Democracies at risk when the barriers against anti-Semitism come crashing down

The elections held yesterday in Germany, in the important federal state of Saxony-Anhalt in central-eastern Germany, with a population of around two million, served as a key test to gauge the level of popularity at the ballot box – and not just in the polls – of one of Europe’s most dangerous parties, which in Saxony-Anhalt fielded as its candidate for the leadership of the Land the man whom Der Spiegel has described as Germany’s most dangerous man. The party is the AfD. The candidate was 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, who, like much of the rank and file of this far-right German party, is entirely at ease with slogans that allude to Nazism, with policies that downplay the scale of the Holocaust, and with catchphrases that evoke the era of German round-ups, albeit in a different guise. The AfD’s electoral performance (over 44 per cent) was also significant as a gauge of German anti-populism’s resilience (yesterday’s signs were dire), and it will take some time yet to ascertain whether the AfD’s results in Saxony-Anhalt will have a national impact – at the ballot box, rather than in the polls.

But the fate of the AfD in Germany – its trajectory, its rise – represents an important test to observe when reflecting on another phenomenon that concerns not only the future of Germany but also the future of Europe. A two-sided phenomenon that bears a striking resemblance to a pincer movement and involves two symmetrical forms of extremism that both lead to anti-Semitism.

Germany is one of the European countries where, in recent months, a dual form of anti-Semitism has grown exponentially, fuelled – though obviously not claimed as such – by both the left and the right. The pro-Palestinian left, in Germany and elsewhere, uses anti-Zionism to conceal its own anti-Semitism. The AfD-style right, in Germany and elsewhere, uses the defence of Israel – a defence centred not on love for a democracy under attack but on a passion for a bulwark against the Islamist threat – as a master key to better disguise its ethno-nationalism and its trivialisation of Nazi crimes. The result is that the most extreme fringes of the political spectrum find themselves magically united in undermining the very defences needed to protect a value even more precious than the stability of Saxony-Anhalt: the right of a Jew not to feel guilty for being Jewish.

In 2025, in Germany, incidents classified as motivated by right-wing extremism rose by 43.6 per cent, from 562 to 807. Over the same period, those attributed to the ‘left-wing and anti-imperialist’ spectrum also rose by 43.6 per cent, from 349 to 501. The left, held hostage by the antagonistic rhetoric of pro-Palestinian extremists, fuels anti-Semitism through a now well-established pattern: it pretends to criticise ‘Israel’s actions’ in general terms; then the criticism becomes more subtle and turns into a demonisation of Israel; this demonisation of Israel allows all the alleged sins of the grim, capitalist, globalist, xenophobic and warmongering West; consequently, defending Israel becomes tantamount to defending the evils of the world; the portrayal of the Jewish people as a toxic virus for humanity justifies the normalisation of genocidal chants calling for Israel’s eradication ‘from the river to the sea’, and the resulting ‘reverse’ anti-Zionism becomes the key to fuelling anti-Semitism without paying a price. The history of the AfD, from many points of view, presents us with a crystal-clear example of another, mirror-image drift. At the end of August, the American Jewish Committee presented a lengthy report to explain clearly how the AfD’s stance, behind an apparent closeness to the Jewish people, is constructed in such a way as to normalise anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism within the AfD, the report states, is rarely explicit, but is structurally rooted in the party’s authoritarian, ethno-nationalist and conspiracy-theory-driven worldview, and manifests itself through a precise coded language: historical revisionism, attacks on individual Jews such as George Soros, and suggestive narratives about the dominant global elites. This assessment is further corroborated by the AfD’s election manifesto in Saxony-Anhalt, which sets out a broad nationalist agenda including an expansion of deportations and the transfer of refugees to collective reception centres, the defunding of ‘anti-German art’, less focus on the Nazi past in children’s education, and the lack of scrutiny shown towards party leaders who, in recent years, have repeatedly used Nazi slogans banned in Germany, such as ‘Alles für Deutschland’, described the Holocaust Memorial as a ‘monument of shame’ – Björn Höcke – or dismissed the Nazi regime as mere ‘bird droppings’ in German history – Alexander Gauland. Höcke, leader of the AfD in Thuringia, has also been speaking for years of a ‘Volkstod durch Bevölkerungsaustausch’, a ‘death of the people through population replacement’, and of the need for a ‘large-scale remigration project’.

Traces of the German extremist stranglehold – which we hope will, over time, be met with even more resistance than was shown yesterday in Saxony-Anhalt – can sadly be found across Europe, in all those countries where the struggle for Palestinian rights has turned into a race to demonise the Jewish people (does anyone in Italy spring to mind?). And in all those countries where the subversion of memory and the normalisation of the horrors of fascism and Nazism have allowed the conspiracy-mongering, xenophobic, racist far right to hand the mudslinging machine over to ethno-nationalism (does anyone in Italy spring to your mind too?). Germany is an interesting case study, not only for gauging the level of support for far-right extremism, but also for understanding who, faced with two mirror-image threats, will be able to grasp a truth that is not all that difficult to understand: when the defences against anti-Semitism crumble, it is not only the future of the Jewish people that is at risk—it is the future of our democracies.