Donald Trump and Elon Musk have energized the German far-right — AfD is hoping to replicate the MAGA movement’s success in upcoming elections

Donald Trump and Elon Musk Have Energized the German Far-Right



Posted by marketrent

7 comments

  1. Josh Axelrod in Berlin:

    *[…] “Within the AfD there’s people who say the quiet part out loud,” says Jakob Guhl, a researcher of the far-right at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank. “There might even be some people who don’t think there is a quiet part.”*

    *[…] In the two-month window surrounding the US presidential election, 449 far-right German Telegram channels mentioned Trump in more than 10,000 messages—that’s about 5 percent of the total messages these channels sent during that time.*

    *There, users have breathlessly followed Trump’s cabinet picks and shared clips from American influencers, including Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. They’ve borrowed American complaints of a “censorship industrial complex” and amplified unfounded allegations of election fraud.*

    *Watching what resonates in America, Germans then deploy their network of far-right podcasters, media personalities, influencers, and politicians to echo similar claims and conspiracy theories.*

    *For example, Stefan Magnet, founder of the Austrian far-right news broadcaster AUF1, wrote in October without any evidence to his nearly 75,000 Telegram followers about a “globalist world of lies” in which German government ministers “are preparing to censor Elon Musk’s news service ‘X’ in Europe. Above all: If Trump wins, they will shut down the platform or brutally censor it.”*

    *“Some of these debates are certainly being repackaged and refought with very different narratives and angles and in the German context as well,” Guhl says. “So you definitely see certain things that first pop off in the US seem to be working quite well there and that are then being adopted in Germany as well.” […]*

  3. I’m sure nothing could go wrong giving ultra-nationalists and populists more power in Germany again.

  4. It won’t go as easy here. The AfD will still make large wins in the comming snap-election, but they won’t see much success from the undecided voters by using the same rhetoric MAGA uses in the States. Due to the history in Germany, it still leaves a really bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.

  6. Russia dark influence spreads

    Big difference is inflation has largely disappeared from voters minds here. Current government was result of high inflation biting. Afd has yet break out from east Germany.

  7. AFD was getting between 20 and 30% of the votes in regional and federal elections recently – and nobody wants to ally themselves with them. So, unless they find a way to almost double their voters base in a couple of months, they won’t be in power.

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