The German election results have shown that branding every populist movement as ‘fascist’ is lazy, self-defeating and untrue.
Germany’s latest election result may have sent shockwaves through the ‘left liberal’ political establishment, but was hardly surprising to anyone with any modicum of common sense. Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) collapsed to their worst postwar performance, securing a meagre 16 percent of the vote. Friedrich Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU emerged victorious with 28.6 percent putting him on course to become the next Chancellor. But it was the second-place Alternative for Germany (AfD), with an unprecedented 20 percent, that truly rattled the political and media classes.
Predictably, the reaction was alarmist. Protesters flooded the streets, and Scholz himself called the result “bitter,” an acknowledgment of his own party’s failure but also a not-so-subtle condemnation of the electorate. Liberal commentators quickly reached for their favourite historical parallel: “the return of fascism.” But is this truly what is happening? Or is the AfD’s rise a sign of something far more mundane - an electorate frustrated with a government that has ignored its concerns for too long?
The AfD is routinely cast as a neo-Nazi party, a charge that both its leadership and many of its voters reject. While it is undoubtedly nationalist, conservative and at times inflammatory, to conflate it with the Nazi Party of the 1930s is intellectually dishonest and historically ignorant. The lazy tendency to brand any right-wing movement as “fascist” is not only a rhetorical overreach but also a dangerous one.
For much of the postwar era, Germany’s political class successfully maintained a rigid cordon sanitaire against the far-right. But that strategy only works if the mainstream parties actually address voters’ anxieties. The AfD’s rise is not due to some latent German desire to resurrect the Reich, but rather to legitimate concerns about immigration, economic insecurity and the erosion of national identity. In vast swathes of the former East Germany, where state neglect has bred resentment, the party now commands over 30 percent of the vote.
Many of its supporters do not see themselves as radicals but as ordinary Germans abandoned by a political elite obsessed with abstract ideals rather than everyday realities. Their grievances about crime, integration and economic stagnation are dismissed as bigoted or backwards. The Left’s answer to their discontent is to call them ‘Nazis.’ That’s not just wrong; it’s counterproductive.
The SPD’s catastrophic defeat is emblematic of a broader trend across Europe, where centre-left parties are losing touch with their traditional base. Once the champions of workers and the middle class, they have become preoccupied with progressive social issues that resonate in university seminar rooms but not in working-class neighbourhoods.
Scholz, much like his counterparts in France, Britain and the United States, underestimated the depth of public frustration with mass migration and economic stagnation. His government’s handling of both issues was widely seen as incompetent, and his party paid the price. Meanwhile, the CDU/CSU, despite winning, finds itself at an ideological crossroads. Merz insists he will never govern alongside the AfD, yet his own policies, especially his hardline stance on immigration, overlap significantly with theirs. That reality is unlikely to change, no matter how loudly the political establishment protests.
Germany is not an anomaly. Across the West, right-wing populist movements are making electoral gains, not because of some grand resurgence of fascism, but because liberal democracies are failing to respond to the needs of their citizens. Whether it’s Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France or Donald Trump in the United States, the pattern is the same: voters are rejecting parties that prioritize ideology over pragmatism.
Trump himself was quick to congratulate the CDU’s victory, while drawing parallels to his own movement. In a post on Truth Social, he framed the German election as a rejection of “a lack of common sense agenda,” particularly on energy and immigration.
Across Germany, the AfD capitalized on widespread frustration with energy policies that have left citizens with soaring utility bills and an immigration system that feels increasingly out of control. It is easy to dismiss this discontent as xenophobic or irrational. It is much harder to confront the reality that mainstream parties have done little to address the underlying causes of voter anger.
Branding the AfD and its voters as ‘fascists’ might make some feel morally superior, but it does nothing to solve the problems that led to their rise. If anything, it ensures that they will only grow stronger.
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