OPINION: Fiamma Nirenstein
The right-wing party that scored a landslide victory in the recent elections in Saxony seems to have provoked more outrage than reflection across Europe.
Still, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is not some inexplicable creature of history. It has emerged after years of mistakes associated with immigration under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, coupled with political instability, economic anxiety, unemployment and a growing fear of war.
What should really give us pause is Germany itself.
Eighty years ago, Germany committed the greatest crime in history: the systematic murder of 6 million innocent Jews. In the decades since, the country has made an extraordinary effort to confront that past and accept responsibility for it.
Now that achievement is beginning to fray.
Both the AfD on the right and Green and left-wing parties reject the label “antisemitic.” Yet each, in very different ways, is increasingly willing to fish in one of the darkest reservoirs of German history: hostility toward the Jews.
The wall is coming down.
A great country that has worked so hard to reckon with its past is losing its balance when confronted with the political temptation to capture antisemitic sentiment as another reservoir of votes.
The left is more explicit. It exploits hostility toward Israel, portraying the Jewish state as colonialist and genocidal and finding allies among radical Islamist movements. Anti-Zionism provides a convenient vocabulary through which ancient prejudices can be repackaged as progressive politics.
On the right, the temptation has a more traditional character. The memory of the Holocaust is gradually diminished, while voices emerge suggesting that those 12 terrible years should no longer occupy such a central place in the story of Germany and its otherwise glorious national tradition.
That is a profound moral wound.
The resurgence of antisemitism should provoke a crisis of national conscience in Germany. Instead, antisemitic incidents rose from 4,886 in 2023 to 8,627 in 2024 and 8,725 in 2025. Sixty-eight percent of German Jews say they feel less safe than they did before Oct. 7, 2023.
The leadership of the German right does not necessarily attack Israel. Indeed, it acknowledges Israel’s right to defend itself. But when politicians minimize the significance of Germany’s 20th-century history, they know they are touching a nerve that can easily turn into hatred.
On the other side, radical anti-Zionism makes its hostility explicit. It criminalizes Israel and increasingly Jews themselves, while pro-Palestinian ideology leaves much of the European left unwilling—or unable—to recognize terrorism for what it is.
Germany increasingly seems to be shrugging its shoulders and saying: If antisemitism is becoming acceptable everywhere else, perhaps we, too, can loosen our grip on the lessons of the past.
Germany cannot afford that luxury.
Its confrontation with the Holocaust was not merely an act of repentance. It became part of the moral architecture of postwar Europe and a warning about what happens when hatred, political expediency and historical amnesia converge.
If Germany forgets that responsibility—if it begins to forget the meaning of World War II—then that will be a terrible warning sign.
And not only for the Jews.
