Illegitimate Concerns?

On the evening of August 22, 1992, in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Germany, a mob of neo-Nazis assembled in front of the Zentrale Aufnahmestelle für Asylbewerber (ZAST)—a municipal building housing Roma asylum seekers from Romania who were waiting for their claims to be processed. Tensions had been on the rise for weeks, with the local newspaper receiving anonymous warnings that residents planned to take matters into their own hands to “restore order” and solve the “asylum problem.”

Local politicians and the police ignored the threats, so they were ill-prepared for how many people turned up that evening. Thousands of onlookers cheered on the mob on as they chanted racist slogans and threw rocks. Later, a food truck arrived to supply the crowd with beer and grilled sausages; the pogrom had become a public spectacle. When, over a day later, the asylum seekers were finally evacuated, the rioters set their sights on the building next door: a dormitory for Vietnamese workers and their families. They threw Molotov cocktails and the building caught fire—with 150 people still trapped inside. The police officers were unable to contain the riots and withdrew, leaving the workers at the mercy of the mob. But the workers eventually escaped to another part of the building, where they hid until the police regained control and rushed them away. The riots lasted for four days; to everyone’s surprise no one died.

Not everyone was so lucky. Two years earlier, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Angolan Amadeu Antonio Kiowa became one of the first known victims of racist violence in reunified Germany. Neo-Nazis beat him to death in the East German town of Eberswalde, where he was working as a butcher at the local sausage factory. From the 1960s, East Germany struggled with labor shortages caused by the exodus of millions of people to the West, so under the guise of economic cooperation between communist “brother” nations, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) invited workers from countries like Vietnam, Mozambique or Angola to fill the gaps. Lured by promises of education or vocational training, they arrived to find that what awaited them was grueling physical labor and minimal promise: the workers were expected to return to their home countries after their contracts expired. But many made a life for themselves in Germany and hoped to stay. On the eve of reunification, there were still tens of thousands of foreign contract workers living in East Germany. Like the asylum seekers, whose numbers had doubled between 1990-92, they were far from welcome. And once the enthusiasm about reunification faded and its aftermath—unemployment, deindustrialization, poverty, and homelessness—became clear, East Germans found someone to blame for their declining fortunes: foreign workers and asylum seekers.

Commentators often blame the rise of the far right in East Germany on the social and economic consequences of “failed” reunification. But right-wing extremism is by no means exclusive to the neue Bundesländer in the East. In the postwar West, former Nazis were rehabilitated and integrated into the federal bureaucracy. The far right shaped the core institutions of the Federal Republic, which affected their ability—or willingness—to investigate or prosecute its crimes. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution)—the domestic intelligence agency responsible for gathering information on subversive activities against the state, founded in 1950—for example, monitored the activities of the new far right. But as the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck reminds us, most of the agency’s early staff were former Nazis, and it chose at first to only go after leftist teachers and academics. When the BfV finally started to focus on right-wing extremism after reunification, it often failed in its responsibilities. In 2018, eyewitnesses reported that far-right groups had chased suspected “foreigners” through the streets after an anti-immigration rally in the East German city of Chemnitz while giving Nazi salutes and telling them to “get lost”. (Far-right groups called the rally in response to rumors that Muslim asylum seekers had fatally stabbed a man.) Hans-Georg Maaßen, then head of the BfV, dismissed video evidence of the violence as “fake” and claimed that reports of right-wing violence were made up.

Today, Rostock-Lichtenhagen stands as a symbol for Germany’s failure to protect foreign workers, refugees, and asylum seekers from right-wing extremism. Though there have been countless studies on the riots, too few have taken the perspective of the victims into account. This is because the government deported the Roma asylum seekers, thereby tacitly condoning the racist pogrom as an expression of “legitimate concerns” about migration. The Vietnamese workers, meanwhile, stayed in Rostock and founded organizations to protect their community but rarely spoke about their traumatic experiences. Their stories were erased while the focus shifted to finding out why the perpetrators held extremist views.

Sentences for the small number of rioters convicted were insignificant and Kiowa’s murderers got away with either light sentences or weren’t imprisoned at all, which set a dangerous precedent for how far-right violence is classified in reunified Germany. More than twenty years later, in 2013, the trial against the last surviving member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground, Beate Zschäpe, revealed that the police had allowed the terrorist group to murder migrants with impunity. In fact, evidence suggests that the NSU might have been “supported and protected by elements of the state itself”—including police officers who were embedded in far-right networks and tried to sabotage the investigation.

For a long time, it seemed like the Baseballschlägerjahre, or baseball bat years—the period after reunification that saw a sharp rise racist street violence—were behind us. But as a podcast about the resurgence of the far right in east Germany recently put it: “The nineties are back.” The most recent cycle of far-right politics was kick-started by the weekly anti-migrant PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident) protests, which began in 2014 and gained traction following Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome refugees into Germany in 2015. Since then, the far right has embedded itself in German politics and civil society. Last November, businesspeople, high profile far-right politicians, and neo-Nazis met in Potsdam to discuss a “masterplan” for “re-migration”—a euphemism for mass expulsion or deportation of refugees, asylum seekers, and “unassimilated” Germans—once a far-right party made it into government. Held only a few miles from where the Nazis developed their plans for the “final solution” at the Wannseekonferenz, the meeting brought together “activists” whose vision for Germany was eerily reminiscent of the Third Reich.

Then, this September, a far-right party won a regional election for the first time since the Nazi era. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) came first in Thuringia and finished a close second behind the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in Saxony. In Brandenburg, the Social Democrats (SPD) were able to fend off the AfD, but only by a narrow margin. In each of the three elections, the SPD’s coalition partners at the national level—the Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP)—lost significant ground, pointing to growing discontent with the government.

The “traffic light” coalition has been dysfunctional since it was first formed in 2021. But Chancellor Olaf Scholz has now taken a decisive step by dismissing FDP finance minister Christian Lindner—a move that signals the collapse of the coalition government. (Linder, who insists that only neoliberal policies can help Germany out of its economic crisis, has blocked any attempt to provide much-needed public investment.) If Scholz loses a confidence vote in January, Germans could return to the polls as early as March 2025. The AfD is well-placed to take advantage of this crisis and would surely benefit from a snap election. 

The AfD is popular among young voters, who are increasingly convinced by the party’s antiestablishment message and its opposition to supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia. Because no party received an absolute majority in Thuringia, Saxony, or Brandenburg, the winners will have to form coalitions at state level too. So far, the AfD has been locked out of negotiations, and some German legislators have called for the AfD to be banned. But simply banning the party or locking it out of government is unlikely to solve Germany’s problem in the long run and would only serve to increase distrust in the parliamentary system, or democracy in general.

The electoral success of the far-right AfD didn’t come out of nowhere. Public support for the party rose sharply following a moral panic about reported mass sexual assault in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2016. Initially, the police didn’t release any information about the suspects, but rumors spread that they were migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, leading to the public condemnation of Nafris, a term used by the German police to refer to “North African repeat offenders.” The events in Cologne marked the end of Merkel’s Willkommenskultur, or “welcome culture,” as pressure mounted for Germany to close its borders, and the political “center” shifted to the right. A broad-based Islamophobia has since taken root in German society, cutting across ideological and class lines.

The AfD has its roots in Germany’s conservative middle-class. Originally conceived as an economically liberal and Eurosceptic alternative to the CDU, the AfD appeared on the political scene in 2013 backed by conservative academics and professionals. By 2019, however, the radical right wing—the so-called Flügel—had gained influence in the party and began cultivating close links with the pan-European ethno-nationalist Identitarian Movement, which functions as a non-electoral counterpart to European right-wing parties and works alongside them to win “cultural hegemony.” This strategy appears to be paying off: in neighboring Austria, a party with Nazi history—the Freedom Party (FPÖ)—has just won a national election. Like the AfD in Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg, the FPÖ could be locked out of the governing coalition. But under the leadership of Herbert Kickl, the party has mainstreamed its anti-immigration and queerphobic views. (The AfD and FPÖ have officially distanced themselves from the Identitarian Movement, but they are still closely linked. Though the Flügel was officially dissolved in 2020, its far-right positions continue to shape AfD policies.) Topics once considered far-right talking points by much of the electorate are being reframed as the “legitimate concerns” of average middle-class citizens. No longer recognizable by their shaved heads or bomber jackets, the new generation of neo-Nazis inhabit the world of bourgeois respectability.

I couldn’t help but think of Rostock-Lichtenhagen when racist pogroms swept across cities and towns in England and Northern Ireland in early August. For a week, far-right thugs targeted refugees, Muslims, and anyone else who didn’t fit their definition of “Britishness”; in two towns, rioters surrounded asylum hotels and tried to enter or burn them. The riots began after three children were killed and several people injured in a mass stabbing in Southport on July 29. The suspect was not Muslim and was born in the UK, but online rumors claimed that he’d arrived on a “small boat” and that “mass immigration” was to blame for what happened in Southport. The word quickly spread in Telegram chats, and far-right figures like Laurence Fox, Nigel Farage, and Tommy Robinson amplified the rumors. Taken by surprise, the mainstream press blamed online disinformation for the resulting violence, but far-right groups had been mobilizing for months, motivated by opposition to the pro-Palestinian protests that Tory politicians and the media had vilified as “hate marches.”

Both Tory and Labor politicians, meanwhile, blamed the riots on “troublemakers” and “criminal thugs,” but this wasn’t entirely true. Successive Tory prime ministers—Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak—made “stopping the boats” and “controlling our borders” a central feature of their government’s policies on immigration, going so far as to propose sending migrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing, asylum, and resettlement. Newspapers and tabloids then stoked the fire with racist stories about crime-infested “no-go areas” and migrants “storming” into Britain.  Islamophobia, of course, played a role too. Since 2003 the Home Office’s “Prevent” strategy, which aims to “stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism,” has singled out Muslims as potential perpetrators of terrorist violence. In this context, stories about a Muslim killer who had come to the UK illegally confirmed deeply rooted prejudices, and set the stage for widespread unrest.

When Labor won the most recent election in July, many Britons expected Keir Starmer’s government to take a more humane approach to migration. And while it has scrapped the deeply unpopular Rwanda plan, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper picked up right where her predecessors left off. She has reiterated the need for more border security, boasting that the government would achieve “the highest rate of removals” of failed asylum seekers and others with “no right” to be in the UK since 2018. In the UK, too, the anti-immigration consensus cuts across party lines.

The new far right draws its recruits from a wide range of class backgrounds as well. Among those arrested for rioting are a “highly paid” nuclear power plant worker from Somerset, a handyman from Lancashire, and the owner of an engineering business. The instigators of the violence—Robinson, Fox, or Farage—are economically well-off but have managed to present themselves as leaders of a persecuted “anti-establishment” majority. Political and media narratives often define Britain’s “working class” as white and northern. While many racialized Britons and migrants are themselves working class, the far right sees them as undeserving of social goods that they would prefer to distribute among themselves.

The riots, then, weren’t genuine expressions of proletarian anger as far-right politicians and pundits have suggested—but it would be amiss not to mention that the riots happened in some of the most deprived parts of the country. Devastated by decades of deindustrialization and austerity, these communities have become invaluable recruiting grounds for far-right groups and parties, who rely on them for their working-class credentials and populist legitimacy.

By framing economic crises as problems of border security, the far right has legitimized its “concerns” about immigration and made them appealing to the public. The postwar compromise between capital and labor, which served as the economic basis for the welfare state, no longer holds. Deindustrialization, austerity, and Brexit have destroyed the British economy, and sections of the British electorate seem to long for a time when economic crises could be solved by a simple spatial fix: the empire. But the wars and poverty caused by imperialism’s search for profits—and the climate crisis caused by the world’s industrial nations—are making large swathes of the planet uninhabitable, forcing more and more people to leave their homes. As Nadine El-Enany writes in the New Left Review, Britain’s increasingly draconian border politics are a “continuation of colonial violence: an attempt to police the nation’s last frontier, so that the wealth and status gained from imperial conquest is preserved, materially and symbolically—and withheld from former colonial subjects.”

The new form of fascism that is emerging across Europe today—from Britain, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, or Hungary to Germany, Austria, and France—is different from twentieth-century fascism. While European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s relied on paramilitaries, veterans’ clubs, youth clubs, and other such voluntary organizations, the new far right is emblematic of the atomized spirit of neoliberalism. The authoritarian personality described by Theodor Adorno and other critical theorists in the 1940s and 1950s was based on the submission to a higher authority, but the new authoritarianism rejects the collective which is perceived as oppressive and tyrannical. The “lone wolf shooter” is an example of this new fascist subjectivity.

The language that is used to make claims against the state—ethnic, sexual, or gender minorities, the “global elite,” or anything else perceived to be oppressive—is framed in terms of individual self-determination and sovereignty. The sociologists Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey describe this attitude as “libertarian authoritarianism.” Seemingly a contraction in terms, their idea of freedom is based on a rejection of the common good in the name of “possessive individualism.” What we are seeing across Europe today, then, may not—or perhaps not yet—be fascism. But the social and political infrastructure that would allow this individualized fascism to grow into something more sinister is already being built. And far-right groups are likely to find new recruits among those radicalized by the UK riots or racist “anti-immigration” marches in Germany.

Fascism has historically followed anticommunist crackdowns or crises in leftist politics. In Britain, Keir Starmer purged the entire left wing of his party to get back at Jeremy Corbyn, erasing in the process any parliamentary resistance to the anti-immigration status quo. The bulwark of leftist activism that would protect communities from far-right threats is simply no longer there; apart from pro-Palestinian activism, which has surged since October 7, the left hasn’t found a way of organizing itself politically. In Germany, Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians has caused a rift in leftist and anti-racist activism, and the electoral left is no longer a political force. Since January, thousands of people have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the rise of the far right. But their refusal to address Gaza—or the tendency to conflate anti-imperialism with antisemitism—shows that the German left has failed to understand the geopolitical and discursive context in which far-right ideology, and especially violent Islamophobia, emerged.

The traditional parties and civil society have all played a role in creating the conditions for a nascent fascism to flourish. As Richard Seymour explains in Disaster Nationalism, “Fascism is a pathology that arises within the democratic mainstream.” The alignment of politics, public opinion, civil society, and state institutions—including the police and judiciary—with far-right ideology, as well as the normalization of racism in European societies, show that far-right positions have again become “valid and respectable,” or what Germans call salonfähig. Just how quickly or successfully the far right can take advantage of these favorable conditions remains to be seen. But if Islamophobia, anti-immigrant riots, and other racist violence continue to be treated as “legitimate concerns” by the state, politicians, the media, and civil society, we will have a difficult time trying to stop them.