German Chancellor in latest deranged speech claims that Alternative für Deutschland "stands in the tradition" of the Holocaust

I write this from the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, just north of Rostock. In three months we’ll have state elections here, and Alternative für Deutschland are far and away the strongest party. The last poll pegged their numbers at 36%. The centre-right Christian Democrats, meanwhile, are weaker here than in any other German state; they’ll be lucky if they scrape by in September with 10% of the vote.

Now, the CDU have never been that strong in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but they owe their particular and present weakness largely to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Since the 2024 election campaign, Merz has taken the Union in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on a steady march down from a high of nearly 20% into the depths of their present misery. Along the way, Merz completed a process begun by his predecessors, Merkel and Scholz, namely the full and total social normalisation of the AfD across East Germany.

This past weekend – as they stare down an impending electoral embarrassment unprecedented in their history – the Meck-Pomm division of the CDU held their state party congress. Things are already bad enough for the poor Union blighters, but to make them worse Merz swooped in to deliver yet another of his bizarre gaffe-ridden speeches. He let slip various strange statements over the course of forty minutes, but one passage of his speech in particular has me thinking that maybe I have had Merz wrong this whole time, and that maybe the man is actually not the most bumbling clown chancellor the Federal Republic has ever had, but rather a deep-cover operative on a secret mission from the AfD to crash and burn the Union with no survivors.

In the middle of a standard lament about the demise of the “political middle,” Merz spent a few words deploring the ex-communists in Die Linke (presently polling at 13% in Meck-Pomm), before turning his ire to the Evil Nazi Hitler Fascists in the AfD:

And there is … a party … that stands in the tradition of the worst injustice our country has ever known in its history. A party that not only wants to return to the days before Helmut Kohl and Konrad Adenauer, but a party questions everything that has made our country great and successful. We must engage more forcefully with this party. This phenomenon did not appear overnight and will not vanish by day’s end; rather, it poses the fundamental question of where the Federal Republic of Germany should move in the coming years and decades. And not everyone will be pleased when I quote a former prominent Green politician. But not everything has to be wrong simply because it comes from a Green. A few days ago, Joschka Fischer said on a talk show that this AfD wants to take Germany back to the time before Adenauer. Ladies and gentlemen, the time before Adenauer was a time of nationalism, a time of the worst excesses of that nationalism. With Konrad Adenauer, we left nationalism behind in Germany and we never want to go back there, which is why we will not leave our country to the extremists.

So, in order of ascending craziness: 1) Merz claims that the AfD want to take us back to a pre-Adenauer nationalism, which is a roundabout allusion to National Socialism. Then, 2) as support for this claim, Merz cites a leading politician from the Greenss, apparently forgetting that the Greens are among the most absolutely loathed parties in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (presently polling at around 4%). And because that is not enough, he additionally 3) claims that the AfD “stands in the tradition of the worst injustice our country has ever known in its history,” which is a veiled way of saying that the AfD “stands in the tradition of” the Holocaust.

Set aside the fact that careless comparisons like this are a terrible idea, because they always entail the risk of legal consequences: Many AfD supporters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are former CDU voters. It is a very bold strategy to set about winning these people back by calling them a bunch of genocidal Nazis. Then we must remember, as I said above, that the AfD has become a totally normal party in the East, and that talking in this way about the AfD here just makes you look out of touch or crazy (or both). And finally, I would just like to know practically what Merz thinks is supposed to happen after the September vote. He spent his party congress speech railing against Die Linke and the AfD, two parties which between them are almost certain to win over half the seats in the state parliament. The Union with its morally ambitious firewalls is on the verge of walling itself off from most of the Eastern electorate, railing against phantom Nazis the whole time.

Merz is a secret AfD agent, that’s the only way to explain this. He’s working hard to get the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler party an outright majority by September. It’s not an easy task, but if anyone can do it he can.

Sunset in Warnemünde.