A Far-Right International Is Assaulting Democracy

MAGA and the AfD are united in a struggle against democratic pluralism that transcends national borders. It is an alliance of extremists defined by aggrieved revanchism

By Thomas Zimmer, September 13, 2026

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The party of Neo-Nazis and ethnonationalist extremists is on the rise in Germany - and the President of the United States is delighted. “Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night,” Trump posted on social media (Opens in a new window) after the AfD got almost 44 percent of the vote in a state election in Saxony-Anhalt last week. “THEY ARE ON THE RISE, and not going to take it anymore!”

For once, these were not merely the delusional ramblings of the man in the White House. Trump’s post was entirely in line with the U.S. government’s official position and the core principle that guides American foreign policy. I know this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone at this point, but it remains remarkable and shocking nonetheless: The government of the United States is in the hands of people who openly align with rightwing extremists in Germany. I hope we have not become too cynical or numb to acknowledge how outrageous this is. In fact, U.S. foreign and security policy is now officially built around the idea that America must lead the global struggle against the forces of “globalism,” pluralism, and egalitarianism by intervening on behalf of anti-democratic movements everywhere. All in the name of defending “Western civilization,” of course.

To oppose this emerging white nationalist international, we need to restore an anti-fascist consensus, as clumsy as that may sound, and we need to recommit to a vision of democratic pluralism. The darkest forces of modern history are stirring, and we all know where this ends if we allow them to succeed.

MAGA is all in on the AfD

Since the MAGA movement took power in January 2025, its leaders have made it abundantly clear that they are the allies of rightwing extremism in Germany and across the “West.”

For instance, when news broke in the spring of 2025 that Germany’s domestic intelligence service had decided to officially classify (Opens in a new window) the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” group, MAGA world reacted with outrage. Secretary of Defense Marco Rubio posted a statement on Ex-Twitter (Opens in a new window):

“Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy - it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD - which took second in the recent election - but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes. Germany should reverse course.”

Just a few hours after Rubio’s statement came out, Vice President JD Vance chimed in (Opens in a new window). He wasn’t going to miss this chance to show his disdain for liberal democracy in Europe:

“The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, and by far the most representative of East Germany. Now the bureaucrats try to destroy it. The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt - not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment.”

This was exactly the line Vance had already taken at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, when he declared (Opens in a new window) that the real threat for Europe was not coming from Russia, or any other autocratic regime – it was coming “from within.” The democratic parties in Europe are the real authoritarians, and the authoritarians working to destroy liberal democracy from both within and without are the real democrats.

The enthusiasm for the AfD is not confined to the political leaders of MAGA either. The party’s most famous fan in the MAGA camp is Elon Musk. He really ramped up his support in the runup to Germany’s general election in early 2025, declaring (Opens in a new window) that “Only the AfD can save Germany”; he later elaborated in an op-ed (Opens in a new window) for a German newspaper that the AfD “represents the last vestige of hope for this nation.” Shortly before the election, Musk appeared via video message (Opens in a new window) at an AfD campaign event and told the adoring crowd of German rightwing extremists that “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” Oh, and he had an opinion on how Germany should handle the legacy of the Nazi past and the Holocaust as well: “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

The American Right loves rightwing authoritarians abroad

There is a long tradition on the Right of supporting foreign autocrats, of longingly admiring and emulating rightwing regimes in other countries. It has always been a way for rightwing intellectuals and politicians to affirm and communicate their preferred vision of societal order at home and abroad. They supported apartheid in South Africa as the manifestation of a “natural” racial hierarchy. They adored Franco-Spain as a model of white Chistian patriarchal order. They hailed Mussolini for his “reactionary modernism” and his manliness. And, of course, the original “America First” movement of the 1940s was strongly opposed to going to war with Hitler: Many of the movements’ leaders either supported the Nazis and thought Germany was fighting for a noble cause or were simply anti-anti-Nazi. MAGA explicitly places itself in that political and ideological tradition.

There is also, to be clear, ample precedent for the American government siding with rightwing authoritarians abroad. During the Cold War, the Western superpower certainly preferred a “stable” rightwing regime over anyone deemed insufficiently anti-Communist.

What is happening right now is still different. The Trumpist regime isn’t supporting the AfD out of opportunism, its stance isn’t based on raw power politics or a cynical indifference to who or what the AfD is. MAGA is siding with the AfD because it is a rightwing extremist party - because it is aiming to bring liberal democracy down in Germany. That is the shared goal; liberal democracy is the shared enemy.

AfD is German MAGA

Donald Trump ended his post congratulating the AfD by adding: “MGGA!!” – which one can only assume is supposed to mean “Make Germany Great Again.”

And frankly, approaching the AfD as the German equivalent of MAGA gets us pretty close. They share the same enemies – foreigners, feminists, the “globalists,” the “wokes,” lefties, liberals, communists… it’s all the same to them. Both MAGA and the AfD are defined by a radicalizing sense of grievance and resentment towards a society that has been moving away from them – and by a desire to restore dominance over those they deem lesser. These are movements fueled by the grievance of – predominantly white, male – people who are consumed by a feeling of having been deprived of their rightful place at the top, of being under siege, who demand society be reordered in accordance with their sensibilities.

There is nothing “conservative” about either MAGA or the AfD, certainly not in the colloquial understanding of the term. They don’t want to preserve and conserve. They dream of a radical “counter-revolution” to wipe away the system they despise. They are at war with the very idea of a democratic society of equals, devoted to a fundamentally anti-pluralistic, anti-egalitarian project that is best described as a kind of aggrieved revanchism.

“The Civil Rights Act was the Treaty of Versailles for white people,” MAGA personality Jack Posobiec blurted out (Opens in a new window) in January 2024 (Posobiec’s latest book, Unhumans, in which he declared all liberals, progressives and people on the left to be subhuman enemies, was heartily endorsed by vice-president JD Vance (Opens in a new window), by the way). You couldn’t possibly capture the sentiment that is driving the revanchist project of both MAGA and the AfD any more precisely than this: Equality for people who are not white men is perceived as an outrageous injustice; “We” have been robbed by “Them,” the sinister forces of “leftism”; “We” must reclaim what is rightfully “ours” – not lost territory this time, but status and power; those who are deserving - “real Americans” and “biological Germans” (a term the AfD uses) – must finally restore dominance across all spheres of society, just as “the West” must impose supremacy around the world.

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The ugly face of German rightwing extremism

How bad is the AfD? I’ve been asked this question a lot in interviews with international media since last Sunday’s election. “When you say the party is the political home of rightwing extremism in Germany, what does that actually look like?” I wish the discussion in Germany would center more often on exactly this question instead of sanitizing and normalizing the AfD with talk of “the will of the people” the party supposedly expresses and the “legitimate concerns” it allegedly channels. Because if you care to actually look, what you find is dangerous and grotesque.

At its core, the AfD is defined by an aggressive ethno-nationalist conception of the nation. Germany should be reserved for “biological Germans,” they demand – a category to be distinguished from those who are merely “passport Germans.” Just like MAGA, the AfD doesn’t care about the actual legal status of the people they are targeting. What counts is only the line between those who qualify to be members of the Volk, according to race, ethnicity, religion, and ancestry – and those who can never be accepted as “authentic” Germans, whose status will always be conditional at best.

The AfD therefore demands “remigration” – a term ethno-nationalist extremists everywhere now use to describe the forced mass deportation of millions, something German chancellor Friedrich Merz quite rightly called out as ethnic cleansing (Opens in a new window) this week. At least 10 million people (out of a population of 80 million) the AfD wants to “purge,” perhaps many more. And if you actually listen, these extremists couldn’t be any clearer about the fact that they are envisioning mass violence. This week, Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s leading candidate in the Saxony-Anhalt election it just won, declared in an interview (Opens in a new window) that he supported investing in Germany’s arms industry because “those resources” (he was talking about the weapons it produced) “will later be needed for our remigration and deportation offensive.”

As I wrote in my previous piece, it is certainly correct that not all AfD politicians and officials are Neo-Nazis. The party is best described as a coalition between national-conservative reactionaries and seething extremists (very much including Neo-Nazis). But it is also true that lots of AfD people have displayed an affinity (to use a euphemism) to Neo-Nazi ideology or even have themselves strong ties to Germany’s Neo-Nazi scene, something the party is tolerating and even embracing in increasingly open fashion. A few examples:

In May 2024, the coalition of far-right parties in the European parliament, then called Identity and Democracy (ID) and later reformed and renamed as the “Patriots for Europe”, threw the AfD out. The ID/Patriots for Europe is the home of France’s National Rally (that’s the party of Marine Le Pen), Austria’s far-right FPÖ, and Victor Orbán’s Fidesz party. Not exactly liberal democracy’s loyal allies – but they no longer wanted to tolerate the AfD in their midst. Why? Because the AfD’s lead candidate for the 2024 European parliamentary election, Maximilian Krah, publicly declared we shouldn’t be so quick to judge the actions of… members of the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the SS, which played a key role in the Nazi regime’s genocidal machine. In response, none other than Marine Le Pen declared (Opens in a new window) that “it was urgent to establish a cordon sanitaire” and end all cooperation with the AfD; she demanded “a clean break with this movement.”

In January 2025, the AfD in Karlsruhe, a mid-sized town in the southwest of Germany, printed 30,000 flyers (Opens in a new window) made to look like plane tickets. They were called “Abschiebeticket”: deportation ticket. They were addressed to “illegal immigrants” (the AfD denied targeting foreigners – but people from immigrant communities certainly found them in their mailboxes and alerted police). “Only remigration can still save Germany,” it said on the flyer. This disgusting stunt, which had the support of state party leadership, clearly resembled an infamous Nazi campaign (Opens in a new window): In 1933, the Nazis distributed fake train tickets to Jewish Germans – “free one-way tickets to Jerusalem, no return.”

Compared to other states, the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, where it just received almost 44 percent of the vote, is particularly extreme, its connections into the milieu of organized rightwing extremism are particularly deep (Opens in a new window). Two of its leading officials have a history in the so-called “Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend,” for instance – abbreviated as HDJ, which not coincidentally sounds very much like HJ, the German abbreviation for Hitler Youth. The HDJ has been banned by German authorities because it was explicitly working to train future national-socialist elites whose task it would be to erect a new Nazi state. Another example: A couple of weeks ago the police raided the homes of two AfD politicians who will be members of the state parliament. They are being suspected of continuing a banned Neo-Nazi organization called the “Artgemeinschaft”: Members were devoted to preserving the Aryan race by marrying and “breeding” among fellow “Aryans” only.

Let us make sure to remember: That is the party the American government is actively supporting.

The MAGA-AfD alliance is not without friction

The AfD loves Trump, but they don’t particularly like America. The far right doesn’t exist as a monolithic bloc – not in any one country, and certainly not across national boundaries. There are real frictions. I would assume that Musk and Vance are completely oblivious to the fairly aggressive anti-American sentiment that is pervasive on the German far right. In their interpretation, America is chiefly responsible for destroying Germany’s former glory. When AfD leader Alice Weidel gave an interview to the rightwing magazine The American Conservative (Opens in a new window) in early January 2025, for instance, she bemoaned that “Germans are a defeated people” and emphasized her desire to return Germany to its supposed former glory. When rightwingers like Weidel talk about present-day Germany as a “defeated nation” under siege from nefarious outside forces, she counts America among those foreign enemies. In her interview with The American Conservative, Weidel dreamed of the German people regaining a “spirit of freedom” – which, to her, meant breaking free from the American empire which treated Germany as, in her words, “a slave.”

The AfD is therefore certainly not pro-America – they are pro-MAGA. The front lines in this conflict are not running between countries as much as they are running through them. Most importantly, whatever deep-seated anti-American sentiment the German far right may harbor, what binds them to ethno-nationalist movements elsewhere is a shared hatred of “the Left.” That is the sentiment that defines the political identify of the far right more than anything else. It’s what integrates the different factions. Any affirmation of egalitarian pluralism, any attempt to level discriminatory hierarchies of race, gender, religion, or wealth: That, to the far right, is “the Left.” It is a shared sense of being under siege from these “leftist” forces, of being victimized by the constant onslaught of a “liberal” offensive in all spheres of life that unites them.

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The far-right international wants to defend “Western civilization”

Unfortunately, there is more going on than just congratulatory messages sent to German extremists via Donald Trump’s social media account. The current U.S. government is in the hands of people who believe America should lead the emergent far-right international – and there are forces in and around the State Department working to redefine the U.S. role in the world towards a policy of directly intervening in the domestic political struggle across the “West” on behalf of ethno-nationalist movements and parties like the AfD. They believe America should actively work towards regime change, mobilize its power and resources to bring liberal democracy down. All under the banner of “America First.”

And that is where much of the confusion among international observers seems to stem from: How does a program of “America First” ethno-religious nationalism at home translate into this kind of interventionist foreign policy?

One of the biggest misconceptions of the Trump era has been the notion that “America First” nativism would lead to an anti-interventionist, perhaps even isolationist foreign policy. In fact, we’d be better served by discarding the term “isolationism” when investigating ideas of America’s role in the world on the Right, both past and present.

A much better starting point is to figure out what the Trumpists mean when they assert to be defending “national sovereignty.” That is the key concept defining the Trump regime’s official National Security Strategy (Opens in a new window), published last November. These semi-regularly updated reports are not really “strategies” in a narrow sense: They serve as a public statement about the U.S. government’s key foreign and security concerns, interests, and goals. As such, they are pieces of public diplomacy, targeted at an international audience as much as a domestic one. This makes them very useful as a window into the dominant thinking inside an administration’s foreign policy apparatus.

Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy is obsessed with the threat posed by “globalism,” multiculturalism, the liberal international order, non-white immigration – all supposedly conspiring to undermine America’s “sovereignty” defined as its ability to preserve and defend its authentic essence as a white Christian nation.

There is a long tradition on the Right of defining any sort of international agreement or commitment to a rules-based order as a threat to national “sovereignty.” This hostility towards internationalism or multilateralism, broadly defined, has often been misinterpreted as principled isolationism. The point, however, was never to keep the United States from projecting power abroad or disentangle it from the world: The goal was to preserve “sovereignty” understood as the right to use American power without restraint and to prevent outside forces to exert any kind of influence over U.S. politics and society.

In that sense, the domestic struggle over the extension of the democratic promise was always connected to the conflict over America’s role in the world. On the Right, the skepticism towards multilateral organizations like the United Nations was often grounded in the idea that those organizations would attempt to force their “leftist,” egalitarian, liberal agenda on America – perhaps by forcing the country to adopt universal human rights, including civil rights for Black people – and thereby contribute to America losing what is supposed to be its “authentic” essence as a white Christian nation. MAGA’s extreme hostility towards the European Union as a supposed agent of “globalism” stands in precisely this tradition.

As is the case in so many other areas, the Trumpists stand in continuity with these well-established tendencies on the Right but have radicalized them in specific ways. According to the MAGA foreign policy doctrine, merely fending off those “globalist” threats (by retreating from international treaties or withdrawing from international organizations, for instance) is no longer enough. Just like there is nothing left to “conserve” on the domestic front, necessitating a comprehensive “counter-revolution” against the evil leftism that is, in this understanding, dominating all spheres of life, America must now defend its “sovereignty” as a white Christian nation by actively and aggressively fighting those “globalist” forces around the world and, that is key, by intervening on behalf of ethnonationalist movements and parties everywhere.

In the second Trump presidency, the Trumpists are aggressively presenting this anti-liberal, ethno-nationalist interventionism as a defense of “Western Civilization.” That was the key term, for instance, in Marco Rubio’s programmatic speech (Opens in a new window) at this year’s Munich Security Conference. Compared to Vance’s grim appearance the previous year, Rubio was delivering his message in a more friendly tone; and because he was talking a lot about what supposedly united Western Europe and the United States, many observers in Europe initially misread the speech (perhaps willfully?) as a conciliatory act, a sign that the Trump government remained committed to the “transatlantic community.” But the community Rubio invoked was not one of liberal democratic values, but of a shared heritage of white Christian supremacy. Rubio warned against “mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people,” against “the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike.” According to Rubio, “Western civilization” had been responsible for all that is good in the world, including in the realms of art and culture. It had been gloriously unfolding across the world from the time of Columbus through the middle of the twentieth century. But things took a fateful tun in 1945: “The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings” (makes sense that in this tale, the European colonial empires were good and decolonization was bad). But no more: Rubio called on all those who wanted to help the MAGA regime to reassert Western dominance, to stand up and fight: “This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame.  We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.”

The people who misread Rubio’s speech as conciliatory were quite right to note that he was not describing the United States and Western European countries as antagonists. But that’s because the key fault line, in the Trumpist view of the world, is not between countries, but within countries. It is the struggle between ethnonationalists and “globalists,” between defenders of “Western civilization” and those nasty forces of liberal pluralism that they care about. And in that struggle against the “global liberal project,” as a young MAGA ideologue who had rapidly risen through the ranks in the State Department put it in a tractate (Opens in a new window) published by the State Department in May, the U.S. government wants to lead. The MAGA regime wants to lead the far-right international in this fight against the “aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself” that Western European governments are supposedly pursuing.

And there you have it: A foreign policy agenda that combines white Christian nationalism and “America First” at home with an interventionist policy in defense of “Western Civilization” abroad. Historically speaking, this isn’t exactly a new thing either. There was, for instance, something we might call “fascist internationalism” in the 1930s. The principle was very much the same: Hypernationalist autocracies seeking to collaborate against their enemies, believing themselves to be engaged in a common struggle against “leftist” forces and a global liberal/Jewish/Bolshevik conspiracy.

All is not lost – but the threat is very real

Let us keep things in perspective. The realization that there is an emergent far-right international that is devoted to bringing down liberal democracy must not lead to resignation and cynicism. The existence of far-right networks across national boundaries does not yet itself prove those are actually effective as political tools. Just because Elon Musk is attempting to intervene in domestic politics in Europe does not automatically mean he can propel the extremists to victory (especially since the political system, certainly in Germany, doesn’t allow for big money donors to exert the same level of immediate political power as in the United States). Trump is extremely unpopular across Europe. The fact that JD Vance flew over to Budapest (Opens in a new window) to address the Hungarian people right before the election in the spring is very unlikely to have helped Orbán. Finally, U.S. foreign policy isn’t nearly as coherently focused on the international ethno-nationalist struggle as the ideologues behind the National Security Strategy may desire. Donald Trump is still president. He is certainly on board with the goal of defending white male dominance, and the idea of siding with rightwing authoritarians abroad aligns with his general affinity for autocrats who he admires as strong and powerful. But Trump lacks the consistent interest and discipline to push for any particular ideological program to be systematically implemented. That may be one reason why the vast resources of U.S. power have so far not been mobilized to further the ethnonationalist crusade on a global scale.

And yet, we find ourselves in an acutely dangerous situation – one that requires a democratic response commensurate with the authoritarian challenge. I do not have simple recipes to offer. And I do not subscribe to the school of punditry that likes to pretend “Adopt all my policy preferences and we will be fine” is good advice. What I feel qualified to offer is a plea: We need more than just policy reforms in response, we need a broader idea of the society we want to create to match the right’s vision of the hierarchical ethnostate, and we need a commitment to pluralistic democracy that matches their fury.

Too often, the response from our elected officials and the institutions that are nominally tasked with defending liberal democracy has been meek, hesitant, and reluctant. That is a disaster, because it almost confirms the allegations from the right: that no one really wants to live in a truly pluralistic society of equals, that liberals and progressives are merely pretending, that their commitment to democratic pluralism is shallow and hardly more than empty virtue-signaling, that there is ultimately no such thing as cross-racial and cross-cultural solidarity, that we secretly all crave the comfort and “safety” of a racially, culturally, and religiously homogeneous ethnostate.

We have been asked the question. Now we must answer. Can we find it in ourselves to meet the far-right international’s challenge with strength, conviction, and a proud commitment to a vision of democratic pluralism that is so much grander that what the right is able to imagine?

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