The Purpose of the Anti-AfD System Is What It Does
Thoughts on the increasingly retarded political protest culture in Germany
On Saturday, the United States turned 250, and Alternative für Deutschland held their national party congress in Erfurt. It was a scene of a now-familiar carnival: The Antifa alliance Widersetzen and other leftist groups summoned protestors from across the Federal Republic to obstruct the congress via road blockades; police responded with the largest security operation that the state of Thüringen has ever seen.
As at Essen in 2024 and Riesa in 2025 and Gießen also in 2025, nothing substantial happened. The protestors ended up blocking roads and tramlines that were already closed, long after the AfD delegates had assembled at their venue. The press ran footage of protestors marching up and down streets chanting the familiar slogans while Antifa beat up a few journalists from Junge Freiheit and Apollo News and threw some bottles at police officers. Ultimately authorities tallied eleven injured officers and 65 criminal offences, mostly property damage and assault. As always, we read that the protesters were “mostly peaceful.”
Spectacles like this become intriguing when you remember that both sides – the protestors making a futile fuss over AfD party business and the police fighting to contain them – are funded by the German state. According to the Ostdeutsche Allgemeine, 10,000 officers from across the country convened to keep the rabble rousers at bay on Saturday. If that figure is accurate, then German taxpayers will have spent around 20 million Euros to secure this one singular party congress against the activist organisations that German taxpayers also fund with millions more Euros.
Why is this happening?
A much-cited proverb of British cybernetician Stafford Beer holds that “The purpose of a system is what it does.” Beer later called this “a basic dictum” that “makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgement, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.” As an analytical principle, POSIWID is useful because it allows us to move beyond the claimed purpose of the anti-AfD apparatus. Protesters have never once succeeded in obstructing an AfD party congress, while the highly ritualistic and repetitive nature of their demonstrations has steadily immunised the public against their message. In early 2024, widespread protest actions could still suppress AfD support at least somewhat, but now they seem to have lost all discernible effect. Highly vocal, overexposed opposition instead cements the status of the AfD as a true political alternative among sympathisers and enemies alike, redounding only to the party’s benefit.
That is one rather bizarre objective purpose of the anti-AfD system, but actually it’s in keeping with how the establishment has opposed the AfD more generally. The people in charge have discredited their own parties and institutions with a wide range of self-defeating tactics. Together, these failures have conspired to make our Evil Fascist Nazi Hitlerites the most popular political party in Germany by a mile. The AfD have not had to do very much to achieve this outcome at all.
The anti-AfD system has a few other objective purposes I can think of as well. At the most banal level, it just mobilises a lot of people in service of a vast media spectacle. Activists, Antifa rabble-rousers, political celebrities, freaked out Uni girls and their forbearing boyfriends – the system assembles these types from across the country and gets them to rehearse canned phrases about how much they loathe fascism over and over. It likewise assembles a great many police to contain the more violently inclined among the protesters while thousands of journalists provide hours of breathless reporting on the circus. Everybody gets to participate in the media hullabaloo surrounding Alternative für Deutschland, but beyond the confines of the AfD party congress the hullabaloo itself has as much to do with the nuts and bolts of real politics as professional sporting events have to do with warfare. The anti-AfD system allows demonstrators to engage in cheap antifascism signaling and it permits the increasingly repressive German state to mount a theatrical defence of the democratic rights purportedly still enjoyed by opposition parties.
Particularly since 2015, the Federal Republic has poured increasing financial resources into the civil society morass, effectively domesticating the activist left. Truly anti-establishment protests, like the destructive 2017 riots agains the G20 summit in Hamburg, don’t really happen anymore. Instead we have a new activist scene arrayed against establishment enemies. Along the way this novel, complex system has developed its own dynamics and started to behave in ways its architects never anticipated. What has made the problem worse, is the general ideological scattering that has afflicted the German left as climatism (their prior unifying focus) enters a state of advanced ideological decay. To maintain unity in their ranks, the activists have come to lean heavily on the AfD as a common cause. They now exist in an uneasy symbiosis with the “fascists” they spend all their time so eagerly imagining and denouncing.
As I keep saying, they’re losing but we’re not really winning.
As a general thing, and for many if not most of the participants, I think protests like this are not meant to have any functional effect on the thing they're protesting (stopping the AfD congress, for instance), but rather serving as emotional tribal membership reinforcement.
May the European left never learn what the Streisand effect is.