The day before the German election, I was sobbing uncontrollably over a video that my German family sent me. It shows a table on a sidewalk, set with pretty porcelain and a sign “Feel like coffee like at Grandma’s?” As passersby sit down, a young man with a guitar carefully pours a cup and offers cream and sugar. Then he sings: “Oma, you’ve been gone a while, but I remember how you’d sit down at our kitchen table and say ‘Never again is now.’”
The viral video, created by a Hamburg singer as part of a day of action against the extreme right, is a little corny. It’s definitely part of the “remembrance culture” that some sneer at. But for, I dare say, anyone who grew up in Germany somewhere between the 1950s and 2000s, it’s a gut punch. The grandmother in the song would have been, give or take, my dad’s generation—someone who was a child during the Nazi era, maybe didn’t talk about it much, but when they did, had this to say: Never, ever, ever again.
Right now, even as we mourn the last of those who remember the Third Reich and the Holocaust, Germany and other countries are electing parties that are, at the very most generous, fascist-adjacent. Twenty percent of Germans voted for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Sunday’s election, twice as many as did so four years ago. That’s the gut punch part.
But tears are not going to get us out of here. So what will? From my perch here in the US—where I arrived decades ago, thinking that having grown up in a country that experienced fascism was never going to be relevant again—here are a couple of thoughts on what we might learn from the German election.
1: Multiparty democracy is a mess, but it has one big plus: It creates options for people who are mad at the status quo. The German campaign echoed a lot of Trump v. Harris 2024: Immigration and inflation were the drivers, and underneath that was the discontent with “those in charge” that has been a theme in virtually every recent election in the West. But unlike Americans, Germans who wanted to send a message to a government they didn’t like had options.
2: One of those options—but only one—was the AfD. Call them the Make Germany Great Again movement, but unlike MAGA they were not able to take over one of the dominant parties. They had to create their own. The AfD is where you’ll find traditional conservatives who’ve been radicalized, people who were always radical but couldn’t say so in polite society, and people who are simply mad as hell. It’s not a Nazi party: That would be illegal in Germany, and politically nonviable too, at least for now. But the AfD absolutely has created a space for fascist-adjacent politics and ideas, from forced “remigration” of immigrants including those with German citizenship, to rehabbing Third Reich slogans and questioning whether SS members were criminals.
3: Twenty percent for the AfD is about exactly what the polls predicted; they’d hoped for 25 percent, which would have been seismic. I can’t help thinking of my dad, who used to say that in any country, 20 percent of voters will vote for the nutbags, if nutbags are on offer. The big problem is when they sweep in a bunch of other folks.
4: But again, those other folks had options. The left-wing party (which has pretty thoroughly repudiated its roots in East Germany’s Communist Party) looks to be landing at close to 9 percent, up from just over 5. The libertarian party was punished for having been part of the unpopular governing coalition, but the new left-populist party BSW—anti-immigration, anti-aid to Ukraine, anti-pronoun, but pro-labor, pro-welfare state, and decidedly anti-Nazi—looks close to making it past the 5-percent threshold that would get it seats in Parliament. Think of BSW as if the Obama-Trump voters had made their own party. It’s a fascinating development and one we might see replicated elsewhere at some point.
5: More parties means more options for forming a non-fascist government. The “firewall” that Germany’s democratic parties have erected against the far right, pledging never to let them govern, has eroded, but it will hold. For now.
So what’s next? To be sure, being the strongest opposition party is the ideal scenario for the far right: They get to demagogue everything the government does and everything it can be blamed for, such as the soaring energy prices caused by its pal Putin and his war in Ukraine. That posture is where the far right is most comfortable (other than complete control). But throwing rocks also has its limits in a country that is divided not along a single line, but along a spectrum. Others, especially the emboldened left party, will challenge the AfD as the voice of protest.
And here’s who else turned out to be less popular than feared: Putin and Elon Musk. Musk, as my colleague Julianne McShane reported, campaigned hard for the AfD, and Putin’s courtship of them may have extended to paying one of its officials. But being the puppet of either an American billionaire or a Russian dictator is not a great look anywhere in Europe.
What should we take away from this for US politics? For one, that people vote in protest for lots of different reasons. It’s a mistake to assume (as Trump and Musk seem to believe, and some in the media too) that a MAGA victory means a MAGA country. America’s two-party system does a lot to mask the differences between voters, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
And just as importantly, small-d democrats were an overwhelming majority in Germany—and they might be here, too. Eighty percent voted for parties that vowed not to make common cause with the far right. That can’t happen in the US in quite the same way because of the far right’s takeover of the GOP. But America’s small-d democratic coalition still exists, and capital-D Democrats might capitalize on that by showing that their tent is big enough. Disagreement is healthy, if you can agree on the most important part—that democracy is about agreeing to disagree.
The next few years will be hard on small-d democrats everywhere. Bad things will continue to happen—maybe another pandemic, almost certainly an economic slowdown, quite possibly more armed conflicts. Demagogues and authoritarians will exploit those things as hard as they can. But 20 percent is about their ceiling, unless they get extraordinarily lucky or democratic forces cave.
So let’s dust ourselves off and get to work. Because never again is now.
