Is it sufficient to simply label them ‘Nazis’ in order to elicit their presence?

So let’s start by getting to know these Saxon Nazis – before finding out whether ‘Calabria really will be our Saxony’, as Vannacci puts it. I see the photos of Alice Weidel, aged 46, in an elegant blue suit, with a look reminiscent of a darker version of Christine Lagarde, ‘the key to the AfD’s success’. I notice that in every headline, the very first word is always: lesbian. Lesbian everywhere, right at the top, before the party, before the policies, before the 44 per cent. Just imagine that word being used like that to open a piece on Schlein’s candidacy. Weidel has two children, a partner from Sri Lanka who produces films, a PhD from Bayreuth, and a stint at Goldman Sachs on her CV. They might appear to be the perfect Upper East Side couple: the sort who admire Mamdani, drink oat milk coffee, attend Sundance, and dream of a touch of American socialism. Instead, here we have identity, borders, Prussian roots, a war on wind turbines, and a grandfather in the SS – things that happen, if you are German. So we gladly cling to the grandfather, not least because, if we so wish, he brings everything back onto a more traditional track: the ‘Nazi lesbian’ of 1970s porn-Nazi films, Ilsa, the SS Beast, Charlotte Rampling bare-chested in braces, the Susan Sontag of Fascinating Fascism. But this is vintage modernity. Artefacts of the twentieth century. Not the key to understanding the New World.

Weidel is “biologically a lesbian but not queer”, explains Vanity Fair – which, however, expresses, like pretty much everyone else, “astonishment and bewilderment” at someone who embodies “everything the far right has always railed against: immigration, the traditional family, rights for LGBTQIA+ people”. Right. I get it. Yet there is no “astonishment and bewilderment” for that queer world and for the pro-Palestinian feminist rallies that enthusiastically embrace political Islam, defend the hijab and march for Gaza alongside those who, if they could, would pelt those marches with stones. As an outsider, I have been wondering for some time: might it be that by constantly placing identity or sexual fluidity as the first bastion of existence – the first thing we need to know to understand who we are dealing with – we have complicated our lives even further, to the point where we no longer understand anything at all? All the markers are now fluid. Everything is blending together. Even the ‘profile’ of the AfD vote currently doing the rounds – ‘male, blue-collar worker, low level of education’ – read like this seems to have come straight from the electorate of our Italian Communist Party in the 1970s. Perhaps the grid has broken down on all sides, and here we keep it hanging on the wall like a map of a country that no longer exists. In Italy, this is less apparent because the grid still seems to hold. A fluid, lesbian woman leads the left, while a former Folgore general attempts to overtake Meloni on the right. Everything is more by-the-book. We spot Vannacci straight away – chest puffed out, uniform, like a school military drill lesson – he’s a black-and-white relic straight out of an Italian comedy. But what about these others from the AfD? What on earth are they? What holds together a former air freshener salesman turned TikTok star; an Arabist who describes himself as a ‘Prussian Muslim’ and worships Putin; and a former Goldman Sachs PhD holder whose wife was born in Colombo? Not a class, not a background, not a taste. Perhaps not even a vision of Germany. Of course, ‘anti-establishment’ is perhaps a bit of a catch-all term. But are we sure that simply calling them ‘Nazis’ is enough to see them coming?