How Germany’s anti-Palestinian crackdowns paved the way for the AfD

Magdeburg, Germany, 6th September 2026. State elections were looming over Germany, an important day for nation’s democratic future. Center-left parties appeared visibly anxious and terrified at the eastern Germany state of Saxony-Anhalt. State media announced the exit poll just after eight in the evening. Alternative for Germany (AfD) has marked historical victory by securing 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony Anhalt, more than double its result five years earlier, and falls three seats sort of governing a German state alone for the first time since 1945.

The AfD gained immense support by adopting the xenophobic and Islamophobic position following the refugee crisis in 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the Germany’s border and allowed more than a million refugees fleeing Syria’s war, and she brilliantly handled the situation by saying, in words that became a slogan and then a target, ‘wir schaffen das’, we will manage this. 

The AfD was originally a fringe Euroskeptic party at that time, opposing the euro far more than immigration. But within a year it has transformed its entire manifesto, and didn’t look back.

The party’s entire modern identity, it’s rhetoric of cultural alienness, and arguments to preserve Germany’s cultural heritage, preserving ethnicity based on bloodline, presenting Islam as a civilizational and existential threat, signifies the return of political horrors that were suppressed by post-WWII liberal democracy and the Bretton Woods Institutions. 

To understand this dynamic, we must first recognize that the German state policy is guided by a doctrine of Staatsräson (reason of state), an old political concept going back to Machiavelli and German statecraft. Modernly, this doctrine mentions that ‘protecting the security and existence of the State of Israel is a non-negotiable, fundamental pillar of Germany’s post-WWII identity’. Consequently, since 2015, and peaking drastically in 2023 after Hamas attack, pro-Palestinian solidarity has been considered an attack of Germany’s core post-war understanding. In this atmosphere, elements of AfD, most notably its co-leader Alice Weidel have deliberately built an image of an internationally defender of an Isreal and Jewish life to mask their nativist agenda. While this positioning has sparked internal rifts, with co-leader Tino Chrupalla criticising the state’s ‘one-sided’ pro-Israel stance, the party’s dominant faction successfully exploits Staatsräson to justify their broader Islamophobic campaigns.

According to researchers, the party’s manoeuvre is entirely instrumental. AfD doesn’t genuinely care about the state of Isreal; instead, the point to use ‘we support Isreal’ is proof that party cannot possibly be antisemitic, which then frees it to attack Muslim and Arab migrants without that attack being read as bigotry at all. 

READ: Germany approves nearly $930M in arms exports to Israel amid Gaza genocide

Surprisingly, Party even runs an internal group called Juden in der AfD, Jews in the AfD, largely built around Russian-speaking people Jewish immigrants, used explicitly as evidence that the party welcomes Jews. Scholars who track it describe its actual function as reputation laundering rather than representation. 

To comprehensively trace the anti-Palestinian crackdowns that AfD rode a wave by installing state-sponsored authoritarianism and paved the electoral breakthrough, like the one in Saxony-Anhalt, it helps us to understand the different loop between mainstream government and far-right exploitation. 

Alternative for Germany (AfD), has adopted a vastly different approach than traditional European neo-Nazi factions. Rather than hiding their motives behind illegal symbols, they heavily integrated staunchly pro-Isreal rhetoric, and used the post-WWII memory as a socio-political tool for their party’s campaigns. 

The AfD relies on two primary strategies to capitalise on these state-enforced crackdown: the first is ‘the Lesser-Evil Strategy’ through which the party attempt to shed the neo-Nazi identity and portray themselves an alternative for voters for their cultural significance and historical revival.

Secondly, they employ weaponised Philo-Semitism, they utilise the support for Isreal as a shield. It allows them to argue that their hostility is not driven by racial supremacy, but driven from the desire to protect Germany from what they label ‘imported anti-Semitic or Islamist elements’ from Arab and Muslims demographics. 

Most importantly, for years, Germany’s mainstream parties maintained a strict ‘firewall’ (Brandmauer) against AfD, signaling that their political ideas and leadership were an existential threat to German democratic discourse and liberal policies of European Union, which were forged in the wake of the Holocaust and the Horrors of WWII. Several political activists in Europe fears the broader revival of these factions, pointing to the rise of National Rally (RN) in France, and the Brothers of Italy (FdI) a party founded in 2012 whose roots trace right back to the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), whose members maintained a close ties with Benito Mussolini. Crucially, German’s domestic Intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) classified the AfD’s regional chapter in Saxony-Anhalt as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization. 

Furthermore, centrist parties passed sweeping, restrictive laws between 2024 and 2026 to curb pro-Palestine activism. The AfD exactly took these laws to validate them in to their Remigration platforms. For instance, the 2024 Citizenship Act passed by the ruling centrist coalition, ideological requirements to the naturalization process, effectively turning an alignment with Germany’s pro-Israel state doctrine into a strict precondition for citizenship. Which created a space to revoke the passports based on political speech. Concurrently, the coalition also passed the Residence Act crackdowns that issues the order to deport the foreign students and activists from UK, USA and Europe citizens for participating in peaceful protests. 

READ: Germany asks ICJ to dismiss Nicaragua case over support for Israel

Apart from these legislative shifts, Germany’s centrist government dramatically expanded the powers of the police, setting dangerous precedents for civil liberties. Therefore, the AfD inherits a populace that is already desensitised to police overreach and state censorship. 

All these German anti-Palentinain crackdowns paved the way for AfD to validate its manifesto and core ideology, which are against the liberal notion of European democracy. This includes the radical concept of Remigration, climate-change denial, and a revisionist overhauling of history, that explicitly demands ‘more Bismark and less Hitler’ to diminish post-war Holocaust remembrance.

Additionally, it demands to abolish public broadcasting because AfD considers public broadcasting as an existential threat. It represents a deeply concerning crisis for the future of democratic stability. 

AfD is deeply Euroskeptic and anti-globalist party, demanding an isolationist approach to international alliances. Vehemently anti-EU, the party opposes the EU monopoly and argues to leave it and withdraw from Euro currency entirely. Interestingly, the party maintains positive posture to Russia and demands to an immediate end to energy sanctions on Russian oil and specifies that German schools should introduce Russian language courses into their curricula.

The tectonic victory of the AfD has sent shockwaves far beyond the German’s borders, marking an unprecedented level of far-right electoral success not seen since 1945. Many observers from UK and wider Europe have called this shift as a dark phase for European democracy. In this global turmoil, European nations must maintain their commitment to globalist and liberal, by welcoming refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers, as vital humanitarian elements that strengthened the societies rather than weaken them. 

Germany must recognise this structural threat, which the AfD is actively trying to normalize against Muslim and Arab migrants. This reality became undeniable on election night when the defeated incumbent Premier, Sven Schulze, conceded by admitting, “Some say this is a dark day… I say that this is democracy.” Ulrich Siegmund and the AfD immediately capitalized on the moment, celebrating the landslide victory as a reflection of true democracy in action. 

OPINION: The economics behind wars

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.