Neo-Nazism is a whole ideology

Yesterday, an election was held in Saxony-Anhalt. Alternative für Deutschland won by a landslide, and we know what lay behind the AfD’s name on the ballot paper. It was probably the most radical political programme drawn up in post-war Germany. It is a document to be read and studied, and not glossed over with the usual lazy terms – populism, protest, anger, sovereignty – because this is not merely a collection of rants. We are faced with a manual for the dismantling of liberal Germany, written in bureaucratic jargon, complete with offices to be created, funds to be scrapped, people to be segregated and institutions to be subjugated.

The draft comprised 156 pages, sixteen chapters and 302 measures. The final version, published after the Magdeburg congress, ran to 258 pages and seventeen chapters. The public face of the campaign is Ulrich Siegmund, a smiling, polished 35-year-old. The mastermind behind the programme is Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, an ideologue of the ‘völkisch’ – that is, ethno-nationalist – wing. Furthermore, the Saxony-Anhalt Landesverband is classified by the regional Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a confirmed far-right extremist organisation. It is not the opposition that is exaggerating: it is the German state itself that is describing the group that aspires to govern.

The first thing to understand is that the programme does not simply propose tougher policies. It proposes a different conception of the state. In the preamble, democracy is reduced to the most dangerously simplistic formula: the majority decides; the minority is entitled to ‘certain’ fundamental rights because one day the majority and the minority might swap places. This is a huge shift. In a constitutional democracy, rights are not a courtesy extended by the victor. They are the barrier that prevents the majority from turning victory into domination. In the AfD’s manifesto, that barrier is being lowered. Those who claim to embody the people are thus preparing to decide who truly belongs to the people.

Everything else stems from this. The programme constructs a hierarchy of people. At the top is the ‘conforming German’: a citizen by descent, loyal to the homeland, part of a family comprising a father, a mother and, ideally, many children. Further down is the ‘assimilable foreigner’, accepted on condition that they abandon their former identity. Further down still are the Muslim, the asylum seeker, the refugee, the Ukrainian, the dual national, and the young person who grew up in Germany but lacks the ‘right’ family background. Not all of them are expelled, of course. But they are not regarded as equals: they are subject to different regimes of suspicion, benefits, surveillance and belonging. It is inequality transformed into administration.

The chapter on the family begins with the ‘extinction of the indigenous population’. It does not simply refer to a falling birth rate: it evokes the disappearance of a people. The solution is a pro-birth and ethnically selective state. The family to be placed at the centre is that consisting of a father, a mother and many children; the equal opportunities officer must be replaced by a family affairs officer; every law must also be assessed on the basis of its effect on birth rates; allowances and benefits are, in many cases, conditional upon at least one parent holding German citizenship. It is the state that chooses which family is to become the biological driving force of the nation. The welfare state is not being dismantled: it is being ethnicised.

But the truly explosive issue is immigration. Here, ‘remigration’ ceases to be a term used only at extremist conferences and becomes a pillar of the state. One hundred million euros are earmarked for a deportation drive, a task force, a remigration commissioner, return escorts instead of integration support workers, more places in detention centres, flights organised by the Land, compulsory work, labour in lieu of financial contributions, means tests and the confiscation of assets to help cover the cost of reception. Accommodation for asylum seekers must be kept away from urban centres; to verify the age of unaccompanied minors, the authorities intend to impose examinations of the teeth, wrist and collarbone. Deportation officials are celebrated as servants of ‘the people and the fatherland’. It is the construction of a public apparatus whose defining mission is to send people away.

The measure that, on its own, would suffice to reveal the nature of the project is the abolition of the constitutional right to asylum and its transformation into a favour granted by the state according to its own political interests. Asylum originated as a right of the persecuted individual against the arbitrariness of power. The AfD wishes to overturn this, turning it into an arbitrary decision by those in power over the persecuted individual. The subject of the right disappears; what remains is the sovereign who assesses whether the presence of the foreigner is to its advantage. It is a legal counter-revolution: no longer ‘you are protected because you are persecuted’, but ‘you may stay if we deem it useful to let you stay’.

The same administrative ruthlessness is being directed at asylum-seekers in churches, which the programme aims to combat by investigating communities and priests and charging them for the costs of deportations that have not been carried out. It is directed at Ukrainians, from whom the government wishes to withdraw the Bürgergeld and even their status as war refugees, arguing that they can seek refuge in western Ukraine. It affects naturalised citizens: a return to the principle of descent, an essay in place of a test, a declaration of loyalty, and the obligation to adopt a new identity and leave the previous one behind. It affects legally resident foreigners, who are obliged to attend courses on German history and culture, with the risk of losing their residence permit in the event of absences. This is not integration. It is forced assimilation, with bureaucracy transformed into a tribunal of the soul.

Islam is declared to be alien to Germany. The programme argues that religious freedom has been inflated to the point of becoming an excessive right and promises to exploit every legal avenue to restrict minarets and the muezzin’s call to prayer. Christianity, by contrast, is regarded as the nation’s historical foundation, though churches are punished when they defend migrants. No distinction is made between lawful and unlawful conduct: the distinction is drawn between a faith considered an integral part of the people and one deemed culturally foreign. Freedom of worship is graded according to the lineage of the religion.

Then there is the school, the place where every authoritarian project seeks to shape its own future. The programme aims to enshrine love of the homeland in the Education Act and the regional constitution, to fly the flag every day, to sing the national anthem, to ban rainbow flags, and to rewrite history syllabuses, giving greater prominence to the years 1813 and 1871. It seeks to limit the number of pupils attending sixth-form colleges to no more than twenty-five per cent of a cohort, to roll back the inclusion of pupils with disabilities, to create special classes for refugee children and to prepare them for their return. It aims to replace compulsory schooling with a general obligation to receive an education, opening the door to home schooling on the grounds that school is a place of indoctrination.

The desired society is transparent: children segregated by origin and background, disabled pupils removed from mainstream classes, pupils selected at an early age, national symbols mandatory, symbols of minority groups prohibited. School no longer serves to create citizens capable of living alongside one another in diversity. It serves to reproduce an identity and to shield children from encountering ideas, families and ways of life deemed to be wrong. This is not conservative education; it is the regimentation of identity.

The university is subjected to the same treatment. Gender studies are to be abolished; postcolonial studies are declared unscientific; student representation is to be scaled back; in their place, a chair in population science and a research institute for critical studies on Islam are to be established. The point is not whether those disciplines are always convincing. The point is who decides. In liberalism, this is determined by scientific debate and academic freedom. In the AfD’s system, it is determined by political power, which decrees which disciplines are science and which are heresy. It is a purge of the university carried out in the name of freedom from ideology.

The cultural chapter is perhaps the most revealing, as it seeks to reshape the German people’s collective memory. Germany is portrayed as a victim of national masochism, paralysed by guilt over Nazism and colonialism. The remedy is a patriotic culture imposed from above. The ‘think modern’ campaign, also linked to the Bauhaus in Dessau, must become ‘think German’. Research into the provenance of works looted during colonialism, Nazism and the communist dictatorship is to have its funding cut where there are no heirs claiming the assets. State-funded art must contribute, above all, to German identity. The regional centre for political education, which is guilty of funding projects against racism and extremism, is to be replaced by an institute for state education and cultural identity.

Here the mask slips. There is no war against state-funded culture: there is a desire to take control of it. The aim is not to free art from politics; it is to change the politics that allocate the funds. They are not challenging indoctrination; they are preparing their own. They are not defending a broader memory; they want to neutralise the memory that makes post-war Germany wary of ethnic nationalism. The Bauhaus is a perfect target because it represents cosmopolitanism, experimentation and cultural fusion: everything that the programme regards as a disease of identity.

The same approach is applied to the media and opposition forces. Public service broadcasting must be reduced to a bare minimum, the treaties governing it terminated, and the licence fee abolished. Radio Corax is named specifically: the government must cut off its funding. The media regulator will be subject to new controls. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution must cease publishing reports on extremist organisations and limit itself to violence, terrorism and espionage. The circular logic is perfect: the party classified as extremist wants to govern the very office that classifies it, change the criteria and abolish the documents that make the classification public.

Security is also being redesigned according to a ‘friend-or-foe’ logic. The police ombudsman must be abolished; Antifa must be treated as a terrorist organisation; voluntary neighbourhood watch schemes must be set up; regarding gun ownership, the programme aims to ensure that being classified politically as an extremist is not sufficient grounds to deny a licence. The idea is consistent: less control over those belonging to the patriotic camp, more coercion against those placed in the enemy camp. The state is not neutral: it is armed culturally even before it is armed materially.

Finally, Russia. The AfD wants an end to energy sanctions, the repair of Nord Stream 1, the use of the intact section of Nord Stream 2 and the normalisation of relations with Moscow. It wants to halt wind power, hinder large-scale solar installations, do away with green hydrogen, retain coal, return to nuclear power, abolish the CO₂ tax, and withdraw from the Green Deal and the Paris Agreement. A regional programme sets out a crystal-clear foreign policy: to break away from the European strategy, weaken support for Ukraine and reopen the Russian energy supply route. This is not merely nostalgia for cheap gas. It is a choice of alignment: less Brussels, less Kyiv, more Moscow.

Many measures cannot be decided by a federal state. However, it would be a mistake to be complacent. A regional government controls schools, curricula, universities, the police, cultural funding, appointments, immigration and broadcasting agreements. It may not be able to carry out the entire revolution, but it can set it in motion. It can make life more difficult for unwelcome individuals, weaken independent institutions, make the culture more conformist, and instil fear in schools. And it can use any conflict with the judiciary as proof that the ‘system’ is preventing the will of the people from being realised. Several proposals would in fact require federal intervention, but education, culture, administration and significant parts of the security apparatus fall directly within the regional sphere.

The most alarming aspect of the programme is not the neutering of stray cats – cited merely to illustrate the level of detail in the text – but its overall structure. It is the way in which one seemingly reasonable measure paves the way for the next, and a social promise makes discrimination more palatable. Free nurseries, hospitals, roads, doctors in rural areas, support for craftspeople: the programme includes all of this too. This is precisely how extremism becomes marketable. It does not arrive in uniform. It arrives with the family allowance, the ministerial form, the school circular, the budget cut, the appointment of the new headteacher.

To call it ‘populism’ would now be a form of denial. This is a völkisch project to take over the state. It seeks to determine who is truly German, which families are ‘normal’, which religions are ‘native’, which disciplines constitute science, which art is worthy, which memory is ‘sound’, which journalism is neutral, which opponents are extremists, and which extremists, in turn, can rewrite the rules of extremism. It seeks to transform citizenship from a shared space into a certificate of conformity, and democracy from a system of checks and balances into the mandate of the majority.

Yesterday, an election was held in Saxony-Anhalt and, whilst awaiting the final results and the formation of the state government, we can say we are familiar with the plan. Democracies are not destroyed solely by a coup d’état. They can be hollowed out through legal means, one power at a time, one funding allocation at a time, one school curriculum at a time. First, it is decided that certain rights are excessive. Then that certain identities are alien. Then that certain institutions are not neutral. Then that some citizens belong less than others. In the end, the ballot paper remains, the ministries remain, the laws remain. But the liberal republic is no more. The Magdeburg Manifesto is the meticulous blueprint for this disappearance.