The Rise of the Anti-Immigrant German Right

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

On Sept. 4-5, 2015, Angela Merkel, then the German Chancellor, opened the floodgates of the country by allowing some million refugees into the country. Most of them were fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

This all followed the publication of a photo of the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi, a two-year old who drowned and was washed up on a Mediterranean beach (a picture which some observers considered staged).

“We can do this,” she famously assured Germans. She was wrong. A decade of chaos, including periodic terrorist attacks, has been the result. Germany, even in its most urban and populated areas, went from a safe nation with high levels of social trust and generous social safety nets, to something rather different. Some 25 years ago, the concept of ungovernably dangerous areas was simply unheard of. Not anymore.

This has given rise to the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now leading in national polls, and on the cusp of taking power in Saxony-Anhalt in that state’s Sept. 6 election. The state government is currently run by the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), as it has been for most of the time since 1990.

The AfD, Germany’s largest opposition party, was founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party that then shifted direction to focus on reducing migration. It challenges the consensus on migration, nationhood, Europe, and identity. Germany is bracing for three state elections, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin on Sept. 20 alongside that of Saxony-Anhalt.

Located in the former Communist East Germany, Saxony-Anhalt is a conservative and underappreciated region marked by depopulation, industrial decline and rural traditionalism. The AfD has long polled more strongly in eastern Germany than in the former West Germany.

“We will form the government in Saxony-Anhalt,” the party’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, predicted in an interview with broadcaster ZDF Aug. 23. A recent Infratest dimap poll showed the AfD with 41per cent support, a result that would double the party’s vote share compared to the last election in 2021, and well ahead of 24 per cent for the conservative Christian Democrats. The Left Party is at 13 per cent, while the Social Democrats are at between six and seven per cent.

This would be enough for an absolute majority of seats in the legislature and allow the AfD to form a government without coalition partners. This is important, because Germany has a cross-party consensus to uphold a firewall or Brandmauer against any parties to the right of the conservative Christian Democrats. This means no party would form a coalition with the AfD, which is almost always necessary to rule under Germany’s electoral system. Even when the AfD came first in the 2024 elections in Thuringia, a state neighbouring Saxony-Anhalt, with 33 per cent of the vote, the centre-right CDU, which came second, chose to form a government with parties to its left, sending the AfD into opposition despite being the largest party.

Ulrich Siegmund, the leader of the AfD in the state, told broadcaster Deutsche Welle that he wants to create a “domino effect” with a “historic” victory. The country’s domestic intelligence service has labeled his AfD’s regional chapter as “right-wing extremist,” which he dismisses as politically motivated. 

The AfD has unveiled an ambitious 100-day government program, including tougher deportation policies, changes to welfare provision for asylum seekers, cuts to funding for NGOs and party foundations, and reforms to public broadcasting.

They also fear ethnic Germans are slowly being replaced by other groups. Nearly a quarter of former East Germans have moved west or abroad since German reunification in 1990. In those five states, the population has fallen by 16 per cent (excluding East Berlin). Saxony-Anhalt recorded the most dramatic decline at 26 per cent. That’s left behind a region that is now Germany’s oldest, with an average age of 48.3 years. Its birth rate among the lowest, with many communities watching traditions slowly disappear.

 “Germany suffers from massive depopulation,” their manifesto states. “What in political debate is referred to as ‘demographic change’ is nothing less than the aging and extinction of the German people.” The text claims that the “ruling parties” know the extent of the problem but are lacking “the political will or the courage to enact the measures that would be necessary to reverse the trend.” The number of people without German citizenship has more than doubled since 2015.

On immigration, the party has limited room to manoeuvre at the state level, since this is largely the federal government’s prerogative. But it would use Saxony-Anhalt’s four of 69 votes in Germany’s upper house, the Bundesrat, to lobby for radical change at the national level as well as enacting state-level measures like refusing to take an allocated share of asylum seekers even if they have entered Germany through a safe state. There is also a frequent use of the term “remigration” to describe the party’s aim to reverse the mass migration Germany has seen over the last decade or so.

 As early as 2010, Thilo Sarrazin, a German economist and author, published Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Abolishes Itself), a critique of post-war immigration policy. By leaving Germany’s demographic anxiety entirely to the AfD, the mainstream parties are losing a lot of ground.

 

Israel and Hezbollah

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

During Operation Rising Lion in 2025, the Iranians discovered that the proxies they had built up

for years failed to provide the assistance expected of them. Hezbollah, their most important ally, refrained from opening a front against Israel. 

But in the current war, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Naim Qassem responded to pressure from Tehran and carried out his threat to open fire on Israel. It sent tens of thousands of Israelis in the Galilee into shelters several times a day. This time Hezbollah proved effective. What now? 

On June 26, after a series of five bilateral meetings hosted by the United States, representatives of the Israeli, Lebanese, and U.S. governments signed the Trilateral Framework Agreement, declaring their shared “ambition to end conflict between them, ensure the sovereignty and security of both countries, and establish peaceful neighborly relations between the two countries.”

Israel and Lebanon agreed to a framework which would include the disarming of Hezbollah, the phased withdrawal of Israel from areas conquered over the last three years of war, and the deployment of the Western supported Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to the areas evacuated by Israel. So far, three “pilot zones” have been established, in the areas of Faroun, Srifa and Zawtar al-Gharbiya.  “It’s the beginning of the beginning. There’s a lot of work ahead,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after the signing ceremony. That’s an understatement!

Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun, a Maronite Christian, made his first ever White House visit on July 21. The Washington meeting with President Donald Trump, the first for a Lebanese president since 2009, was meant to move forward on the project to sever Lebanon from Iran’s orbit, disarm Tehran’s proxy Hezbollah, and pave a way toward Lebanon-Israel peace. 

Aoun recalled that the army’s collapse in 1975 led to the emergence of militia groups, a civil war and the Palestinian takeover of the country’s south, which was used to launch attacks on Israel.

But there remain legitimate doubts about Beirut’s willingness to follow through on promises to disarm and dismantle Hezbollah. The last round of such efforts in late 2025 failed. Lebanese leaders have promised to disarm Hezbollah multiple times over the past thirty-five years, without success. The United States has sent the LAF more than $3 billion in aid since 2006. And yet two decades later, Hezbollah is still armed and still on Israel’s northern border.

“America needs to support the LAF,” Aoun told Trump. “Without the LAF,” he continued, “everything will collapse.” And as he told a group after his meeting with Trump, the aid must be “immediate and unconditional.” Could the army plausibly disarm Hezbollah? Since 2022 Washington has been paying LAF salaries directly, yet there has been no change.

The LAF is generally thought to consist of about 50 per cent Shia Lebanese among its rank and file, and around 30 per cent in its officer corps. Such a force would split along sectarian lines were it to be deployed against Hezbollah. Until Hezbollah’s control over the Shiite community weakens, it remains unclear whether the army can perform the task.

Anyhow, eliminating Hezbollah is virtually impossible, because its very existence is just part of what makes Lebanon an ongoing failed state. Hezbollah is not merely a military organization. It is the product of a particular geopolitical environment, a particular historical experience, and a particular understanding of survival.

Over the past four decades, it has evolved into a political party, social welfare provider, military force and ideological movement deeply rooted in Lebanon’s Shia communities. While military action can weaken it, the social and political foundations that sustain Hezbollah are much harder to remove.

The people who demand Hezbollah’s disarmament often begin with an idealized image of Lebanon rather than the Lebanon that exists. They imagine a state capable of protecting all its citizens equally and defending its borders independently. That is very far from reality.

Modern Lebanon was constructed around a delicate sectarian formula that sought to balance competing communities rather than forge a single national project. Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing arrangement was formed under the National Pact of 1943 and the Taif Agreement of 1989. Different factions cultivated different external patrons, be they France, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Syria. Political identity often became intertwined with foreign sponsorship and external alliances. The result was a state that never succeeded in creating a unified national consciousness.

For much of the country’s history, the Shia Muslims were widely regarded as the country’s most politically and economically marginalized community. They were often viewed with suspicion by the authorities and lacked the institutional recognition enjoyed by other religious communities.

So, for the Shia population, Hezbollah is not merely a political party or an armed movement. It is an insurance policy against annihilation. The Shia community in Lebanon looks around the region today and sees opponents everywhere — not just Israel, but Sunni Muslim militants ruling Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as well – states that consider Shia Islam a heresy to be extinguished. (Lebanon’s own Sunnis also fit that description.) Under such conditions, disarmament begins to look like suicide. 

President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Syria might get involved in Lebanon again is ridiculous. Any Syrian intervention under its new Sunni rulers would allow Hezbollah to claim credibly that Lebanon faces a new external threat. Whereas many Lebanese question Hezbollah’s claims that it is protecting Lebanon from Israel, there would likely be greater agreement that a Syrian incursion merits resistance. Many Lebanese would view it through the lens of Syria’s 29-year occupation of Lebanon, fuelling concerns about a return of Syrian influence over the country.

Since the fall of the Assad regime, Hezbollah has portrayed the new government in Damascus as a jihadi organization that seeks to carry out sectarian massacres against the Shias. This has actually increased Hezbollah’s legitimacy within its own support base – those who already view Hezbollah as a resistance movement that seeks to fight against any external actor. 

Nonetheless, in the recent conflict Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah. The organization since the Gaza war began has lost most of its long-range and heavy missiles, and about 8,000 of its fighters and commanders have been killed, out of roughly 30,000. 

But Hezbollah has not been decisively defeated, nor will it be. The problem is that when a state is faced with an armed force on its soil that doesn’t want to disarm, the usual recourse available to the state is coercion. The Lebanese state has neither the will nor capacity to do so and is no longer sovereign, in any meaningful sense.

As long as the conditions that created Hezbollah remain intact, the expectation that it will voluntarily surrender its weapons will remain a fantasy. It is up to Israel alone to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani River, where the group’s short-distance missiles and drones cannot reach Israel’s population centres.