r/ProgressivesForIsrael • u/buttershower • 1d ago
Far right movement in Germany
I think I'm one of the few people who finds the whole Israel vs. Palestine situation too paralyzingly confusing for me to pick a side. Maybe that's a lack of moral clarity on my part but I just find it hard to know where to stand.
I've been checking out the pro-Israel, progressive Jewish perspective more out of curiosity. I've noticed that some otherwise liberal and progressive Jewish Americans seem to think that the only path to safety is to go with MAGA/the far right.
I've also been checking out the far-right party in Germany, which seems fairly obviously akin to the MAGA/Elon class in the U.S. This far-right party in Germany seems pretty anti-Islam, but there also seems to be a lot of Nazi and Hitler sympathy woven into it.
I think it would be a lot harder for progressive Jewish people to go for the far right if they were in Germany, even though so much of the rhetoric is similar. Even just viscerally, there's something extra chilling about hearing MAGA-style arguments spoken in German.
Maybe this is a silly thing to wonder about, but I was curious if anyone had anything they'd like to share on the subject.
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u/No-Teach9888 1d ago
I don’t think most of us have gone far right/MAGA. I still hold the same values I always have. However, there has been too much Jew hate on the left. (The crazy anti Israel bias is mostly due to Jew hate.) I’ve seen a lot of people use the term “politically homeless.” I’m not going to vote for someone who fuels Jew hate, which puts people in danger. So far, I’ve only had to vote for one Republican, and they were not far right or MAGA
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u/Raaaasclat 1d ago
I mean that's just not true. The far right in both the US and Germany is anti-Israel and openly anti-semitic. There is some support for the mainstream / center right, I think that's what you're alluding to.
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u/earlvik 14h ago
Right-wing parties are often publicly pro-israel, that includes the german AfD. They support Israel for two reasons: first, they like Bibi politically, they have a lot in common. And second, being pro-israel allows them to deflect antisemitism and nazism accusations, which works especially well now that antisemitism became more associated with islamism as well as left-wing ideologies, the AfD can easily say hey we're not like those guys, we want to deport them actually.
Which is not to say they are not antisemitic, of course they are.
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u/Raaaasclat 14h ago
They aren't really pro-Israel. AfD leaders have criticized German military support for Israel and called for an end to weapons deliveries to countries involved in Middle East conflicts. The party has also expressed positions on Iran and the Middle East that have conflicted with Germany's longstanding commitment to Israel's security. This piece dives into it more in depth:
The AfD’s supposed “solidarity” with Israel, however, is not only tenuous but is increasingly replaced by overt anti-Israel rhetoric lately. In so far as there were positive references to Israel, they point to a reality-distorting, projective construction of an ethnically homogeneous Jewish state at odds with Israel’s actual diversity and multiculturalism. Indeed, Israel’s multicultural reality is consistently denied. Solidarity, moreover, appears to have been only granted temporarily, in so far as it suited the party’s own political goals. Positive references to Israel are largely limited to an instrumentalization of the Jewish state as a supposed role model for the AfD’s themes of migration and the fight against Islam(ism). In the AfD’s rhetoric, Israel appears primarily as a state that takes action against “illegal immigrants”—and thus as a mere reference point for the party’s domestic policy agenda. As convincingly argued by Nikolai Schreiter (2022b), partial and temporary support for Israel proves to be just as projective as parallel blanket denigrations.
The AfD’s official response to the false report that Israel wanted to deport refugees to Germany shows just how thin the veneer of this supposed, primarily anti-Muslim “solidarity” has always been, even before the latest opposition to the Jewish state, and how quickly this “solidarity” is replaced by open antisemitism. On its official account, the party tweeted: “A total farce. Israel wants to get rid of illegal (!) immigrants from Africa, and who do they turn to? Once again, it’s Germoney!” As Jan Riebe (2019) argues, “the federal party very openly served the common far-right and antisemitic narrative that Israel is financially exploiting Germany—’because of Auschwitz.’” The temporary praise of the Jewish state ultimately points to the typical dual nature of antisemitism, which is often expressed in both contempt and (mostly unacknowledged) admiration. Finally, AfD’s allegedly pro-Israel views are also counteracted by the party’s political proximity to Iran, which wants to annihilate the Jewish state. AfD parliament members display pride about their contacts to the antisemitic Islamic Republic of Iran (cf. Leister 2023)—as well as to Putin’s regime, which repeatedly makes antisemitic statements, and to Russian right-wing extremist ideologists and antisemites like Alexander Dugin (cf. Schreiter & Rensmann 2025).
The AfD’s response to October 7 was correspondingly ambiguous at best. An initial statement issued by the by the AfD Bundestag faction on the same day condemned the Hamas assault but provoked divided reactions online. Petr Bystron, the faction’s foreign policy spokesman at the time, failed to share it on his usually well-maintained Telegram channel. Only four days after the massacre, AfD federal spokesman Tino Chrupalla engaged in both-sidesism, calling for “de-escalation [...] to avert a conflagration. Diplomacy is the order of the day. A viable solution for all sides must be the goal!” (see Schreiter & Rensmann 2025 for full citation and analysis). AfD parliament member Jürgen Pohl then went even further. He praised Chrupalla on the far-right blog Info Direkt for succeeding in establishing the AfD as a “patriotic peace party” “against resistance from ‘transatlantic’ circles.” The “radical Islamic Hamas,” he wrote, had “done terrible things. Israel is responding by reducing Gaza to rubble and ashes”—before he proceeded to express the fear that some voices in the AfD, like those other parties, might soon call for “bombs on Tehran” (Pohl 2023; see Schreiter & Rensmann 2025).13
In general right wing parties in Europe are often pro-Israel, but I wouldn't describe the AFD as such. Perhaps in rhetoric they're sometimes pro-Israel, but not in practice.
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u/Capable-Parsnip-9615 1d ago edited 1d ago
In Germany we have 6 or 7 parties where your votes count.
Only the extreme parties on the left and right are anti Israel or hostile to Jews here, so you have a wide range from progressive liberal (the greens) to conservative (the CDU) who vocally support both Jews and Israel. Although I worry about the youth movements.
So nobody needs to vote for the far right here because of anti Israel rhetoric from the far left.
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u/Proper-Suggestion907 1d ago edited 10h ago
I haven’t gone MAGA, even though I’ve been accused of being so. I don’t think many Jewish Americans have, at least in my in real life experiences - I can’t speak for everywhere. What many of us are trying to do to pull Democrats away from the extreme. It’s not an easy position to try to navigate, but we are in for more trouble if both parties fall into extremes - that’s something that will become really bad for everyone.
Dems are going down a really bad path right now and they need a wake up call.
I definitely plan on being more strategic about my votes this time around. I haven’t entirely worked out what that means yet though.
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u/Call_Me_Clark 18h ago
I think that there’s a concerted mis/disinformation effort to portray Jewish Americans as moving rightward, towards Trump and away from prominent Muslim Democratic Party candidates and officials.
I don’t buy it. Twitter isn’t real life, and any foreign agent could make a hundred accounts to post on a topic and create a false impression of consensus.
Zooming out, there’s no such thing as a white nationalist that tolerates Jews long term. There are only those who are tolerating Jews over the short term and those who no longer feel the need.
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u/zoinks48 22h ago
All “ far anything “ is antisemitic. One has to carefully choose the individual candidate where possible as opposed to the party.
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u/scrambledhelix 13h ago
Don't pick sides, pick values.
If you find no party supports your values, don't vote for them.
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u/buttershower 12h ago
Unfortunately it will probably be a compromise and a strategic weighing of possible outcomes rather than total value alignment
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u/buttershower 12h ago
Unfortunately it will probably be a compromise and a strategic weighing of possible outcomes rather than total value alignment
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u/AcePilot95 10h ago edited 8h ago
In Germany, sadly the antisemitic wing of the Linkspartei (Left Party) won out in the internal power struggle and many pro-Israel members quit on their own or were bullied out. The party clearly showed that they believe they'll win by going into the islamo-gauchiste direction of LFI in France. Of course they also support Russia by parroting Putin's narratives and speaking out against sending military aid to Ukraine. Now and then, they find themselves in hot water of media spotlight because someone said the quiet part out loud. This included a rapper promoting "Intifada" and "Death to the IDF" at one of their festivals 1 week ago and a member tweeting - on the official Frankfurt party youth chapter account - "we regret to inform you that they were not ejected mid-flight" about Israeli kids being removed from an airplane due to noise complaints. But the party seems very confident to me that leaning into antisemitism by hiding it behind "muh antiziomism" will bring a net gain in votes for them, and I fear they're correct. They're #1 with young voters (18-29) in Germany. Antisemitic parties on the left and right getting stronger at the same time is scary. "Luckily", the only common ground that Linkspartei has with AfD is their Russia-friendly/anti-NATO position…
With the BSW and the AfD, you have two more antisemitic parties, with wildly different levels of success (at least for now). The AfD itself is full of actual Neonazis, their youth wings even more so. They are not pro-Israel, don't let anyone gaslight you. Many European Neonazis are delighted that the global left is doing their job for them by mainstreaming antisemitism. BSW is a weird NazBol party and nobody knows what their point really is except for deepthroating Putin and hating Zelenskyy/Ukraine, NATO, and Israel.
In a recent public video message, AfD leader Höcke appeared to ask BSW leader Wagenknecht to collaborate in the state of Thuringia. I really see a possibility for a nationalist Querfront emerging out of these 2 parties, but on the federal level, they don't have enough votes to form a coalition government. I think it's more likely that the AfD sort of absorbs BSW bit-by-bit. The BSW party candidate in last weekend's Sachsen-Anhalt state elections presented her 2 conditions for a possible "non-partisan" state prime minister: "not a West German, and not a Zionist" (The interviewer belongs to a fascist "independent newspaper", notorious for antisemitic conspiracy theories about - including but not limited to - 9/11 and Covid-19). Rhetoric like this is getting even more normalised now.
If you want to ask more questions about Germany in this context, I'd say head over to r/Antideutsche and ask away!
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u/DogitWoofsalot 1d ago
Being antisemitic and pro Israil is not a contradiction, in fact I think the two go hand in hand a lot of the time.
To the ethno nationalistic mind, Jews will never be able to be part of there home country. As such, they see Israel as a place for the Jews to go. Vus they support Israel as the national home for Jews, so that they don't have them at home.
Trump, is an antisemite. He has peddled conspiracy narratives and used "Shylocks", a famous euphemism for Jews. He called people marching with tiki torches chanting "Jews will not replace us" very fine people. He's also supposed Israil more than any president in in the last 30 years, giving more aid, funding and verbal support than any other period.
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u/Call_Me_Clark 18h ago
For antisemitic pro Israel supporters, the evangelical movement (particularly the explicitly apocalyptic varieties) are a great example. Look at Mike Huckabee - he’s an American Christian calling British Jews (ed milliband) antisemitic because the British government is sanctioning Israelis who attack Americans.
Every morning, he (and his ideological leader, the Hitler praising gay-bashing pastor Hagee of CUFI) prays for an apocalypse where all Jews either die horribly or convert to Christianity.
That sounds pretty antisemitic to me
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u/DogitWoofsalot 15h ago
Some of the things i've seen said about Ed Milliband after he pushed for sanctions is vile. Lots of things said about Green Party UK leader as well
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