THE NEW YORK TIMES: Challenges to identity, real and imagined, drive Europe’s far right

The rise of a far-right party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany, represents a skewing of history, fuelled by its own, sometimes imaginary vision of the past. It feeds, analysts say, on widespread alienation from a liberal, multicultural, united Germany committed to the memory of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes.

The AfD is now the most popular party nationwide, polls say, close to governing a German state for the first time, and did well again in two more state elections Sunday. It has benefited from economic and industrial decline and a sense of insecurity, which the party blames on the extensive migration of young Muslims in the last decade.

The party finished first in the small eastern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and a good third in Berlin, while the Christian Democratic Union of Chancellor Friedrich Merz did poorly, in what he himself called “a disaster.” The results will heighten talk of the party’s replacing the unpopular chancellor before the end of his term.

The AfD has thrived on a key element that ties most populist parties together, especially those of the far right: nostalgia for a society and nation lost to time, even if they exist only in gilded memory or fantasy.

“We live in a world today of fragmentation and growing inequality, no longer with unifying themes or a unifying narrative,” said Mohamed A. El-Erian, an economist at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

That sense of insecurity, analysts say, is driving many people to yearn for the narratives they do know, especially in the past, when life is remembered as simpler, family structures seemed more defined, and Western nations were largely Christian and less diverse.

Across Europe, far-right leaders have painted that idea of the past as preferable to the present, downplaying or dismissing inconvenient facts, such as Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, collaboration with the Nazis, Soviet occupation or the inequalities of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

France’s far-right party, the National Rally, ahead in the polls for next year’s crucial presidential election, has made French identity central to its ideology, which includes praising heroes like Joan of Arc and downplaying the Vichy regime.

Its emphasis on national values, assimilation and state preferences for citizens is largely shared by other far-right parties, including the Party of Freedom of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats and the Reform UK party of Nigel Farage.

Behind tough positions on restricting immigration — and the deportation, or “remigration,” of immigrants and criminals — these parties envision a threat to their culture and identity. They see national or even European culture as largely white and Christian, threatened by globalization, Islam and the dilution of nationalism in institutions like the European Union.

Leaders of the American MAGA movement have expressed similar fears, with Vice President JD Vance worrying about “civilizational death,” both in Europe and the United States, and arguing that ancestry means more than adherence to a national creed.

“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say” anyone who does not agree with “progressive liberalism” does not belong in the country, he said last year.

In his recent book, Communion, Vance asserts that the shift from “Western Christian civilization” to “secular global liberalism” is to blame for rising racial strife, the erosion of traditional marriage and a decline in population growth.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, too, has emphasized Christianity as a “sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the Old World and the New.”

The yearning for a proud identity is particularly strong in the former East Germany, which was essentially annexed in a peaceful takeover in 1989. As the country unified, West Germans arrived as a new elite to run businesses, or shut them down, and as much as a quarter of the population moved west, including many young women.

In a conversation in Weimar, in Thuringia, and where German democracy collapsed before the Nazis, Anna Wenske, 69, spoke of the East German identity as something lost.

“It was more German,” she said. “Not little America, like the West.”

Key AfD figures such as Björn Höcke have played into that persistent division, suggesting that West Germans are not even German anymore, just colonized Americans, said Steffen Mau, a sociologist who was born in East Germany.

“They give people with an inferiority complex the feeling that they were better Germans, and that they are authentic, they are the future,” he said.

Many East Germans felt that they resisted their Soviet occupiers more than West Germans resisted the culture of their occupiers, especially the Americans. Communist East Germany cast itself as the inheritor of the resistance to Hitler, historians have said, and hence did not embrace the culture of guilt that dominated the West after the war.

For many young people in Germany, who are voting in large numbers for the far left or the far right, the war was not their responsibility, and the AfD’s appeal to highlight national accomplishment, not collective crime, is attractive.

Much as President Donald Trump has pushed US institutions to downplay slavery and highlight heroes like George Washington, the AfD wants to remake education, museums and public media to downplay German guilt and emphasize German pride and greatness.

“More Bismarck, less Hitler,” Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the AfD’s deputy state chair and education spokesperson in Saxony-Anhalt, has said.

Germany is having “a psychodrama over its own history,” said Yascha Mounk, a German-American political scientist. “The debate over right-wing populism is in part what to make of German history,” he said.

The AfD, he said, wants to abandon the dominant “Erinnerungskultur,” or Culture of Remembrance, about the crimes of the Nazis, for a different, prouder future.

What the shift from memory culture really represents, said Ivan Krastev, a political scientist and analyst, “is the end of the long political 20th century.” Responsibility for the Nazis, he said, “cannot be used to stabilise Germany’s political system any longer.”

In Eastern Germany especially, he said, the nostalgia is not for communism or the Nazi regime. Instead, the yearning is for the huge numbers of people who left the East, and the quiet life remembered by those who stayed.

“They are nostalgic for the world that they believe they understood, and now they’re living in a world that they do not understand,” Krastev said. “The pride people felt in their own lives was not honoured, and people deprived of their pride are very easily tempted by political parties that start to talk about pride, grandeur and greatness.”

Echoes of the same arguments were clear in talks given at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy by Jordan Bardella, the deputy to France’s National Rally, and by Roberto Vannacci, a former general who has started an Italian political party, National Future, which is further to the right than that of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

The far-right speakers were far from unopposed: Centrists at the annual economic forum attacked them, accusing them of tilting toward fascism, and cited François Mitterrand’s last speech as French president, when he said that in Europe, “nationalism is war.”

Where voters stand between these competing forces will be put to the test with key elections next year in France, Italy, Poland and Spain, all of which have strong far-right parties trying to push politics in their direction.

The West has grown complacent about democracy and “started taking it for granted,” said Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics and the author of What Happened to Liberal Democracy?

Democratic backsliding and the rise of populist politics are “very much driven by the failures of liberal democracy,” he said.

The two broad lines of that failure, he said, are economic — with rising inequality and the neglect of efforts to spread wealth — and the rise of what he said were “top-down cultural politics,” which has treated less-educated and less-advantaged voters and their concerns with contempt, opening a void for far-right parties to fill.

To a large extent, what is happening in Germany is an international phenomenon, noted John Kampfner, a British analyst of Germany, where he is also a citizen. “Each of these populist movements have their specificities but follow similar tramlines,” he said.

“A population that feels insecure,” he said, “that equates globalization and transnational identity with insecurity, is very open to this kind of identitarian politics from the nationalist conservative point of view.”