Coincidence or not, the party has timed its congress for the centenary of an infamous Nazi rally. But condemnation didn’t stop Hitler, and it’s not enough now
Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is different from its sister movements across the west.
In a country deeply conscious of its own history, the party, now riding high in the polls, has to decide whether it rejects or embraces Hitler as an ideological antecedent. Rather than answering definitively, the party is deliberately opaque. It flirts with the Nazi legacy without explicitly committing to it. Far from putting voters off, this strategic ambiguity cultivates a surprisingly powerful mix of outrage and plausible deniability.
The latest stunt is to announce that it will schedule its party conference in early July in Erfurt, the capital city of the central German state of Thuringia.
This date and location are of particular significance: it will be exactly 100 years since a notorious Nazi rally convened in Thuringia. On 3 and 4 July 1926, Adolf Hitler – then nowhere near power but already an infamous fanatic – gathered his party faithful in Weimar, which was then the state capital. This meeting was smaller than the better-known Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s. But for the Nazi party, Weimar was a milestone on its path to power.
