M. NEDİM HAZAR | COMMENTARY
Germany’s surging political movement, the AfD, is not picking up where Hitler left off. It is a resistant strain produced by the very immune system Germany created to ensure that Hitler could never happen again.
Kanye West is known in the music industry as “Ye.” In 2025, Ye crossed one red line after another: selling T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas, releasing a song titled “Heil Hitler” on May 8—the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe—and declaring himself a Nazi, among other provocations. He caused an uproar but later expressed remorse.
In January 2026, he took out a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal to apologize, attributing his behavior to an undiagnosed brain injury and untreated bipolar disorder. His album Bully was released in March 2026, and on April 1 he embarked on his first tour in a decade.
The European leg of that tour became a chain of cancellations and bans. In April, the United Kingdom denied him entry, forcing the cancellation of his appearance at the Wireless Festival. After the French government attempted to block his performance, his Marseille concert was postponed; Marseille Mayor Benoît Payan declared him “not welcome.” Concerts in Poland and Switzerland were also canceled, while his show in Italy came under pressure from trade unions and politicians.
Two episodes from the tour stand out.
The first took place in the Netherlands. Ye’s concert at the GelreDome in Arnhem was debated for months in parliament, within the government and, ultimately, in court. The concert went ahead in early June, with a significant portion of the audience arriving from Germany, just 20 kilometers across the border.
The second was in Istanbul. On May 30, Ye performed before 118,000 people at Atatürk Olympic Stadium, setting what was reported as a stadium concert record. The fact that his show had effectively migrated to Istanbul because of restrictions elsewhere in Europe became a controversy in itself.
The latest development came from Russia. Last week, Gazprom Arena in St. Petersburg rejected two concerts announced for October on the grounds that no rental agreement had been signed. Local media reported that the cancellation followed “a phone call from above.”
What is interesting is that Germany appears nowhere on this list. The country has developed a firm legal reflex when it comes to turning a foreign performer away at the border, yet it has failed to display the same clarity when classifying a political party operating on its own soil. Today and over the next few days, we will examine this issue more closely.
Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is a right-wing populist and far-right party founded in 2013, widely known for its anti-immigration and anti-Islam positions.
I am reproducing the following story exactly as it circulates in that vast ocean called the internet, where truth and falsehood are hopelessly intertwined:
“The 1980s. Berlin Olympic Stadium.
The stands are packed with young Germans.
They are there because Frank Zappa, one of the 20th century’s most important philosopher-artists, is scheduled to perform.
But there is a problem: The concert is supposed to have started, and Zappa is nowhere to be seen.
Half an hour passes, then an hour. Still nothing.
Exactly two hours later, he finally appears, walking slowly onto the stage.
He steps up to the microphone and looks out at the crowd.
Then, without warning, he raises his hand in a Nazi salute: ‘Heil Hitler!’
The stadium falls silent.
The Berlin crowd is stunned.
Slowly, a murmur begins to rise.
The man onstage remains unmoved.
Once again, he gives the Nazi salute: ‘Heil Hitler!’
A small section of the audience responds by shouting the same words.
But the artist is still dissatisfied.
He gives an even sharper Nazi salute and screams at the top of his lungs: ‘Heil Hitler!’
This time, the audience is better prepared. Nearly half the stadium repeats the words in unison.
Still, Frank Zappa is not satisfied.
He glares at the thousands before him, raises his arm once more and shouts again: ‘Heil Hitler!’
By now, the crowd understands what it is expected to do.
As one, they roar back, ‘Heil Hitler!’ shaking the entire stadium.
Then comes a silence—brief but tense.
Frank Zappa’s words break it:
‘You Germans! From what I can see, you still haven’t learned your lesson.
There will be no concert for you!’
He turns around and walks off the stage.”
We now know that no such concert took place and that this incident never happened. Yet the sociology prevailing in Germany today is such that we would no longer be entirely surprised if it had.
An INSA poll conducted for Bild on August 23, 2026, placed the AfD at a record-high 29 percent. INSA, headquartered in Erfurt, is one of Germany’s leading public opinion research firms. In the ARD-DeutschlandTrend survey, the party reached an all-time high of 28 percent, while the CDU/CSU fell to 21 percent, its lowest level since November 2021. Ahead of September’s election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD is in first place with 36 percent; in Saxony-Anhalt, it continues to break records.
But none of those figures is the real story.
The real story is that, in the same poll, 53 percent of Germans described the AfD as “far-right.” In other words, it is the leading party in a country where more than half the electorate regards it as extremist. A year ago, that figure was even higher: 61 percent. The number may be falling, but the party’s vote share is rising.
Understanding this widening gap is, in my view, the key to understanding what is happening in Germany.
Ten years ago, being branded “far-right” amounted to political death in Germany. Today, that label is no longer grounds for rejection for millions of voters. For some, it has become a reason to support the party. The debate over normalization has not merely ended; it appears that the normalization everyone feared has already taken place. What must now be discussed is how and why this happened.
And here we must confront a question that has become almost reflexive in Turkey and among Germany’s Turkish community:
“Is Germany returning to Hitler?”
There is something faintly reassuring about that question because it places an extraordinary development into a familiar framework. But it is also dangerous, because it causes us to look in the wrong direction. In my humble opinion, anyone seeking to understand the AfD should look not to 1933, but to the very system Germany constructed after 1945 to protect itself.
Let me state my conclusion now, for the benefit of those who may not have the patience to read to the end:
The AfD is not a movement picking up where Hitler left off. It is a resistant strain that evolved under 80 years of pressure exerted by the immune system Germany created to ensure that Hitler could never happen again.
Please note that I have deliberately chosen the word “strain.”
In microbiology, a strain is a genetic variant or subtype of a microorganism. Different strains of the same bacterial or viral species carry slight genetic variations. Every year, for example, a different strain of influenza may circulate, requiring the vaccine to be updated accordingly.
To return to my argument: This thesis does not mean that “the AfD is innocent.” On the contrary, I am trying to say something far more disturbing. Because, as we know, resistance produced by antibodies can make a pathogen much harder to treat.
Let us proceed layer by layer. Careless use of concepts causes the discussion to lose meaning before it has even begun. We must therefore take a step back.
According to Benedict Anderson’s classic definition, the nation is “an imagined political community.” Here, “imagined” does not mean false. The members of a nation do not actually know one another, yet they feel that they belong to the same community by reading the same newspapers, memorizing the same history textbooks, singing the same anthem and watching the same football matches. Nationalism is the political language of that feeling. It is not, in itself, a disease, but part of the fabric of modern society. Liberalism, conservatism and even socialism have all formed relationships with that fabric throughout history.
Fascism, however, is not simply a stronger degree of nationalism. It is a change of state.
It transforms the nation from a pluralistic form of belonging into an organic, homogeneous, sacred body governed by a single will. Within that body, difference is not richness but contamination.
The defining features of fascism are clear enough to be read as a checklist: the portrayal of the nation as an organic and homogeneous whole; the perpetual manufacture of internal enemies; the leadership principle and cult of the leader; the treatment of violence not merely as an instrument but as a founding principle; the promise of returning to a lost golden age and achieving national rebirth; the portrayal of pluralism and the rule of law as obstacles; and the permanent mobilization of society.
That last element is critical. Authoritarian military regimes want the public to remain silent. Fascism wants the public to speak on its behalf. As Orwell understood, it is not enough to obey Big Brother; one must sincerely love him.
Now let us read this checklist alongside the AfD.
An organic and homogeneous conception of the nation?
Yes—and it lies at the heart of the party’s ideological core.
The manufacture of internal enemies?
Yes.
A narrative about a lost golden age?
Yes.
A cult of the leader?
No. The party is governed by two co-chairs whose profiles do not even resemble one another.
Foundational violence and a paramilitary structure?
No. The party has no official street militia; whatever formations do exist merely create legal risks for it.
Mass mobilization?
No. The party has around 70,000 members; some village football clubs in Germany are larger.
An explicit rejection of pluralism?
Not in the party platform, though it is partly present in its rhetoric.
So what is the conclusion?
The AfD is not a textbook fascist movement, but it is carrying many of the political reflexes that make fascism possible back into the democratic system. Any analysis incapable of stating both of these things at once will produce either panic or complacency.
Danger does not always arrive in uniform, marching beneath banners and torchlight. Sometimes it comes through the ballot box, sometimes in the language of law, sometimes with promises of security—and most often by declaring: “We are the will of the people.”
Let us move to the second layer.
Yes, Nazism had a Führer; the AfD does not.
Nazism had a uniformed street force numbering in the millions; the AfD does not.
Nazism openly promised to destroy the parliamentary system. Today, the AfD seeks redress in court, applies to the Constitutional Court and celebrates rulings by administrative courts as political victories.
Nazism had a revolutionary program oriented toward a war economy. The AfD’s economic platform amounts largely to a form of Mittelstand conservatism centered on tax cuts, fiscal restraint in social spending and energy prices.
It is important to stress that these observations do not exonerate the AfD. They do, however, explain why the Nazi analogy backfires.
When you say, “These people are Nazis,” you hand the AfD its most powerful weapon: victimhood.
Voters know the party they support. They know their neighbors. They know themselves. And they say: “I am not a Nazi.”
From that moment on, they believe the party rather than you. This, I suspect, has been Germany’s recurring mistake for the past 20 years: moral diagnosis has replaced sociological diagnosis.
Does that mean there is no continuity at all?
Of course there is. But it exists not at the organizational level; it exists at the level of vocabulary.
Björn Höcke, a former history teacher and head of the AfD in Thuringia, has twice been convicted for using a slogan associated with the SA. Although he holds no formal position in the party’s federal leadership, he leads its ethnocultural wing and helps determine its ideological direction.
Alexander Gauland, a former lawyer and civil servant who spent 40 years in the CDU, co-founded the AfD in 2013 and now serves as its honorary chairman. He once dismissed the Nazi era as no more than “a speck of bird droppings” in a thousand years of glorious German history.
Höcke described Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial as a “monument of shame” and called for a 180-degree reversal in Germany’s politics of remembrance.
These were not slips of the tongue. In my view, they were declarations of intent.
But note the distinction: What is being demanded is not the restoration of Nazism, but the removal of Nazism from its central place in German national memory.
The two are not the same.
The first is undoubtedly impossible. The second is now entirely possible—and that, I believe, is where the real danger lies.
That will be enough for today. In the next article, we will examine whether the AfD’s ideas truly originate with Hitler—or with the ideological workshops established after him.
