453. Trump’s Far Right Allies in Germany: Is History Repeating Itself?

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1:10Welcome to the rest of this politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And now we're doing a special bonus episode where we are talking to Gerald Knauss. Really keen listeners will have noticed that I spend a lot of time praising Gerald Knauss and quoting him. So it's actually rather nice to hear from the man himself. He's a very unusual individual. He's somebody who has been right at the heart of thinking about policy, particularly European politics, for well over 30 years, right out on the front line, living in Turkey, living in Bulgaria, living in the Balkans. And today we're talking to him about the rise to the far right in Europe.

1:46And the reason for that is that he came into the studio to talk to us about immigration, on which he is something of an expert, not least because he was one of the architects of the EU-Turkey deal. and we were talking to him as part of a members only episode that we're doing on immigration which we talked to Gerald and we also talked to Zoe Gardner who is a British campaigner on human rights and immigration that will be coming out to members next Friday but while he was here it was clear to both Rory and me that he he's Austrian but he lives in Berlin and he has some very very interesting ideas and interesting insights about why the AFD has been on the rise in Germany and why it's so dangerous, not just to Germany, but to the rest of Europe.

2:30He's a fascinating guy. He's also, he's also, he is, get this, he's written a Spiegel bestseller on immigration policy. Now that takes some doing, I've got to say. And I've read it and it is very, very good. So he's an interesting guy and I hope you enjoy listening to him. To sign up for the members package, our deep dive on immigration, or indeed for Alistair's forthcoming miniseries on Rupert Murdoch or to catch up on the miniseries we just did on JD Vance, go to therestispolitics.com and you can sign up for a free trial as a member. And meanwhile, here's Gauld Knauss. Can we just begin, please, with a little account of the AFD in Germany, who they are, where they come from, and why we should be interested in them?

3:14Yes. Well, thanks for the invitation and for these kind words. I'm based in Berlin at the moment. We are, as a think tank, working on a lot of countries in Europe, and we follow, of course, what happened in the US. And what we see, and I think people still underestimate it, is probably the most dangerous moment for the Western European order, not just because of the threats from Putin, but because of the political developments in our democracies since 1949. I mean, 1949, institutions were created. Germany was part of them, West Germany then, Konrad Adenauer, NATO, European integration, the first European community, the Council of Europe, European Convention on Human Rights.

3:55The AfD, as a party created only in 2013, and since 2015, a party captured by the most extreme far-right elements is promising to undo that whole order. It's the anti-Adenauer party. It's the anti-Germany integrated into the democratic-liberal West party. and to understand them, perhaps it's useful to go back to, maybe there's one person who symbolizes this, but it's not just a symbol. He has been electorally the most successful IFT politician at the local level in the land of Thuringia, Thuringen, Björn Höcke, who's really been an extremist far-right his whole life. He's from Hessen and he went to East Germany, to Thuringia.

4:40And he and the thinkers around him have discovered since 2013 on that there is this new intellectual universe of the identitarians. The people who say, and remember the identitarian movement in France, Génération Identitaire in 2012, started on a mosque in Poitiers. It was a construction of a mosque in the center of France with a banner and with a war declaration saying, we want to expel Muslims. People tiptoe around this, you know, the far-right is extremist and xenophobic, anti-liberal, at the core of their emotional appeal. is the promise to expel Muslims from Europe. And Poitiers was chosen because Charlemagne fought his battle against the Moors in the 8th century.

5:24And Höcke and the people around him then started in 2013 with a little institute in Sachsen-Anhalt. All of them have been found to be extremists by the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution since. And seminars and workshops with identitarians from Austria and Germany, sort of an NGO, to develop a program how these ideas could become a platform for a national party. And Höcke won the elections last year in Thuringia. He is now in the opinion polls in the national, not opinion polls, national elections in Germany this year in February. He won, AfD won 39 % in Thuringia. In the latest opinion polls in Sachsen-Anhalt, another state where they will have local elections next year, land elections, they are also at 39%.

6:12You know, they might, if this continues, have an absolute majority. They are number one in each of the five Länder of East Germany. And in some national polls, they are head to head or slightly ahead of the Christian Democrats in number one. So I think when we talk about the far right, we sometimes get complaints from our listeners that we sort of lump anybody who's sort of to the right of Rory Stewart conservatism. We're talking far right. On a scale, let's take Trump, Maloney, Orban, AFD, Le Pen, Farage. Where are they on a scale? I think they will be closest to Trump. I mean, Höcke. I mean, he's written a book.

6:55Let me just say that his own party tried twice to expel him when there was still this battle over what direction the party should go. Recently, the party leader, Alice Weidel, said that in an AfD government, she would make him a minister. You know, it's now Höcke's AfD. I don't think it's useful to talk about the AfD anymore in abstract because it's now Höcke's AfD. That's their, an identitarian party. And he wrote a book where he said Germany could afford to lose 20 million people. You know, the concept of remigration in the election campaigns last year, the poster said, let's get rid of 1.4 million people.

7:27That obviously signaled it's not about rejected asylum seekers. You don't have that number. It's about people who have a legal status. Herke even talks about citizens who haven't integrated. There are thinkers of the identitarians who organize seminars with national figures of the party, the AfD, where they discuss a proposal in a book that was published, which says we need to have an institute that measures how much people are attuned to the national culture, and then makes the calculation that in Germany there are 400 ,000 people of Afghan origin, some of them now citizens of Germany, and Germany really should only have a few thousand.

8:08The others need to be made to leave. And when I hear people, parties say, we will make a certain group leave, I'm always reminded of Sheshel and the far right in former Yugoslavia having all these ideas before the war, saying, we should just peacefully separate the groups. Sheshel then led a paramilitary force, and we saw ethnic cleansing. So, what is clear to me is not the voters of the AfD. They are not all in favor of ethnic cleansing. Just like not all the Nazis were in favor when they voted for them of concentration camps. But what they are supporting is a party with a leadership that openly talks about, and Höcke spells it out, millions of people being made so uncomfortable, which means violating their human rights, that they will leave or be expelled.

8:56And in addition, that's why I talked about the anti-Adenauer bit, Höcke also says this new Germany, its closest ally should be Putin. It should get out of the EU. It's a Dexit party. He says for Europe to live, the EU has to die. You can't be any more clear. No human rights treaties. Of course, Germany should be a fortress. And this Germany would be a threat to every neighbor. You know, if I'm a Dane or if I'm in Luxembourg, invaded two times in the history of the 20th century by the Germans, the great thing, the fantastic thing about European integration is Luxembourg stopped fearing Germany and Poland stopped fearing Germany and Denmark stopped fearing Germany for good reason.

9:38Everybody's happy Germany's rearming. Everybody's happy that the biggest economy, the biggest military. But if you see the AfD come close to power, the neighbors have reason to fear it. That's the problem. We're talking not long after Tommy Robinson held a demonstration of 130 ,000 people in Trafalgar Square, which brought in other voices, brought in Erick Zemmour was speaking, Elon Musk was speaking. Give us a sense of the international coalition around this. Because the AfD is not just a sort of solitary party in one country. This is a bigger global issue. Well, listen, Germany, because it's the biggest economy, because it's the biggest military in Europe now, it will be even bigger because it's going to spend huge amounts on its military, because it's the most populous country, is the pillar today of the post-1949 European order.

10:29You can't imagine Schengen, the Euro, the EU, the Council of Europe, and even European NATO without Germany. The Russians know that. So they are supporting parties in Germany that will break this up. MAGA knows that. So you have Elon Musk openly call on people to vote for the AfD. And J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance came to Munich. Well, not just the fact. I mean, he came to Munich. He met Merz. It was not a warm meeting. And then he met the leader of the AfD for longer in Munich. Having told the Munich's EU conference that the biggest threat to Europe was not Putin. It was free speech. Yes. And by free speech, what he meant is the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution monitoring the AfD and saying that by promising that certain groups should be put under pressure to leave, remigration, that concept, it is violating the Constitution.

11:20This is also often misunderstood abroad. And what J.D. Vance has been saying and others, even the attempts to look at the AfD as a threat are a violation of their right. Tell us about the connection between Orbán, the people around Trump, the IFD, Tommy Robinson. I mean, what is this whole world? The starting point, really, intellectual starting point, on the one hand, is the very radicalism of the identitarians, the Generation Identitaire and their books. These publishers, which are close to Höcke, started translating French extremist literature into German. They take the battle of ideas seriously, and the liberals don't.

11:56The liberals are not telling good stories the last 10 years. They are going back to the past. They are telling stories. They translate novels. Novels in which the French president has to reflect on whether he should kill a million people who come with boats from India. You know, that kind of outrageous extremist literature is being translated. There are seminars. In addition to the battle of ideas, there is Viktor Orban who made a speech in September 2015. I mean, he's the longest serving prime minister of an EU member state today. He's been very successful electorally. And Hungary is still a country where you can hope that the opposition wins the next election.

12:30There are no political prisoners in Hungary. It's very important to be very concrete and realistic. He's not Putin. He's not Putin. He's not Lukashenko. He's not Georgia. Because, of course, he knows Hungary gets a huge amount of money from the EU. Its economy depends a lot on German investment in the car industry. It's a small country in the middle of Europe. But where he's been extremely radical is in the speeches he makes. and in creating an infrastructure of ideas, institutes, congresses. And already in 2015, he gave a speech on the 4th of September, 2015, where he said that the fear of refugees will expose the hypocrisy of liberals.

13:09By liberals, he means Christian Democrats, conservatives, centrists, anyone, social Democrats, of course. The fear of migrants and Muslim migrants. I mean, he's explicit. He says he doesn't want a Muslim community in Hungary. and most publics he predicted will follow him and governments which don't will be voted out of power. So in 2015, he expected within three or four years, because of the huge number of refugees then crossing Europe, going to Germany and Austria and Sweden, within three or four years, there'd be far-right governments everywhere, in France, in Germany. He was wrong then. Angela Merkel reduced the number of refugees in 2016 with the agreement with Turkey.

13:48She won elections. Macron won elections. We didn't see the sweeping of the far right, but he might be right now. Because the last few years, we had a new massive arrival of refugees, a second wave. Putin is trying everything. He managed to get four and a half million Ukrainians who came legally into the EU, but to get refugee status. He wants 10 million to come to Europe to overwhelm our systems. Ukrainians resist. You know, every Ukrainian could come to Germany. There's no, it's open. They don't need a visa. They don't. They stay in their cities. They fight for their cities. But Putin tries to destroy the infrastructure because he knows.

14:26And when I was in Moscow as a fellow at the Carnegie Institute in 2015, I saw these people close to the Kremlin, their eyes gleaming at the idea. We create refugee crisis in Aleppo, now in Ukraine. They come to Germany, Austria, and then our friends benefit politically. So, Orbán then said this refugee crisis will create an opportunity, a cultural revolution was the word he used, an illiberal cultural revolution, and our friends will win power. And that is, unfortunately, while he might lose elections next year in Hungary, because he's mismanaged Hungary badly and there's a lot of corruption, allegations, I say, I have to say, while he might lose power, his ideas and his vision of Germany, France, the UK and Austria and other countries, the far right winning elections is now more realistic than ever.

15:15And it's a real threat. We should say to listeners and viewers, by the way, that we're going to be putting out for members a longer interview that we've done with Gerald and also another immigration expert and campaigner, Zoe Gardner. We're going to be putting that out shortly. You obviously think that the AFD could win overall power in Germany. You presumably think that it's entirely possible that the Rassemblement National could win in France. We have a situation in the UK where a year ago, the Labour government was elected with a three-figure landslide. And I was at a dinner last night where I asked the audience who they thought was going to win the next election.

15:52And a good 40%, said Nigel Farage, who currently is one of five MPs in the parliament. How realistic would you take that from your sort of studying of the way the far-right operates and the way that our democracies are weakening? My great inspiration as a European hero of the last few decades is Jean Monnet. And he always used to say, I'm not an optimist, but I'm determined. I think that's what our leaders and liberals in society need to be. Not optimistic, but also not give in to this culture pessimism, this cultural pessimism that sees the far right winning by default. We need to be determined.

16:28We need to see the threat. We've had an unusual run in Western Europe since 1950 because of the institutions we put in place then. NATO, so we were not attacked. it deterred attacks on the members. The European integration and the Council of Europe, because it laid a basis with human rights as a common foundation we share, and a big market, which Britain did a lot after it joined the European economic community to expand, that created a basis for not just prosperity, but also trust. So Luxembourg and Belgium no longer fear Germany. Poland no longer fears Germany, because they are in these institutions, they work together, and this creates trust.

17:08This was the vision of Jean Monnet. And he fought for this having seen two world wars. So we don't need facile optimism, but we need to recognize what we're about to lose because these institutions are now at risk. If Britain leaves the European Convention on Human Rights and the Council of Europe, I think the Council of Europe will collapse. I mean, it was the founding member. It wrote the convention. Others will leave too. So we will lose the idea of a common basis with a court and the statutes that tie European democracies together. America is already threatening the survival of NATO. So Europeans in NATO need to now mobilize their own ability to deter Russia, not attacking the Baltic states, for example.

17:46The European Integration Project, which is actually, if you ask people, it's more popular now than 25 years ago. But the popularity is very passive. It's lukewarm. You know, you're in favor of it because it's a good thing. But if the AfD wins, if anti-EU parties win power, they can very quickly sabotage and destroy it from within. Because the EU is relying on governments voluntarily, because there's no force in Brussels that can go into Hungary and force Hungary to implement the law. Or, of course, nobody can force Germany. It's governments allowing their own courts to apply EU law. It's governments themselves voluntarily abiding by the rules they make together.

18:27And so if a big country like Germany suddenly has a government that says, like Orbán has said in Hungary, I will no longer implement EU law. Sue me. It breaks down. So the three institutions, the pillars of our post-war order, Council of Europe, NATO, and European integration, are all at risk. And I think we've forgotten what really happened after the end of the Cold War. In 1990, great moment of enthusiasm, famously in Paris, everybody meets Charter of Paris. From now on, it will be peace and everybody will agree on the basis of human rights. The reality was from 1990 to the beginning of the big war in Ukraine now, the attack on Kiev, 2022, we've had 10 million displaced Europeans in wars in Europe.

19:11We've had 300 ,000 Europeans killed in wars. Every country which was not in the EU or in NATO has had in those periods since 1990 war, civil war or massive repression. Caucasus, the Balkans, Ukraine, massive repression in Belarus, collapse of the state in Albania in the 90s. Now it's in NATO. If you're not in the EU and in NATO, Europe looks like it looked in its most darkest past. If the EU and NATO collapse or are eroded from within, there's nothing in human nature that says Europeans will not fall back to where they were in the past. So what we need to defend, and this is where I think we need more than lukewarm support for these institutions.

19:53We need to defend the idea that what Churchill and Adenauer and Monet and Schumann and Bevin, what they created in the late 40s, early 50s, as a result of lessons learned in two terrible wars, it worked. It worked for a reason. People need to understand how it worked. And we need to defend it against threats from within and threats from outside. And the The AfD, because everybody sees those who want to destroy the system, who want Europe weak, like Trump, who says the European Union is nasty and is because it's a powerful force for negotiation with the US when it comes to trade, they would like to see it divided.

20:31Those who want to see Europe divided focus on Germany. And in Germany, their instrument is the AfD. So, Gerd, I want to bring you right into the middle of one of the central British debates, the question of whether Trump is actually dangerous or not. You and I have a friend who often says to us, you know, American institutions are very strong. Trump's bark is more than his bite. You know, we shouldn't overdo the threat posed by Trump. Everything will be fine. And my sense is your instinct is actually we need to be more worried. We need to be more serious about Trump. Yes. Perhaps one thought first.

21:05I have a good friend who was born in Austria, 1929. He was five when Austrian democracy suddenly, or four, actually disappeared. You know, you had a very well-written constitution after World War I. It was a democracy. You had a president, you had a constitutional court, you had a parliament. In the last elections, the Social Democrats won. The city of Vienna, the Social Democrats had an absolute majority. And yet in 1933, this democracy disappeared because the far right, which had a majority of one seat in the parliament, managed to get the police to close off parliament. People couldn't enter.

21:41And then by decrees, not laws, because there was no parliament, they abolished the rights one after the other. It took a year. There was no fighting. And in 1934, in February, there was a short civil war by which time democracy was lost. And you think that actually it's worth thinking about that even in the United States? And I think that that kind of model should be a warning because that can happen anywhere. And here's the thing. We should believe when people announce things, we should take them seriously. We should have taken Putin seriously 20 years ago because he talked about many of the things he later did.

22:16We should take seriously Trump. He talks about the opposition being illegitimate. He talks about dictatorial governments. He praised them for years. He said that the U.S. might benefit from this as well. He's attacked courts. I mean, he's attacked the division of power. He rules by decree. The most important signal, of course, was that he presents the people who attacked Congress as heroes. And what more signs do we need of his intention? But what we see now in his second term is a very strategic approach to take over the military, to fire generals, to fire the lawyers. You know, all the people inside a proud institution really devoted to the rule of law, and this is how people have been trained, to put it under the control of loyalists, to get Americans used to see the military in their cities, to build up a massive operation through the ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in the name of fighting irregular migration.

23:17I mean, ICE will have a budget bigger than the Swedish military every year, directly under the control of some of the hardliners in the White House. Now, he creates the position where he could be in a position to just block off Congress in Washington. Now, is this a worst-case scenario? Yes, but it is not unrealistic. And to go back to my friend, four years later, of course, Austria was annexed by the Nazis. He had to flee. He was Jewish. He managed, after the pogroms in 1938, to come to the United Kingdom. And he became a professor of government later in Oxford, Peter Pulitzer, one of the biggest theorists on democracy in Britain.

23:58But the first book he wrote was on political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria before World War I. Because what he was interested in is how can a civilized city like Vienna, a democracy like Austria succumb first to authoritarianism and then to the Nazi totalitarian regime. How was this possible? And his question, his answer was, look at the ideas developed in the decades before, the authoritarian ideas, the anti-Semitic ideas, where he saw anti-Semitism really being targeted against liberalism. You know, Jews were seen as symbols of a rule of law and liberalism and cultural pessimism. The intellectuals who said everything is doomed, we're in decline, this requires radical measures, all of which we've seen in the US in recent decades.

24:45We're doing this interview just after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And Stephen Miller, who is Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy, is now making statements saying that there is an existential threat posed by what he calls radical leftists and Islamist terrorists. And he's now extended this to saying, and this is embedded in the Democratic Party. Is this also part of the issue you're talking about? Yeah, of course. What we've seen is a discrediting of the ideas of a loyal opposition that you have vicious disagreements with politically. But then the next moment, you know, McCain and Obama, Romney and Obama, even the very hotly fought campaigns between George W.

25:30Bush and the Democrats in the two elections. afterwards, you know, people accepted that there was a common framework, the constitution, that this was a system that had survived for centuries with, importantly, a big civil war in the middle, right? But it had regular elections because people accepted results of elections. I don't think we've taken seriously enough that Trump made the loyalty test for his new administration, buying into the big lie that he won in 2020. And when you start by saying, you can only join my administration if you say two plus two is five. Famously, the test that in George Orwell's 1984, the torturer explains to Winston, the hero, that if the party makes you say two plus two is five, you have to say it.

26:18When this is a test to join a democratic government, then you expect this government to have no problem lying about anything. And that's what we see now, lying about the facts of political crime. There is political crime, there are assassinations, but more of them in the US, as the Cato Institute has recently again shown, comes from far-right extremists. So to say that the threat is from this conspiracy linked to the Democrats, or that the Democrats welcome the assassination of Charlie Kirk, when every single Democratic politician, you know, from the governor of California to Kamala Harris, has of course condemned the assassination of somebody who they disagreed with, but who was still a debater in the end.

27:03With ideas, I would challenge, but he was not a violent person. He didn't call on people to be attacked and he was viciously killed. But all the Democrats condemned this. To then say 2 plus 2 is 5, they are somehow part of this conspiracy, shows us that there's nothing you can rely on with this administration. It's like when Trump says Ukraine shouldn't have attacked Russia. It's the end of any respect for what in any democracy, which is government by opinion, you know, we discuss, if we lose respect for any facts, you can't have democracy. There seems something very, very odd in J.D. Vance saying, on the one hand, I want European countries to rearm, spend 5 % of their GDP on defense.