The far-right in Germany is bad, actually

Fans of 1930s Germany will be delighted by the AfD's latest results.

The far-right German party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), has won a regional election.

They’re the first far-right party to get there since Adolf Hitler’s party did it in the Second World War. And that turned out fine, right?

Maybe I’m being unfair. Of course, the AfD are nothing like the Nazis. After all, Hitler talked of a “great replacement” of German people, called for “a confederacy of the fatherlands” and threatened to shoot and gas migrants, including women and children.

No, wait, those were all quotes from AfD leaders. 

The AfD are not a right-wing party, they are a far-right party. They whisper about ‘remigration’, a frankly evil policy that would see German citizens forced out of the country, left homeless in countries where they may not even speak the language. They want disabled kids forced out of mainstream schools. These guys are too far on the right for Le Pen.

But when Sky News Tweeted the AfD’s election win, the replies were full of the usual suspects asking why it was ‘far-right’ to be concerned about immigration. In fact, everywhere I look for coverage of the AfD result, the comments are full of the same sentiment: “stop calling them far-right”. 

It’s not far-right to be concerned about immigration. It’s far-right to be … um … on the very far-end of the left-right political spectrum. At a certain point, you have to call a spade a spade.

It reminds me of this video:

Here’s something the far-right won’t tell you: wanting to reduce immigration is not an especially controversial position. Most centrists, the centre-left and centre-right, generally agree net migration into the Western world at its current rate is unsustainable.

That’s why the vast majority of leaders in the Western world, across the entire political spectrum, have stated an aim to reduce net migration. 

But far-right grifters like the AfD convince their supporters that this isn’t the case. They tell their supporters that everyone is ignoring immigration, except for them, and only they can stop it.

There is nothing wrong with believing net migration needs to be controlled: there is something deeply wrong with hating immigrants. The AfD and their comrades around the world would have you believe the two must go together. They’ll tell you that, because a government isn’t prepared to demonise immigrants and greenlight racism, they’re not serious about stopping immigration. 

We have this in the UK. Both Labour and the Conservatives have in their manifesto a desire to reduce net migration and both have a plan to do it. But Reform will insist they aren’t serious about it because, unlike Nigel Farage, they’re not prepared to say horrible things about foreigners.

But Nigel Farage does not have a credible plan to reduce immigration. He has no plan - he only has talk. Reform UK supporters are surely the only bloc of voters that seem to say: “I’m sick of politicians wasting time walking the walk, I want a leader who’ll focus on talking the talk! What we need is all talk (no action)!”

But rhetoric will not reduce immigration. That’s what mainstream politicians realise, and the far-right do not. The AfD’s hard talk, Nigel Farage’s xenophobia, and the rest of them and their racist rhetoric: all it does is tear the fabric of social cohesion. All it does is make some people angry, and other people scared. It just turns us into nastier, more dangerous, less happy nations. 

And rhetoric over action is a staple of the far-right.

But more than that, the far-right are liars. They promise that they can change things - but they can't. These parties, if given a shot at the top job, would not be able to reduce immigration. There is no lever you can pull to change the country in a flash. Ask Liz Truss, she tried to change the economy and caused a catastrophic crash. 

If Nigel Farage became Prime Minister, he’d realise there are very few options for reducing immigration. If he shut the doors, as his manifesto pledged, the economy would collapse, the pound would collapse, our national services would shutter within months. But he can promise whatever he likes, because he knows he'll never have to deliver. He, like the entirety of the far-right, can lie.

Reducing immigration is difficult when we have an economy built on it. That’s the reason politicians struggle.

What makes the AfD far-right is their claim that there are simple answers to difficult questions. 

But above all, it is their obsession with immigration. Any sensible government should be looking at a whole range of things to make the country better: improving transport, preserving our natural environment, building houses, improving the standard of education, creating jobs, driving positive health outcomes.

Yet these far-right politicians are a CD with only one track: immigration. They don’t present a positive vision of the country we can be, they simply talk down everything and everyone.

It is completely unserious to think one issue rises above any other, and shows why the lot of them are unfit to govern. They are obsessed with immigration and that materialises as racism: it’s akin to the far-left’s obsession with Israel that materialises as anti-semitism. That obsession is always what marks an extremist out.