The turning point in Magdeburg shows that, 80 years after the Nazi terror, significant sections of the ruling class are once again turning to fascist methods to impose their policies of war and social cuts against the population.
In Saxony-Anhalt, for the first time since the end of the Nazi dictatorship, an AfD politician has been elected president of a state parliament: Tobias Rausch, a close confidant of the far-right politician Ulrich Siegmund. He received 48 votes—even though the AfD does not have a majority of its own. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a split-off from the Left Party, and the CDU helped put him in office.
And it is not just these two parties. In the Bundestag committees, all parties have long been working together with the AfD. Bodo Ramelow, the long-time Left Party state premier of Thuringia, even boasted back in 2020 that his vote had helped an AfD politician become vice president of the state parliament.
The AfD is not an alien body. It is the sharpest expression of the right-wing shift of all the parties. You cannot support a genocide, prepare for war against Russia and impose historic social cuts without returning to authoritarian and ultimately fascist methods.
This is evident not only in the way the AfD is courted, but also in the way it is criticized. Yesterday, Defence Minister Pistorius—the man presiding over a military buildup on a scale not seen since Hitler—led an SPD protest march against the AfD. Of all places, it marched to Bebelplatz, the site of the Nazi book burning. And there, of all things, he led the assembled crowd in singing the German national anthem—just as the Nazis did during the book burning.
With anti-fascists like these, who needs fascists?
No, the fascists cannot be fought in alliance with the parties responsible for their rise and which themselves promote nationalism and militarism.
The fight against the AfD requires a break with all capitalist parties and the mobilization of workers throughout the world. In France, hundreds of thousands of students and workers are protesting against Macron’s social cuts; in Spain, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets against the housing crisis.
The decisive question is to arm this enormous social force with a socialist perspective directed against the root cause of fascism and war: capitalism. This is what the Socialist Equality Party is fighting for, together with its sister parties of the Fourth International throughout the world.