AFD - These Truly Are Hard Rightists. BLAME The Left For Their Rise! They Bear Precious Few Similarities To The 'Hard Right' Imagined by Burnham and His Leftist Crew in The UK.

The neo-Nazi-Russian alliance

If the right imagine Putin will save the Christian West, they’ve got a big shock coming.

Melanie Phillips Sep 15 ∙ Preview

Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin

This is an expanded version of my column in today’s Times (£).

The success of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in last week’ elections for the parliament of Saxony-Anhalt has freaked out a lot of people, and rightly so.

Unlike other “populists” who are smeared as far-right merely because they oppose the left, the AfD are the real deal.

Populism in Europe has thrown up various parties with unsavoury pasts.

The “far right” leader of France’s National Rally, Marine le Pen, renounced the racial prejudice and antisemitism of her father, the late and unlamented Jean-Marie le Pen, by expelling him from his own party.

Italy’s prime minister, Georgia Meloni, firmly distanced her Brothers of Italy party from its roots in another grouping founded by supporters of the wartime fascist leader Benito Mussolini, whom Meloni herself once supported.

By contrast, the AfD not only refuses to draw such a line against its historic ties to Nazism but its members reassert them. Various party leaders have described Nazism as “just a speck of bird poop”; denounced Berlin’s memorial to the Jews murdered in the Holocaust by declaring: “We need nothing less than a 180 degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance”; and defended former members of the Nazi SS against the charge of criminality.

So far, so alarming. Support for the AfD , however, comes from a seemingly unlikely quarter: Vladimir Putin...