THE NEW YORK TIMES:
The populist emphasis on national identity and threats to it, real and imagined, finds a deep response in voters adrift in a world they no longer understand.
Screenshot taken from this NYT article. | Attendees at a rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany party on Saturday in central Schwerin, Germany. Credit: Lisi Niesner/Reuters
The rise of a far-right party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany, represents a skewing of history, fueled by its own, sometimes imaginary vision of the past. It feeds, analysts say, on widespread alienation from a liberal, multicultural, united Germany committed to the memory of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes.
The AfD is now the most popular party nationwide, polls say, close to governing a German state for the first time, and did well again in two more state elections on Sunday. It has benefited from economic and industrial decline and a sense of insecurity, which the party blames on the extensive migration of young Muslims in the last decade.
The party came first in the small eastern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and a good third in Berlin, while the Christian Democratic Union of Chancellor Friedrich Merz did poorly, in what
he himself called “a disaster.” The results will heighten talk of the party’s replacing the unpopular chancellor before the end of his term.
The AfD has thrived on a key element that ties most populist parties together, especially those of the far right: nostalgia for a society and nation lost to time, even if they exist only in gilded memory or fantasy.
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Steven Erlanger | Steven Erlanger, based in Berlin, writes about European security, diplomacy and politics. | Monday, September 21, 2026
