FULL ANALYSIS: “Friendly Faces” of Antisemitism?

Since its founding in 2013, the AfD has rapidly risen from a small anti-Euro protest party to a firmly established and powerful opposition force in the Bundestag. By now, the AfD is the biggest opposition party in national parliament. This development has been accompanied by a now well-documented shift from right-wing populism to far-right extremism (see, among others, Decker 2016; Quent 2019; Rensmann 2018b; Heinze 2022; Weisskircher 2020; Funke 2016; Kopke & Lorenz 2017). Since 2017, the party profile has been characterized by its anti-migration, ethno-nationalist platform—an ideological lens which shapes nearly all policy areas (Rensmann 2018b: 47–53). The frequent use of racist and völkisch (ethnic-nationalist) stereotypes is repeatedly linked to nostalgic nationalist sentiments coupled with antifeminist and anti-modern slogans and provocations. Moreover, rhetoric by AfD leaders is frequently directed against the liberal-democratic system and its constitutional principles.3

The role and presence of antisemitism in the party, however, have so far attracted relatively little attention in political science research. Exceptions include work by Armin Pfahl-Traughber (2017), Ackermann (2017), Grimm & Kahmann (2017), Salzborn (2018a), Tuschling (2021), Khislavski (2024), Dietl (2025) as well as Rensmann (2020a, 2021b, 2022) and Schreiter & Rensmann (2025). It was only after the antisemitic terror attack on the synagogue in Halle on October 9, 2019—and in light of the partly dismissive or even antisemitic reactions by the AfD—that the issue of the AfD’s antisemitism drew public and increased scholarly attention. The attacker ended up killing two non-Jewish Germans because he was unable to enter the synagogue. In response, AfD member of the Bundestag Stephan Brandner, then chairman of the Bundestag’s Legal Affairs Committee, retweeted the question “Why are politicians hanging about mosques and synagogues with candles?” After all, he argued, the victims were “Germans” (implying that Jews are not Germans). Similarly, Roland Ulbrich, an AfD member of the Saxon state parliament, asked: “What is worse, a damaged synagogue door or two dead Germans?” Taras Maygutiak, an AfD city councilor in Offenburg, even suspected a conspiracy to harm the AfD, claiming that the attack had been “staged” (all quotes cited in Krauss 2019). 

 In the following analysis, I will first examine the extent to which verbal antisemitic frames, tropes, and patterns shape the political ideology of the AfD. While the party constantly transgresses the boundaries of what can be said in democratic discourse, its antisemitism still often appears in a modernized or camouflaged form. In part, it will be shown, antisemitic ideology is embedded in the party’s rebellious, rule-breaking behavior. This includes a national-revolutionary worldview that is based on a nostalgically nationalist (Rensmann 2025) opposition to modern democracy, the support for revolutionary violence as well as the use of völkisch vocabulary and even the revival of Nazi slogans. The following sections will examine targeted campaigns by the AfD against prominent Jews as a means to advance antisemitism before I turn to the AfD’s “secondary antisemitism”—a form of antisemitism closely linked to the resistance to Holocaust remembrance and the refusal to accept German historical guilt. Subsequently, I will present findings on antisemitism in the far-right media environment of the AfD and among the party’s voters. Based on these findings, I will finally assess the significance of political antisemitism in the AfD as a whole.

Since the 2017 election platform, the party’s political ideology is characterized by a friend-foe mentality. It is a leitmotif of the AfD’s 2017, 2021, and 2025 election platforms to reduce social conflicts and interest group pluralism to a fundamental antagonism between a homogenized “good and true people,” on the one hand, and on the other, an equally homogenized, hostile “corrupt elite” (vertical antagonism) as well as collective “others,” especially migrants, and a “global elite,” that are allegedly supported by or linked to the “corrupt” domestic elite (horizontal antagonism; Rensmann 2006). The construction of such fundamental antagonisms between a “true” German people vs. entities and collectives alleged to be “enemies of the people”—both within and without—is also typical of modern antisemitism. In such ethno-nationalist imagery of interrelated threats from within and from outside, Jews were traditionally attributed the role of an existential enemy who links the “traitors” on the inside with the enemies from outside. The imagined existential enemy designations typical of antisemitism (Volksverräter—“traitors to the people,” cited in Bender 2020) vis-à-vis a “true” people implicitly—and at times explicitly—correspond to an ethnic construction of the nation that historically excludes Jews and ultimately declares them existential adversaries. Like the global radical right more broadly, the AfD’s construction of global and domestic enemies conspiring against the “good” white ethnic peoples thus directly ties into traditions of modern antisemitism (Rensmann 2004: 75; foundationally Volkov 2000). 

The AfD actively and programmatically promotes the nostalgic image of an ethno-exclusive community that needs to be revived and, in particular, can still be found in those regions of Eastern Germany where until this day virtually no migrants live. This image is historically closely linked to antisemitism. Within this nostalgic image, both immigrants and Jews traditionally do not belong. Supporting this ethno-nationalist ideology, the party invokes ethnic definitions of citizenship and law. Evidence of such ethno-nationalism can be found throughout the party’s platforms since 2017, and are reiterated on all levels of the party, from the rank and file to the party leadership. They are also the ideological backbone nurturing the aggressive demand for the “remigration”—this is, the deportation—of millions of citizens and non-citizens, which is popular throughout the AfD. The concept of “remigration” originated in the right-wing extremist “Identitarian Movement” and became a core issue of the AfD’s 2025 federal election campaign. As early as 2016, North Rhine-Westphalian MP Thomas Röckemann stated: “Contemporary politics must finally muster the strength for political action. It must be prepared to defend what is ‘its own’ and exclude what is ‘foreign.’” The AfD’s influential intellectual Marc Jongen, who after seven years in the German Bundestag was elected to the European Parliament in 2024, has long promoted the full return to the ethno-nationalist “principle of descent” as the foundation of citizenship. Saxony’s AfD chairman Jörg Urban insists that a people can “only preserve unity and freedom if it remains largely homogeneous.” Against the ideological backdrop of a völkisch concept of nationhood, it is not surprising that honorary AfD chairman Alexander Gauland also wanted a German citizen, then-Minister of State Aydan Özoguz, “to be disposed of in Anatolia” (all statements cited in Bender 2020). 

Not surprisingly, then, today’s party leadership, featuring the co-chairpersons Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, also supports and protects the openly far-right and ethnonationalist Der Flügel (“The Wing”) faction led by Björn Höcke, the AfD chairman in Thuringia. The extent to which a völkisch-based “criticism of the system” has defined the party as a whole is evident in the “Erfurt Resolution,” initiated by Björn Höcke and André Poggenburg in March 2015 and co-signed by Alexander Gauland, then honorary chairman of the AfD parliamentary group. This document served as the founding manifesto of the former Der Flügel. It expresses the party’s proximity to racist “bourgeois protest movements” (including PEGIDA), its political agitation against the “betrayal of our country’s interests,” and the “AfD’s commitment to a fundamental political change in Germany.” This change, enacted by “our people,” is supposed to initiate the turn away from “the social experiments of recent decades” such as “gender mainstreaming” and “multiculturalism,” with the AfD being understood as a “resistance movement against the further erosion of Germany’s sovereignty and identity” (all quotations from Der Flügel 2015). 

Under pressure from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Der Flügel was formally dissolved in 2020. Yet its substance not only remained but transformed into the party’s mainstream. Back in 2019, Gauland, the AfD’s intellectual architect, remarked: “Mr. Höcke is not pushing the party to the right. Mr. Höcke is the center of the party” (cited in Schwesinger 2019). Höcke, as I will subsequently show, is the AfD’s most prominent leader who articulates aggressive völkisch fantasies of ethnic cleansing and annihilation and a full-blown national-revolutionary ideology. He also repeatedly uses Nazi slogans. He has been convicted twice for the unauthorized use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations, specifically for deploying the banned SA slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (“Everything for Germany”) at public events. Former Bundestag members Ulrich Oehme and Kay-Uwe Ziegler also used the slogan in 2017 and 2020, respectively (Sternberg 2024). 

As indicated, Höcke openly advocates for ethnic-revolutionary means and goals. In the book Nie zweimal in denselben Fluss (“Never the Same River Twice,” 2018), Höcke emphasizes that “in addition to protecting our national and European external borders,” a “large-scale remigration project” will also be necessary to prevent “our impending Volkstod (‘death of the people’) through population replacement” (Höcke & Hennig 2018: 2164). Here Höcke links his Volkstod fantasy with the “Great Replacement” myth popular within global authoritarian radical right (see below). “There will be no way around a policy of ‘well-tempered cruelty,’ as Peter Sloterdijk called it,” he adds explaining what such “large-scale remigration” will entail (Höcke & Hennig 2018: 216). Höcke believes that many Germans will be willing to rid themselves of moral inhibitions, so that “in the end, there will still be enough members of our people with whom we can open a new chapter of our history. Even if, unfortunately, we will lose a few sections of the population who are too weak or unwilling to resist the ongoing Africanization, Orientalization, and Islamization” (Höcke & Hennig 2018: 257). 

Such national-revolutionary statements, coupled with Höcke’s use of Nazi vocabulary, fundamentally break with the democratic constitutional state and its political culture. The apologia for cruelty appeals to sadistic desires among his followers. The satisfaction of such desires is promised in collective acts of violence. This promise may be closely linked to Höcke’s libidinal casting as “Chancellor of Hearts” (as can be read on posters by Höcke’s admirers), who allegedly gives his love to his “own people” and whose declared willingness to be cruel against others is assumed to win their hearts.  

As said, Höcke’s unapologetically völkisch ideology, embodied in the concept of Volkstod, stands in open contradiction to federal German law and the political system. This conflict is not denied by Höcke, the AfD leader and its most prominent ideologue; rather, it is to be “fundamentally” overcome in a national revolution (rather than reforms) destroying “modernity” and Germany’s modern, multicultural democracy and immigrant society. The “power of renovation” that “we Germans [...] have shown after dramatic downfalls,” such as the “collapse of 1945,” Höcke says, gives “justified hope for renewal.”

The “dilapidated German house” is stated to be in need of major renovation work. A few corrections and tiny reforms will not suffice. But German determination will guarantee that we tackle the matter thoroughly and fundamentally. Once the time for change has come, we Germans will not do things by halves. Then the rubble of modernity will be cleared away, for it is the reason for today’s greatest problems. (Höcke & Hennig 2018: 257f) 

The revolutionary anti-modern program outlined here is especially rich in antisemitic connotations. Apparently, modernity, which promised and granted equal rights to Jews and other minorities, is to be overcome “fundamentally,” not “by halves” and with violence, in an anti-modern, national revolution (Schreiter & Rensmann 2025). This anti-democratic völkisch revolutionary ideology is intimately linked to antisemitic ideas of Jews as “enemies of the people”—even when they are not explicitly mentioned. Consequently, Höcke also rejoices in the supposed “smell of a dying democracy in decay” (cited in Naumann 2018). 

In Höcke’s case, positive references to Nazi organizations and to Nazi rhetoric have been recognized by German courts. However, such positive allusions and references can also be found in other parts of the AfD. The frequent Nazi innuendo that is increasingly present in social media postings or pamphlets among party groupings and functionaries who play with Nazi ciphers, codes, and Nazi vocabulary suggests that these allusions have become an essential part of the AfD’s discourse. Positive references to the revolutionary-antisemitic Nazi criminal state, some allegedly in “good humor,” are now a normalized element of the party’s ritualized rule-breaking and continuous undermining of established democratic norms after the Holocaust.5 AfD activists seem strongly drawn to such radical gestures, tropes, and even symbols of the Nazi tradition—even though AfD chancellor candidate Weidel simultaneously post-factually claims that Hitler was actually “left-wing,” indeed a “communist,” and thus not a representative of her own “right-wing” tradition (cited in Metzger & Schneider 2025).  

Still, so far, the AfD rarely employs overt or explicit verbal antisemitism in its political campaigns. Explicit antisemitism does not appear to be a central element of the AfD’s political ideology and mobilization until this day. However, camouflaged antisemitism and anti-Jewish innuendo are acutely present in the AfD’s political mobilizations. The AfD’s worldview is permeated with antisemitic connotations, codes, and constructs. The party’s antisemitism is mostly implicit, camouflaged, and modernized, but this does not make it less relevant and dangerous. For instance, when AfD leaders, members of the Bundestag, and other party representatives insinuate the existence of a sinister global conspiracy of transnational elites, they also activate the political and cultural associations of the fixed idea of a Jewish world conspiracy. When the official party account insinuates that Netanyahu and Israel blackmail “Germoney” and make Germany pay for Nazi history by sending “illegal migrants” to the country, they do not utter anti-Jewish slurs. But antisemitism it is, and the AfD uses it politically to mobilize respective voters.  

The AfD’s ethno-nationalist concepts of people, identity, and interest are linked to the image of a globally networked, corrupt, malevolent, and cosmopolitan elite that allegedly “betrays” or “deceives” the national people. This image is part of a simplistic worldview and enemy narrative promoted by the AfD throughout their platform. The idea of a closed, homogeneous elite that is antagonistically opposed to a good-natured people unified by a shared cultural identity comes straight from the arsenal of modern antisemitic tropes. This motif of a conspiratorial, anti-German, cosmopolitan elite that supposedly pursues plans to “destroy” the people the AfD mostly mobilizes in a camouflaged way—above all through the right-wing extremist conspiracy fantasy of the “Great Replacement” threatening an “impending Volkstod” (Björn Höcke, cited in Ingendaay 2019). This fantasy, which connotes the image of a Jewish world conspiracy and the supposedly planned disintegration and destruction of the native people, is repeatedly concretized and personified in the anti-Jewish enemy image of Soros. Specific Jews, and first and foremost Soros, hence repeatedly appear as the force orchestrating the imagined deliberate “replacement” of native whites. According to the AfD, such conspiracy is led, orchestrated, and financed by the wealthy cosmopolitan Jewish financier Soros as the “puppet master.” He is, many AfD officials claim time and again, organizing a worldwide replacement of the native “white” or European populations. In its very core, AfD ideology feeds on the antisemitic idea that a “globalist” elite operates worldwide to destroy or “dissolve” ethnic white nations, and Germany in particular. Even though the word “Jew” is rarely iterated in this context, this delusion reproduces the ideological core of the infamous forgery Protocols of the Elder of Zion.  

Björn Höcke, for instance, believes that “at the latest after throwing out Hans-Georg Maaßen, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has become a mere executive body for the nation-dissolving and perverse spirit of a George Soros” (cited in Mascolo & Steinke 2019). Höcke proceeds constructing the EU as another puppet of Soros. He repeatedly uses the pejorative term “perversion,” which is connoted with deviant sexuality—a classical element of anti-Jewish stereotypes and projections. The EU, he argues, is a “globalization agency” that executes the “perverse spirit of George Soros” (cited in Siemens et al. 2020). In 2017, the then AfD chairman of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Dennis Augustin, claimed that the “Great Replacement, the deliberate, intentional cultural and ethnic transformation of Europe” was “in full swing” (cited in Bender 2020). In line with that same myth, AfD member of parliament Gottfried Curio suggested in the German Bundestag: “The long-term goal [...] is obviously the dissolution of the German nation as a centuries-old community of descent and culture in favor of a gradual transformation of Germany into a history-less and faceless settlement area for foreigners of all and any origins and cultures“ (German Bundestag, Curio: 19/236, cited in Lorenz 2024). 

As demonstrated, the emotionally charged image of anti-popular “globalists” associated with financial power, which the AfD repeatedly activates, also has strong antisemitic connotations (Friesel 2010: 174). Modern antisemitism links Jews to cosmopolitanism and global finance. During the protests against the Munich Security Conference in 2023, AfD Bundestag member Petr Bystron said: “The AfD is a populist party, for the people, for the populus. And those who are against it are up there; they are the globalists” (cited in RIAS 2023; cf. Schreiter & Rensmann 2025). Katrin Ebner-Steiner, chair of the AfD faction in the Bavarian state parliament, said that the AfD “makes policy for its own people rather than working for the ‘globalists’ and ‘financial elites’ who, together with the old parties’ cartel, are pursuing the ‘Great Reset’” (cited in Schreiter & Rensmann 2025). AfD parliamentarians also lament an impending “Great Transformation” as “forcing a global, radical restructuring of our lives” in the name of the climate (cited in Lorenz 2024). A striking example of camouflaged conspiracist antisemitism and innuendo can also be found in a speech by AfD politician Benjamin Nolte, a member of the Bavarian state parliament. Nolte sees himself threatened by a “dark alliance” of “politics, the media, and accomplices of this state-corroding gang” (cited in Peterhans 2018). The idea of a “corrosion” (Zersetzung) of the state by a sinister, dark, and hidden cabal pursuing a conspiracy involving “the media” displays strong antisemitic connotations. 

Furthermore, the AfD links the widespread accusation against the alleged mastermind of global transformation, the “globalist” Jew Soros, to its own rejection of socio-cultural change in modern society in the age of globalization. Thomas Seitz, who has represented the AfD in the Bundestag since 2017, attacks the young grassroots activists of “Fridays for Future” as “Soros-Youth,” thus subscribing to the conspiracy myth that even these independent young leftist demonstrators are paid and ultimately controlled by Jews (cited in Schwarz 2020: 70). Here, as Shulamit Volkov argues, antisemitism functions as a code activating broader cultural patterns, as “an abbreviation for a whole system of ideas and attitudes” (Volkov 2000: 23) directed against a hated liberal modernity. In other words, it is code for an authoritarian, anti-emancipatory, anti-egalitarian, völkisch, anti-feminist—and by now also anti-ecological—set of values with which Jews are identified in the antisemitic imago. The “culture war” advocated and prioritized by parts of the AfD leadership and the authoritarian-nationalist radical right as a whole, thus emerges as a comprehensive complex involving the rejection of women’s equality (called “gender mainstreaming”) and the denial of human-made climate change. Both topics feature prominently in the AfD’s platforms, as well as among other radical right actors around the globe (cf. Lockwood 2018). They are linked with nostalgic, völkisch-nationalist, and antisemitic cultural constructs that evoke the image of an all-powerful Soros and sinister global elites as agents of destruction.6

The traditional antisemitic phantasmagoria, which attributes great conspiratorial power to the Jewish minority, is also evident in the AfD’s anger towards journalism and the media. The AfD especially attacks public ‘state broadcasting’ as a part of a hated political and cultural elite. Particularly striking is the traditional and ingrained antisemitic stereotype of the media as a homogenous “lying press” or “system press” to which the AfD attributes the goal to manipulate and deceive “the people” (cf. Pittelkow et al. 2018). The antisemitic propaganda term Lügenpresse (“lying press”), which has antisemitic connotations and was also used in Nazi Germany, establishes a connection to the stereotype of “Jewish media power.” This construct insinuates a supposedly deliberate suppression of free speech (“taboos”) by a coordinated sinister cabal involving the government, the “elite,” and the established media. In this view, pluralism of opinion and diversity of interests have been replaced by a controlled, organized, and enforced uniform liberalism. In antisemitic perceptions, Jews have traditionally been attributed control of the media and a corresponding power of media manipulation. 

At times the AfD also explicitly articulates conspiracist antisemitism. The former chairman of the Würzburg AfD district association and city council candidate Herold Peters-Hartmann claimed on “MuslimTVDE,” a project of the Islamic Ahmadiyya community: Jews have “a great deal of influence,” which is a “big problem” for the “dream” of a “homogeneous people” (cited in Lauer 2020).7 Like Wolfgang Gedeon, an openly antisemitic activist fantasizing about a “Zionist world conspiracy,” Peters-Hartmann was eventually expelled from the party (Bohr 2020). However, other antisemites remain unsanctioned. When coded antisemitic allusions (such as narratives about “globalists,” Soros, and the “Great Replacement”) used by high-ranking AfD representatives are adopted by the public or by local politicians and re-articulated in an openly antisemitic manner, the party leaders tend to either remain silent or distance themselves from the consequences of their speeches (Schreiter & Rensmann 2025). 

The extent to which the authoritarian-nationalist counterrevolution invoked by the AfD is linked to antisemitic conspiracy myths was also evident during the coronavirus crisis. Right-wing extremists around the world dismissed the pandemic as a hoax, an invention for the purpose of a political conspiracy by a global elite, and as an attempt to establish a “COVID dictatorship.” Conspiracy myths about the coronavirus also found resonance in the AfD and were mobilized in the 2021 election campaign (cf. Rensmann & de Zee 2022). 

In addition, the AfD makes political demands whose implementation would render large parts of (religious) Jewish life in Germany impossible, such as a ban on brit milah or on shechita8 (cf. German Bundestag 2023, cited in Schreiter & Rensmann 2025). Moreover, the AfD leadership opens up space for antisemitism by downplaying hostility toward Jews within the party and among the native population. When antisemitism is discussed, it is only in relation to “the others,” namely as a problem of leftists, but above all of Muslims and refugees (Steinitz & Poensgen 2018). Native antisemitism is denied. The AfD at times even links its demand for mass “remigration” and thus the expulsion of millions of migrants with styling itself as the patron saint of Jewish life in Germany.

A central motif of the AfD’s political ideology and program is the rehabilitation of German national pride by means of downplaying and whitewashing the Nazi atrocities. The AfD’s cultural memory policy aims at a wholesale glorification of Germany and the nation’s history. The party also promotes the nostalgic return to an idealized national past. Yet both national nostalgia and the idealized image of the nation’s history inevitably on which it is based require the minimizing of the crimes committed by Germany and the ‘liberation’ from German historical guilt. 

Indeed, the memory of the persecution and extermination of European Jews inevitably stands in the way of any unconditional or unqualified idealizing of German culture history. Consequently, the AfD opposes the country’s institutionalized forms of Shoah remembrance and a self-reflective memory culture that unambiguously commemorates the Jewish victims while naming and shaming the perpetrators of the Shoah. By contrast, the AfD’s historical narratives celebrate the national heroism of German soldiers fighting for the Nazis while proclaiming that the “good people” is free of guilt. Non-Jewish Germans are hereby construed as heroes or innocent victims but never as culprits. Small wonder, then, that these narratives offer little space for genuine Holocaust remembrance. Thus, the AfD’s politically communicated efforts to relativize the crimes of the Shoah and the history of eliminatory antisemitism are hardly surprising. Indeed, the AfD’s project of a new national(ist) remembrance culture deliberately turns away from the history of the country’s crimes. 

This directly implies the marginalization or exclusion of “Jewish memory”—the history of the victims and the victim’s perspective that recalls the Shoah. The AfD replaces this history with one focusing on and construing Germans as heroes and victims—victimized also by remembering the history of the Holocaust which directly or indirectly affects all Jewish families living in Germany today. A “creation of a German victim myth” (Salzborn 2018a: 66) goes hand in hand with the devaluation of those who do not subscribe to it—first and foremost Jews who personify the unwelcome dimensions of German criminal history already simply by being Jewish. This ultimately leads to a perpetrator-victim reversal: if Germans are construed as the victims of history and historical memory, Jews—especially if they remind people of German perpetrators or address Germany’s criminal past—are the culprits who maliciously instrumentalize memory. The AfD’s historical relativism narrative of the good, heroic, innocent German people is inevitably directed against Jews as perceived or personified “troublemakers” vis-à-vis and idealized German history and culture. Consequently, the AfD also advances a “secondary antisemitism based on the rejection of historical memory.”9

Along with the aforementioned AfD leader Höcke, the honorary chairman Alexander Gauland is one of the most popular leaders of the AfD. Gauland embodies the way downplaying the Nazi crimes and secondary antisemitism intertwine. According to Gauland, “Hitler and the Nazis were just a bird’s dropping” in over a thousand years of successful German history (Gauland 2018). Gauland had previously glorified the German Wehrmacht soldiers, who were involved in crimes against European Jews, as “war heroes”: “If the French and British are proud of their emperor or of their wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.” Moreover, in Gauland’s view “we should no longer be held accountable for those twelve years [the Nazi era: L.R.]. They no longer affect our identity today” (cited in Martenstein 2017). In 2017, Höcke described the German Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame.” He programmatically called for a “180-degree turn in memory politics” (Höcke 2017).10 The AfD counters critical remembrance culture with the narrative that Germany is dominated by an imposed “cult of guilt.” AfD politician Jens Maier declares that this “cult” is now “over.”11

The focus of remembrance, the party argues, should be on German traditions and German suffering. The AfD’s 2021 election program, for instance, devoted two pages to the topic of “customs and remembrance” without ever mentioning the Holocaust. Instead, the emphasis is on the grief of displaced persons: “The suffering of those displaced from their homeland must not be forgotten” (AfD 2021: 160). Strengthening the sense of homeland while honoring German history “in its entirety”—this official AfD platform position represents nothing less than the proclaimed implementation of the radical shift in remembrance policy that Höcke had called for. The platform also states: “Official remembrance culture must not focus solely on the low points of our history; it must also keep the high points in view. A people without national consciousness cannot survive in the long run.” A focus on the “high points” of German history goes hand in hand with complete silence on the history of German crimes and, in particular, the memory of the Shoah. Overall, the AfD opposes what it sees as a “moralizing reinterpretation of German history” and the alleged defamation of “Imperial Germany” as a “backward, unjust state” (AfD 2021: 161). 

Given the AfD’s desire to “liberate” German historical memory from a focus on the critical remembrance of the Nazi crimes, it is hardly surprising that AfD actors are taking the step from Holocaust trivialization and historical apologetics to a camouflaged antisemitism. Indeed, the AfD combines nostalgic nationalism, a revisionist historical policy (Ackermann 2017), in which the Holocaust has no place, and secondary antisemitism in a comprehensive fashion. A speaker at the “Russia Congress” of the Saxony-Anhalt AfD faction went so far as to claim, in reference to the convicted Holocaust denier and antisemite Horst Mahler, that “Germany, too, has political prisoners” (cited in Bender 2020). Motifs of secondary antisemitism propagated by the AfD include constructions of Jews as vengeful and unforgiving, unable to let the past rest, or the trope that Jews or Israel are after money out of “Germoney’s” pockets, this is, they allegedly seek illegitimate material gain from their history of persecution. 

The AfD does occasionally make official efforts to distance itself from antisemitism, Nazism, and the Nazi legacy. Like other right-wing extremist parties, it sometimes indignantly rejects being identified with Nazis. They view this charge as a “cudgel” unfairly used against it by the elites. However, analyses of the party’s historical-political orientation show that the AfD not only trivializes the German crimes and exculpate Nazi organizations but also uses Nazi slogans, symbols, and ideology, with some leaders openly glorifying Nazi actions and organizations. The AfD’s lead candidate in the 2024 European elections, Maximilian Krah, stated in the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica that he would “never automatically call everyone who wears an SS uniform a criminal” (cited in Joswig 2024). Even the European radical right parties Rassemblement National and Fratelli d’Italia distanced themselves from the AfD’s rehabilitation of Nazism afterwards and excluded the party from joining their radical right party group in the European Parliament.

Despite repeated statements by the party leadership claiming that it neither holds nor promotes antisemitic views (and that all allegations of antisemitism are thus illegitimate or malicious, raised in bad faith), the AfD’s social media channels also time and again target prominent Jews directly, with scornful comments, stereotypes, and ridicule. Jews are selected and subjected to hate speech, sometimes with barely concealed recourse to antisemitic resentments—such hate speech resonates in AfD forums and finds widespread approval in the comments sections of the AfD’s social media channels. 

For example, AfD member of the Bundestag Petr Bystron (on behalf of “Team Bystron”) distributed an antisemitic caricature portraying Jewish author and activist Anetta Kahane, who is involved in combatting hate speech. The headline reads: “Merkel’s candidate for new president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.” In the image, Kahane appears in the uniform of a Soviet political commissar. Her reddish hair is turned into a threateningly anarchic lion’s mane. This depiction as a violent communist female incorporates classic antisemitic and anti-feminist stereotypes (Lang 2017; Stögner 2014). Her face is also adorned with the typical antisemitic features that were once found on every page of Der Stürmer: exaggeratedly thick lips, an extremely wide mouth turned down at the corners, a hateful gaze, a pointed chin, and a huge, crooked nose. Kahane thus becomes the embodiment of the “Judeo-Bolshevik threat” once conjured up by Joseph Goebbels (Aly 2018). The image reflects the widespread antisemitic myth that Kahane, like Soros, is part of a Jewish conspiracy—a devious communist commissar who pulls the strings and controls free speech with the help of the Federal Republic’s compliant elite. 

Kahane has been the target of numerous conspiracist hate campaigns by the AfD and other parts of the radical right. Within the first two years in the Bundestag, AfD members of parliament had mentioned Kahane 81 times. The AfD’s chancellor candidate and party leader, Alice Weidel, imagines Kahane as part of a “GDR 2.0” (Schwarz 2020: 70). Again and again, Kahane is accused of being “responsible for censorship measures in social media networks” (Schwarz 2020: 69)—and also of secretly exercising dictatorial control over the media. In so doing, the AfD activates and plays with the antisemitic stereotype of Jewish media power. These campaigns serve to prepare physical threats. Members of the “Identitarian Movement” attempted to enter the Amadeu Antonio Foundation headed by Kahane and published the names of its employees—the rest, they assumed, would “naturally follow.” Finally, according to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, right-wing terrorist Franco A. scouted Kahane, planning an assassination attempt (cited in Schwarz 2020: 71). 

Michel Friedman, a Jewish-German liberal lawyer, publicist, television journalist and former member of the center-right governing party CDU, is also a recurring target of invectives, verbal aggressions, and ridicule. Friedman had criticized the AfD as a “party of hate,” stating: “If the AfD were in the federal government, I would leave the country” (Friedman 2019). AfD representatives responded with particular malice, insinuating that the Jewish citizen’s emigration would be a particular bonus of a future AfD government. Tomasz M. Frölich, a member of the European Parliament, tweeted triumphantly minutes after the AfD briefly hoisted the FDP, a small party, into government in Thuringia: “Michel Friedman’s emigration is drawing nearer” (cited in Laurin 2020).

The AfD typically uses two main strategies when attempting to respond to public criticism of its hate speech and radical right opposition to democracy or when the party is accused of antisemitism. Firstly, the party suggests that it is the victim of malicious exaggeration in bad faith: if anyone in the AfD ever articulates Nazi slogans, adores Hitler or expresses overt antisemitism, these are isolated cases, the defense strategy goes, that are being dealt with decisively without the need for mainstream media to take notice. Other statements the AfD defends by claiming that they might be provocative but are covered by freedom of expression: “Surely one’s still allowed to say that!” A few statements are officially retracted, yet most of the time it is suggested the AfD has been deliberately misunderstood or misrepresented by mainstream media.  

Secondly, the AfD leadership claims that it is in fact a pro-Jewish party because it allegedly supports Israel and wants to protect Jewish life in Germany from “antisemitic migration” from Muslim countries. According to AfD member of the Bundestag Jürgen Braun, the AfD “is the party of Israel’s friends in this parliament” (cited in Riebe 2019). And indeed, the party at times tends to see Israel as a “geopolitical ally against the supposed ‘Islamization of Europe’” (Salzborn 2018a: 66). In the Bundestag, the AfD actually took a pro-Israel and anti-antisemitic stance with its motion to “condemn the BDS movement”—the boycott campaign that rejects the Jewish state and spreads Israel-related antisemitism. This represents a break with the anti-Zionist tradition in German right-wing extremism stretching from Adolf Hitler to today’s neo-Nazi parties such as Die Heimat (formerly NPD), Die Rechte, which defames Israel as “our misfortune,” or Der III. Weg (Third Way), which demonizes Israel as a “terrorist state” (cf. Schreiter & Rensmann 2025).12

The AfD’s supposed “solidarity” with Israel, however, is not only tenuous but is increasingly replaced by overt anti-Israel rhetoric lately. In so far as there were positive references to Israel, they point to a reality-distorting, projective construction of an ethnically homogeneous Jewish state at odds with Israel’s actual diversity and multiculturalism. Indeed, Israel’s multicultural reality is consistently denied. Solidarity, moreover, appears to have been only granted temporarily, in so far as it suited the party’s own political goals. Positive references to Israel are largely limited to an instrumentalization of the Jewish state as a supposed role model for the AfD’s themes of migration and the fight against Islam(ism). In the AfD’s rhetoric, Israel appears primarily as a state that takes action against “illegal immigrants”—and thus as a mere reference point for the party’s domestic policy agenda. As convincingly argued by Nikolai Schreiter (2022b), partial and temporary support for Israel proves to be just as projective as parallel blanket denigrations. 

The AfD’s official response to the false report that Israel wanted to deport refugees to Germany shows just how thin the veneer of this supposed, primarily anti-Muslim “solidarity” has always been, even before the latest opposition to the Jewish state, and how quickly this “solidarity” is replaced by open antisemitism. On its official account, the party tweeted: “A total farce. Israel wants to get rid of illegal (!) immigrants from Africa, and who do they turn to? Once again, it’s Germoney!” As Jan Riebe (2019) argues, “the federal party very openly served the common far-right and antisemitic narrative that Israel is financially exploiting Germany—’because of Auschwitz.’” The temporary praise of the Jewish state ultimately points to the typical dual nature of antisemitism, which is often expressed in both contempt and (mostly unacknowledged) admiration. Finally, AfD’s allegedly pro-Israel views are also counteracted by the party’s political proximity to Iran, which wants to annihilate the Jewish state. AfD parliament members display pride about their contacts to the antisemitic Islamic Republic of Iran (cf. Leister 2023)—as well as to Putin’s regime, which repeatedly makes antisemitic statements, and to Russian right-wing extremist ideologists and antisemites like Alexander Dugin (cf. Schreiter & Rensmann 2025).

The AfD’s response to October 7 was correspondingly ambiguous at best. An initial statement issued by the by the AfD Bundestag faction on the same day condemned the Hamas assault but provoked divided reactions online. Petr Bystron, the faction’s foreign policy spokesman at the time, failed to share it on his usually well-maintained Telegram channel. Only four days after the massacre, AfD federal spokesman Tino Chrupalla engaged in both-sidesism, calling for “de-escalation [...] to avert a conflagration. Diplomacy is the order of the day. A viable solution for all sides must be the goal!” (see Schreiter & Rensmann 2025 for full citation and analysis). AfD parliament member Jürgen Pohl then went even further. He praised Chrupalla on the far-right blog Info Direkt for succeeding in establishing the AfD as a “patriotic peace party” “against resistance from ‘transatlantic’ circles.” The “radical Islamic Hamas,” he wrote, had “done terrible things. Israel is responding by reducing Gaza to rubble and ashes”—before he proceeded to express the fear that some voices in the AfD, like those other parties, might soon call for “bombs on Tehran” (Pohl 2023; see Schreiter & Rensmann 2025).13

Another rationalization mechanism of the AfD’s political antisemitism and response to antisemitism charges that should be mentioned here is the positive reference to actual or supposed Jewish positions supporting the AfD (see Schreiter & Rensmann 2025). For example, the AfD seeks to ward off accusations of antisemitism by pointing to a party-affiliated association founded in 2018—JAfD, short for “Jews in the AfD” (Botsch 2020b: 6). Even though this group has only two dozen members, the party has managed to attract public attention through effective PR. Despite being largely defunct from the start, this group was met with a very receptive response from the mainstream media. According to Gideon Botsch, the small group is characterized by idiosyncratic views on Jewishness and primarily addresses a non-Jewish audience (cf. Botsch 2020b). In terms of content, the JAfD is hardly distinguishable from the party as a whole; the JAfD logo even appeared on a booklet whose foreword was written by Andreas Kalbitz, a völkisch right-wing extremist who has since been expelled from the party (cf. Schreiter & Rensmann 2025).

The political and cultural opportunity structures for the rise of the AfD and the legitimization of its (antisemitic) ressentiments include both long-established and new media environments. The AfD operates within, cooperates with, and does not distance itself from a certain right-wing extremist media milieu disseminating overt antisemitism. The party proudly flaunts the support of Elon Musk, who spreads conspiracy myths and antisemitism, agitates against liberal democracies worldwide, and promotes right-wing extremist propagandists who want to destroy democracies  worldwide, and promotes right-wing extremist propagandists who want to destroy democracies—such as influencer and AfD supporter Naomi Seibt or media figures associated with the far-right “Identitarian Movement” led by Martin Sellner (cf. Rajal 2017) or the right-wing extremist influencer Erik Ahrens. The latter is in close contact with the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, FPÖ (Lorenz & Schmid 2024) and also with the AfD, at whose party events he repeatedly appeared. Ahrens’s network propaganda aims at building an international political “elite” network modeled on the Nazi SS (Lorenz & Schmid 2024). Furthermore, leading AfD politicians such as Björn Höcke are also active in the long-established milieu of a radical, racist, and antisemitic New Right media, as represented by the ideologue Götz Kubitschek and the former “Institute for State Policy” (see Weiß 2020).  

Equally important is the context of right-wing extremist “alternative media” in the AfD’s sphere of influence, such as the New Right magazine Sezession and, in particular, the media conglomerate of the conspiracist and völkisch-antisemitic magazine Compact founded and edited by right-wing extremist Jürgen Elsässer, who also has connections to the Russian dictatorship and its—in parts also antisemitic—disinformation propaganda.14 Compact has long been a key mouthpiece for the extreme right and supports the “Identitarian Movement” (cf. Andrae 2022: 112) as well as AfD election campaigns with propaganda and events featuring leading AfD politicians (Andrae 2022: 112). Earlier studies have shown that antisemitism has “a special relevance as a unifying element and cohesive factor for disparate political strategies and views” (Culina & Fedders 2016: 56) in Compact. Kevin Culina and Jonas Fedders also note an “excessive focus” on the enemy image of Israel (ibid: 71). For years, Elsässer and his magazine have used camouflaged antisemitism to agitate against the “greed” of the “global elites,” insinuating, for instance, that a “meeting of international high finance from Rockefeller to Rothschild” was behind Merkel’s “takeover” of the government (and her supposed “dictatorship”). George Soros is depicted as a “sinister secret puppet master” behind the current migration movements (all cited in Andrae 2022: 115–117), in line with the aforementioned antisemitic and racist Great Replacement conspiracy fantasy promoted by the AfD and the global radical right. Elsässer argues that the world is ruled by “the money dynasties, i.e., the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, Blackrock and Soros” (ibid.: 119). In so doing, he activates the antisemitic trope of ‘the rich Jew’ embedded in an antisemitic conspiracy narrative. 

Like the AfD itself, the party’s right-wing extremist alternative media environment appears on first glance to entail different views of the Jewish state of Israel, as reflected e.g. in the reactions to October 7 and the Gaza war, and at times ambivalence (cf. Weiß 2024: 140f; Zarbock 2024: 243; on the ambivalence and projectivity of the radical right toward Israel in general, see Schreiter 2022b). Antisemitic projectivity, however, remains constitutive both in negative and in seemingly positive references to Israel. The images of Israel consistently appear as “the result of antisemitic projections” and “always offer the potential to unleash antisemitic hatred” (Zarbock 2024: 254), as Luca Zarbock demonstrates in a study.  

As for the Compact magazine, it takes a clear stance against the Jewish state, linguistically connecting it to Nazism by speaking of a “brutal war of extermination against Palestinian civilians” or the “mass murder of the Palestinians” (Jürgen Elsässer) (all cited in Zarbock 2024: 250). While euphemistically describing the massacre of October 7 as a “rendezvous between Hamas and the festival visitors,” Elsässer also blames Israel for a “world war scenario” (Elsässer 2023, cited in Zarbock 2024: 250). 

In other extreme right publications supportive of the AfD, however, there is some notable “identification with the projectively charged Jewish state in order to form a common front” (Zarbock 2024: 245) in a “world-historically apostrophized fight of the Judeo-Christian West against Islam” (Grimm & Kahmann 2017: 52). Yet Israel is also depicted—sometimes in the very same publications—as an “aggressive, vengeful, and bloodthirsty power” that “commits all kinds of atrocities against the Palestinians on the basis of alleged moral superiority” (Zarbock 2024: 246; cf. Weber 2022: 405). Whereas Compact is straightforwardly anti-Israel, ambivalences and contradictions are particularly evident in the right-wing Sezession magazine: alongside the projective admiration for Israel as an ethnic, self-assertive nation state, the magazine feels threatened by illegitimate accusations of antisemitism in relation to Israel. Anyone who “does not sufficiently fulfill certain Zionist desires,” the Sezession editorial team laments, is labeled antisemitic; at the same time, Jewish members of the AfD are accused of being “seemingly primarily loyal to another state, Israel” (2023, all cited in Zarbock 2024: 248). Moreover, Jews also appear “as devious globalists who undermine national communities, and Israel as a brutal ‘oppressor regime’” in that same issue of Sezession (ibid: 253). 

Many AfD voters share antisemitic sentiments, this demand possibly driving the party’s supply. According to an early representative survey conducted by the University of Hamburg in 2016, 59% of AfD voters believed that “Jews have a great deal of influence”—in contrast to 16% of other parties’ voters. In the same survey, 40% of AfD voters stated that “National Socialism had good and bad sides”—in contrast to 6% other parties’ voters (Marcinkiewicz et al. 2016). A 2018 survey by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research found 55% of AfD voters to believe “Jews have too much influence in the world” (Petersen 2018). Among AfD voters, antisemitism is thus a majority opinion. This has also been repeatedly confirmed by the Leipzig Authoritarianism Studies. In 2018, only 43.1% of AfD voters rejected the statement “I can well understand that some people find Jews unpleasant” on a five-point response scale (significantly less than all other relevant parties’ voters), while 23.8% completely agreed with the statement (significantly more than all other relevant parties’ voters). At 30%, the statement “Israeli politics make me increasingly dislike Jews” also found by far the highest approval ratings among AfD voters (Rees & Lamberty 2019: 215). 

More recent survey research confirms these findings. The Leipzig Authoritarianism Study of 2024 shows that antisemitism in general continues to be significantly stronger among AfD voters than among other electorates. Moreover, we also find the highest level of agreement with every single dimension and form of antisemitism (Decker et al. 2024: 146). For instance, unsurprisingly, secondary antisemitism related to the desire to downplay national guilt is present among 50.2% of AfD voters. Yet AfD voters also agree most strongly and widely (22.4%) with statements expressing open Israel-related antisemitism. Surprisingly, they also support the newly measured postcolonial antisemitism, usually associated with the far left and its postcolonialism and anti-Zionism (Decker et al. 2024: 146). Although rejection of colonialism “is not part of the AfD’s ideological inventory,” this legitimization “is nevertheless used” to express antisemitism (ibid: 146), even if this contradicts other political views of a radical right worldview. This is consistent with the findings of our new representative empirical study in North Rhine-Westphalia (Beyer et al. 2024). 

In an online survey conducted with 1,044 respondents between January 9 and January 19, 2020, based on a representative quota selection, 58% of AfD supporters agreed that “the Nazi era is portrayed in a far too one-sided and negative light—it also had its good sides” (19% “completely agree,” 39% “somewhat agree”; pmg 2020: Table 38). 80% of AfD voters see the memory of National Socialism as a problem that prevents a ‘healthy’ national consciousness (pmg 2020: Table 20). This corresponds to the way mainstream media’s engagement with the past is perceived—as part of a supposed “cult of guilt” denounced by the AfD. 66% of AfD voters agree “completely” with the statement: “I find it is too much that the media reminds us of the Nazi past almost every day,” with another 21% agreeing “somewhat” (pmg 2020: Table 36). They also feel suppressed when expressing their opinions on the subject of National Socialism. 51% of AfD voters “completely” and another 31% “somewhat” agree that “you cannot honestly express your opinion about Germany’s Nazi past” (pmg 2020, Table 34).  

The AfD mobilizes antisemitism politically in the Bundestag and in the German public. The party acts as an aggressively “taboo-breaking,” transgressive force while simultaneously portraying itself as a victim—a discursive mechanism typical for fascist agitation since the first half of the 20th century (Löwenthal 1987, 75). Open hostility toward Jews is not at the center of the AfD’s political campaigns and mobilizations yet; still, antisemitic constructs and conspiracy theories, alongside völkisch / ethnic nationalism, are an integral part of the party and its politics, as are hate-mongering campaigns against individual Jews. 

The AfD’s antisemitism manifests itself in various ways. This entails nationalist and antisemitic memory politics, which seek to post-factually reinterpret Germany’s past and nostalgically idealize Germany’s history, including the Nazi past, and defame Jews as representatives of a Holocaust-centered memory culture. Furthermore, antisemitism is apparent in the AfD’s support of measures that would make Jewish life in Germany impossible; in conspiracist antisemitic myths of a “globalist elite” orchestrating a “Great Replacement”;15 in ethnic fantasies of liberating Germany through mass “remigration”; in targeted antisemitic campaigns against Jewish personalities (especially liberal ones and those opposed to the AfD); in the ideological and organizational proximity to autocratic antisemitic regimes and ideologues, from Iran to Russia; and in close ties to “alternative,” right-wing extremist and conspiracist groups, movements, and media. According to empirical social survey research, the AfD’s electorate also exhibits by far the strongest degree of antisemitism. As for the internal party association “Jews in the AfD,” it has proven to be a politically irrelevant micro-group that is de facto no longer active. 

Antisemitism in the AfD is closely interwoven with its right-wing extremist and conspiracist worldview. Ultimately, the party is permeated by antisemitic ideas and corresponding enemy stereotypes and conspiracy narratives. These are evident in the AfD’s platform and in its leaders’ statements, from party chairpersons to members of the Bundestag to the district level, as well as on the party’s official social media channels. The strong presence of antisemitism can neither be concealed by the fragile veneer of selective and instrumental statements—often relativized and sometimes underpinned with antisemitic projections—that are supposedly pro-Israel, nor by the occasional diatribes against left-wing, Islamic, and Islamist antisemitism (cf. Schreiter & Rensmann 2025). The AfD hereby downplays or denies antisemitism among the native population in general and within their own ranks in particular, essentially presenting it as an exclusive problem of migrants and leftists—which it is evidently not. In the meanwhile, even open antisemites are only rarely excluded from the party. The AfD’s talk of “imported antisemitism” is thus an ideology deflecting from the party’s own antisemitism, which is supported by the majority of the party’s voters and disseminated by the party (Schreiter & Rensmann 2025). 

Gideon Botsch rightly emphasizes the role of agency, especially in “adjustment processes with regard to antisemitism” (Botsch 2019: 22). Actors on the radical right test and shift the boundaries of the sayable and of liberal democracy around the globe—and in Germany, the AfD is not only the radical right’s strongest political force today but also the largest opposition party in national parliament. So far, the cordon sanitaire of the democratic-pluralist parties in the German party system has largely held, keeping the AfD and its political antisemitism at bay. Yet the party’s politics of transgression has already transformed and helped polarize Germany’s political culture. 

Political antisemitism’s increasingly pronounced role in the AfD is arguably an effect of the party’s continuous internal radicalization. The examples of this process are plenty. In 2021, the participants of a Telegram chat group that included 16 out of 18 AfD members of the Bavarian parliament and 11 out of 12 federal AfD parliamentarians from Bavaria shared fantasies of violently overthrowing the Federal Republic’s supposedly “criminal system” and discussed the need for a “civil war” (cited in Kontrovers 2021).16 This violent revolutionary rhetoric shouldn’t be surprising in light of the völkisch-nationalist, conspiracist, and antisemitic worldview which, as demonstrated above, constitutes part of the ideological core of the AfD all along. It entails a fundamental opposition to liberal modernity and the political culture and system of Germany’s pluralistic-liberal, constitutional democracy.  

A driver of the party’s anti-systemic, anti-democratic, and antisemitic radicalization process is Björn Höcke, the popular regional chairman in Thuringia, who repeatedly uses Nazi vocabulary and SA slogans. Yet recently more and more representatives and AfD groupings play with references to Hitler or Nazi symbols or, like party chairman Tino Chrupalla, insinuate that it is acceptable to sing banned Nazi songs. Matthias Helferich, the self-proclaimed “friendly face of National Socialism,” is part of the AfD Bundestag faction. Small wonder, then, that the AfD also cooperates with openly antisemitic extreme right milieus, such as the “Freie Sachsen” (Free Saxons), Compact magazine, or the self-declared Reichsbürger, or “citizens of the Reich,” who explicitly reject the Federal constitution and its legitimacy. Some Reichsbürger groups have been involved in violent plans to overthrow the German state and spread radical antisemitism. For instance, the Reichsbürger Prinz Reuss interprets all of modern history and all its crises and conflicts as the effect of a Jewish world conspiracy.17

In Germany, as elsewhere, we see a profoundly transformed party competition and political playing field. The AfD’s complexity-reducing slogans, emotionalized, ressentiment-driven verbal aggressions, and post-factual conspiracy myths can flourish in this new environment. In particular, the AfD benefits greatly from the newly structured political communication and public sphere. No other party is as active, effective, and present on social media such as TikTok (Bösch 2023). Digital and social media do not completely dominate public will-formation; quality press continues to matter and influence public opinion (Schubert 2019). However, mainstream media, too, have participated in a partial erosion of discourse boundaries in many areas—including antisemitism—and have increased the social acceptance of such transgressions in political culture. Moreover, multiple societal crises have engendered a demand for conspiracy thinking and antisemitism. The effects of these crises, and failed policies tackling them, have contributed to the overall erosion of trust in institutions and of shared democratic values. 

The AfD is not the only one but one of many forces and faces driving the re-politicization of antisemitic ressentiment today, that is: the renewed political articulation, instrumentalization, and mobilization of antisemitism for political purposes. The AfD is flanked by many other radical right, radical left, and Islamist authoritarian actors, revitalizing the Big Lie about the Jews as the origin of all social evil. 

The AfD is part of both a rising irrationalism and antisemitism the world over and of a broader political and cultural authoritarian-nationalist revolt currently turning into a revolution (Rensmann 2017b; 2026). This revolution is not just directed against liberal democracy but also against Jews; it is thus authoritarian and antisemitic. The long-term success of this revolution depends on many factors—not least on the strength and determination of democratic forces and institutions.