A massive 15,000 people traveled in 200 buses from all over Germany aiming to block a national conference of the far-right AfD in the Saxon town of Riesa on Saturday, January 11. But two days earlier, a new hate campaign against migrants and refugees from the AfD had claimed public attention. Let’s review events by last week’s timeline.
On Thursday, January 9, Elon Musk had entered the fray. He had decided to influence the February 23 German Federal elections by supporting the AfD. So he had a 74-minute live chat with the party’s leader Alice Weidel. The AfD, which won 10.4% of the vote in the 2021 elections, is polling second in Germany this time, with 22% of the potential vote. The interview was rife with false and dangerous statements, covering topics from migration to National Socialism. In her typical right-wing and revisionist-of-facts fashion, Weidel dismissed pandemic-era mask measures as a “bluff and fraud”. Members of the party have often taken part in demonstrations of the so-called “Querdenker” movement against COVID-19 restrictions, alongside neo-Nazis.
During the interview, Weidel claimed that Hitler was not right-wing but “communist and socialist” She portrayed her party as “libertarian and conservative” and “the only party that protects Jewish life in Germany.” This lie was challenged by the conservative Central Council of Jews in Germany. Musk’s collaboration with the AfD perfectly aligns with the party’s revisionist and inflammatory rhetoric.
On Saturday, January 11, anti-fascist demonstrators arrived early in Riesa to block all roads leading to the hall, delaying the conference by two hours. However the conference proceeded, aided by police using pepper spray, truncheons, dogs, horses, water cannons. All that had for more than a year become familiar to those demonstrators against the genocide in Gaza. They faced tactics of pushing, punching and kicking to clear the blockades. Party co-leader Tino Chrupalla called the demonstrators “terrorists” and thanked the police for their intervention. Why did the police apply these tactics? Ostensibly to ensure “protection of the fundamental rights of both sides.”
It’s worth noting that the AfD is being monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a suspected right-wing extremist party. Saxony is one of three states where the party’s extremist nature has already been officially confirmed.
The conference chose Weidel to be the AfD’s candidate for chancellor. In her acceptance speech, she called for “remigration”. In right-wing and Nazi parlance this means the deportation of millions of people, including non-whites with German passports. It is a term that became notorious after a secret meeting between Nazi “activists” and AfD officials in Potsdam a year ago.
During the conference, a new flyer in the shape of a plane ticket was distributed among delegates. Titled a “deportation ticket,” it featured the AfD logo and was addressed to a “passenger: illegal immigrant.” The flight details were transparently xenophobic and racist: departure “From: Germany,” destination “Safe country of origin”. The passenger is to board at “Gate AfD” on 23 February, the day of the election, from “8 am to 6 pm”. Two sentences at the bottom of the “ticket” read: “Only remigration can save Germany” and “It’s nice at home too”.
The 2025 flyer is almost an identical copy of 2011 and 2013 election flyers by another far-right party, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) – which then changed its name to Die Heimat. In 2017, Germany’s Constitutional Court found that the NPD pursued unconstitutional goals in line with neo-Nazi ideology, but stopped short of banning the party.
The campaign bears an unsettling resemblance to the mock-up “one-way” “free train tickets to Jerusalem” for Jews that were distributed in public spaces across the German Reich during the 1920s and 1930s. Whether or not this historical reference was intentionally chosen or even known by the AfD, the striking similarity in political rhetoric and ideological patterns highlights a shared alignment in beliefs.
A QR code on the front of the flyer links to the website of the AfD branch in Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg. Marc Bernhard, a member of parliament for the AfD in Karlsruhe, has confirmed the party’s recent flyer distribution campaign. According to Bernhard, between 20,000 and 30,000 flyers were printed and distributed through election campaign stands and by dropping them into letterboxes. He emphasized, however, that there was no targeted search for letterboxes with foreign-sounding names during the distribution process.
On Monday, the Karlsruhe branch published an additional statement on its website, defending the flyer as “fully in line with the current legal situation and the Basic Law.” The reverse of the flyer outlines a xenophobic program titled “one-way economy”. This includes proposals such as “Humanitarian residence only as long as there is a reason for asylum”. History has a lot of examples of future developments of such ‘adequate’ reasons. The programme goes on to “Deportation of all persons obliged to leave the country”. This is explained as: “The demand to leave the country refers in particular to people who are in Germany illegally… such as the 1 million Syrian (former) civil war refugees in the country”. This rhetoric is not unique to the AfD nor to Germany. One day after Assad left Syria, a number of countries have already announced they will stop processing asylum applications.
Most German political parties, including the CDU, SPD, Greens, and FDP, support deportations in various forms. For instance, CDU MP Carsten Linnemann recently called for deportations after just two criminal offenses. This is a low threshold taking into consideration that “offences” like using public transport without a ticket are still considered a crime in Germany.
The AfD’s flyer also called for the “reduction of false incentives”. This includes restricting unemployment benefits (“citizen’s money”) to German citizens, and denying residency rights to asylum seekers and a general call to “stop illegal immigration”. Additionally, it demands an end to “Islamisation,” perpetuating a long-standing and infamous trope in European (far-)right rhetoric. The flyer attempts to placate any potential public outrage by claiming that citizens would not be deported, asserting that the party’s demands were “completely legitimate and legally compliant.”While other political parties may publicly distance themselves from the AfD’s overt xenophobia, the underlying policies are often alarmingly similar. The AfD’s ability to openly express such views allows other parties to appear moderate by comparison, despite sharing overlapping agendas. Meanwhile, Karlsruhe criminal police have begun investigating the campaign for incitement to hatred, but given historical precedent, it is unlikely to lead to significant consequences.
