory for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the region of Saxony-Anhalt over the weekend is not the biggest electoral prize won by a far-right party in Europe in recent years, but it is one of the most shocking because it is Germany. No country had more to learn from history if it wanted to immunise its democracy against extremism. None pursued a more systematic programme of inoculation. The word for it is Vergangenheitsbewältigung – hard to say and tricky to translate, meaning roughly coming to terms with a shameful past.
There is no excuse of ignorance about the AfD’s rise. It is a knowing repudiation of atonement. The party flirts with Nazi imagery and embraces racist definitions of nationhood, seeking to deport Germans whose credentials it sees as biologically improper. It is extreme enough to induce squeamishness in Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally (RN). She has spent years carefully cultivating respectability and is leading the polls ahead of next year’s presidential election. She doesn’t want to jeopardise her mainstream credentials by affinity with it.
That is less of an impediment across the Atlantic. Elon Musk is an AfD fan , deploying his control of X to boost the party’s campaign messages. Last year, the US vice-president, JD Vance, met Alice Weidel, AfD co-leader, during a visit to Munich. There was no space in his diary for Olaf Scholz, then the German chancellor. Clearly, the AfD meets the criteria for endorsement set out in Donald Trump’s national security strategy , which pledges support for “patriotic resistance” movements committed to halting the “civilisational erasure” of Europe by immigration.
In Britain, Nigel Farage could once have assumed entitlement to that status as an early and enthusiastic cheerleader for Trump. But in the competition for Maga accolades, Reform UK has lost ground to parties and people even further to the right – Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain; ultra-nationalist agitator Tommy Robinson; pretty much anyone who can muster a mob of blackshirts or a passing troll who catches Musk’s eye posting racist conspiracy theories online.
27:02 It would be absurd if it wasn’t so effective. “We never fall into the same abyss twice,” writes Éric Vuillard, the French novelist. “But we fall in the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread.”