In scarcely more than a year, stabbing attacks on small children have brought political upheaval in three European countries. In November 2023, protesters burned buses and police cars in Dublin after an Algerian-born man knifed three children outside a daycare center, critically injuring a 5-year-old. Last July, when the son of Rwandan migrants murdered three girls, aged 6, 7, and 9, at a Taylor Swift dance party in Southport, dozens of England’s run-down cities erupted in race riots. Mosques were damaged, and a thousand men arrested. And two weeks ago, when a 28-year-old Afghani migrant in the sleepy Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg stabbed to death a 2-year-old boy and a bystander who tried to come to his aid, the convention that has kept German politics relatively decorous and civilized since the defeat of the Nazis began to fall apart. Or so it has seemed to much of the country’s political establishment.
The Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz, favored to win Germany’s national elections later this month, reacted to the killings with a promise to advance a series of hardline anti-immigration measures. “I’m absolutely indifferent to who joins me on this route,” explained Merz. “I will only say: I can go no other way.” With the whole of Germany just now commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Peasant Wars that followed Martin Luther’s calls to reform, the echo of Luther’s own words (“I can do no other”) was probably not an accident. This was a revolution of sorts. Merz was breaking with the European Union’s doctrine of free movement across borders, which has bound all Germany’s parties for decades. And he was welcoming cooperation with a party seen in some quarters as belonging to the radical right: the Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
Elon Musk has gushed over the AfD, which he calls Germany’s “last spark of hope.” In January he livestreamed a long conversation with the party’s leader, Alice Weidel, about everything from overregulation to life on Mars. Long popular in the post-Communist east of the country, the AfD is now the country’s second party, zooming past 20 percent in opinion polls. But its success divides Germany. In the land where National Socialism arose, an elaborate set of laws and customs has been devised to keep parties that are eccentric, revanchist, or nationalist far from power—even at the price of smothering freedom of speech. Part of this system is the Brandmauer, or “firewall”: Respectable parties are not supposed to cooperate with the AfD or to pass any legislation that would require its votes. Extremist parties cannot be allowed to weigh on the political system at all, lest they enter the game of political horse-trading and outsmart the system, as Hitler did. Many German politicians and staffers have embraced the Brandmauer with such fervor that they won’t even wave or nod at AfD members in the office buildings around the Bundestag.
But what appears like civic responsibility to some looks to others like a cartel protecting a political establishment. Merz, whether he meant to or not, has placed squarely on the table the most important question in Europe at the moment: Is the AfD an ordinary populist party, of the sort that has been summoned to power in many Western countries, including the United States? Or is there something special about Germany that should make us worry about Alice Weidel’s AfD in a way that we do not about other populists, such as Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy?