25.07.2024

Banned ‘far-right’ magazine promoting former Die Linke leader

Locusts versus vampires

As a matter of basic principle, Maciej Zurowski opposes the ban on the anti-establishment news magazine Compact. However, it is clear that those advocating a bloc of two classes, workers and industrial capitalists, have momentum behind them. The forces of liberalism, including the liberal left, are in a panic

On July 16, 25 masked policemen stormed the residence of notorious anti-establishment figure Jürgen Elsässer in Werder an der Havel - a picturesque small town in Brandenburg. Printers, computers and other equipment were confiscated.

The following day, the ministry of the interior officially banned Compact, a news magazine edited by Elsässer, along with the associated video production company Conspect Film, and seized their assets. Launched in 2010, Compact was a publication of the so-called ‘new right’ with a circulation of 40,000 (and temporarily 80,000 during the ‘corona dictatorship’ four years ago).

Social Democratic interior minister Nancy Faeser justified the move by stating that it was “opposed to the constitutional order” and had recently called for the “fall of the regime”. She also accused Compact of stirring up “unspeakable hatred against Jews, migrants and our constitutional democracy”. Faeser stressed her intention to “take action against the intellectual arsonists who foster a climate of hatred and violence”.

The action taken is legally questionable, relying on legislation that applies to “associations” (Vereine). A magazine not being an association, it could well turn out that the ban cannot be upheld - at the time of writing Elsässer has already filed criminal charges.

Thirteen years ago, I contributed an article to this paper arguing against state bans of far-right material.¹ Back then, the talk was about the legal suppression of neo-Nazi rock music in Germany. The Weekly Worker’s stance on these issues remains unchanged: the left must oppose political bans, whether they target music, newspapers or political parties. Just as was the case then, some on the left foolishly support such bans - as long as they hit ‘the baddies’. Specifically, there are those in Die Linke - a party which, especially after Sahra Wagenknecht’s departure, is quickly moving towards left liberalism and now offers little beyond ‘anti-fascism’. As if to reinforce the perception in some circles that the left is an extension of the establishment, Die Linke’s deputy federal leader, Katina Schubert, is urging the government to also “consider a ban on the Alternative for Germany” - something the government has already been contemplating for some time.

Unlike in the past, however, the threat faced by those issuing the ban - namely the established parties and the forces they represent - appears to be more serious this time.

For these reasons, instead of rehashing my arguments against state bans from 13 years ago, I will simply quote the imminently sensible response from the Marxist daily, Junge Welt. I will then look at some key stages in Jürgen Elsässer’s political career and try to understand the reasons why the government has decided to shut down his magazine. First off, here is the excerpt from Junge Welt:

It doesn’t matter if you agree with them on every issue. It’s a matter of principle. Time and again, the foreign ministry and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution deliberately conflate the potential danger from the right with criticism of the system from the left … To put it simply: bans against the right are of concern to the left, because the left could be the next target. As is well known, Junge Welt is under surveillance by the domestic intelligence service and has to operate under the threat of a possible ban. The authorities have inconspicuously, almost casually, crossed red lines … The president of the domestic intelligence service, Thomas Haldenwang, stated in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on April 1: “Not only ‘calls for violence’ or concrete plans for violence are grounds for action, but also the ‘delegitimisation’ of the Federal Republic of Germany.” In other words, it is enough to criticise the capitalist system …²

Never again!

There was a time when Jürgen Elsässer - then a vocational school teacher in his mid-30s - would regularly frequent the Jugendhaus Mitte, a youth centre right in the heart of Stuttgart. Its regular clientele included mainly punks and anarchist groups, such as the Anarcho-Syndicalist Youth. The local branch of the Communist League, an ‘undogmatic left’ group that emerged from 1970s western Maoism, also held its meetings there.

Elsässer had been a member of the organisation since 1976 and part of its leading committee from 1989. With the top button of his shirt undone, revealing a golden necklace with a hammer-and-sickle pendant, Elsässer would approach disinterested mohawked youths from table to table, offering a friendly smile and asking, “Fancy a copy of Worker’s Struggle, lads?”³

It was the early 90s - the time of German reunification - when freelance nationalist violence was rampant in the streets, including in Stuttgart. Using public transport alone, especially at night, could lead to unpleasant encounters if you looked like the type who might frequent said youth centre. In modern German parlance, the early 90s are now retrospectively called the ‘baseball bat years’, and that moniker is no exaggeration.

Against this backdrop of resurgent German nationalism and an emboldened far right, a slogan became prominent at leftwing demonstrations: Nie wieder Deutschland! - ‘Never again, Germany!’ For the radical left factions chanting it, the phrase was directed against German unification, indeed against the German nation-state as such - seen, on account of its historical Sonderweg, as playing a uniquely destructive role within Europe and bound to revert to militarism and aggressive expansionism.

These are generally seen today as the formative stages of the so-called ‘anti-German’ movement. However, they were preceded by intense soul-searching within the Communist League throughout the 80s, which saw a substantial faction of this slowly disintegrating organisation discover a supposed “anti-Semitism of the left”, particularly regarding the Israel-Palestine question.⁴ Additionally, there was much Angst about Germany’s creeping “fascistisation”. To counteract this threat, any attempts on the part of the German state to act independently of its American and European allies were to be opposed.

Elsässer was one of the founders of the ‘anti-German’ current, and his 1990 essay, ‘Why the left must be anti-German’, is regarded as its seminal text. His contributions from this period are symptomatic of the movement’s obsession with anti-Semitism. In 1992, he published the book Anti-Semitism - the old face of the new Germany, and a talk titled ‘Respectable anti-Semitism?’ saw him generate typically ‘anti-German’ word salad (“What is secondary anti-Zionism? It is the respectable mask of secondary anti-Semitism”). Even then, Elsässer had a propensity to think in terms of undifferentiated national collectives, asserting that “Israel, as the collective Jew, is a painful reminder of the singular crime that the German nation has committed.”⁵ In a 1995 article for Konkret, while commenting on the so-called ‘historian’s debate’ about the singularity of the Nazi holocaust, Elsässer wrote that the only remedy for anti-Semitism was not essays, but baseball bats. He was the first of many ‘anti-Germans’ to lift this modest joke from Woody Allen’s Manhattan.⁶

Some of the theses that Elsässer and his co-thinkers put forward in the early 90s were validated within a few years. For a period, pogroms against asylum-seekers spiralled out of control. German imperialism did get a boost, and by the late 90s Germany was involved in a foreign war for the first time since 1945 - namely when taking part in the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia. But, contrary to ‘anti-German’ forecasts, the Federal Republic of Germany did not evolve into a Fourth Reich, nor did it start rounding up Jews again.⁷ Instead, anti-fascism and the holocaust became - and remain - the German state’s default justifications for any involvement in imperialist ventures, from Yugoslavia to Ukraine, and for maintaining its unconditional alliance with Israel. Nor did Germany ever break free from its subordination to the interests of the United States, despite occasional solo efforts, such as the government’s opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq (vociferously denounced by ‘anti-Germans’).

Elsässer noticed as much. In a 2005 interview, he argued that, in hindsight,

1995 was a turning point, because it became clear that German aggression was being thwarted by the Americans. For example, Croatia, whose violent secession was promoted by Germany, passed from the German to the American sphere of influence around 1994. From this point onwards, [the left] should have analysed that, instead of the predicted Fourth Reich, there was general western imperialist aggression by all capitalist states, but led by the US.⁸

In another interview, he commented on Germany’s thwarted power ambitions:

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it really seemed as if a Fourth Reich was emerging, so you had to be anti-German. But the nationalist dynamic was shattered by the globalist dynamic from the mid-1990s onwards. Germany had to subordinate itself to the US once again.

By the time of the Second Gulf War, Elsässer had definitively defected from the ‘anti-German’ camp. His new-found hostility to US imperialism had ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ overtones, and he showed a propensity for what he called “criminalist-materialist analysis” (and others might call ‘conspiracy theory’). Regarding the 9/11 attacks, for example, the question that seemed to interest him most was ‘What did Mossad know?’ - and a few years later, he speculated about a secret alliance between the US neocons and Islamism. In the following years, he wrote for Neues Deutschland and Junge Welt, closely associated with Die Linke and the German Communist Party respectively, but increasingly showed an interest in Querfront (cross-front) tactics: ie, the unity of elements from the left and the right against liberalism.⁹

Meanwhile, many of his ‘anti-German’ former comrades discovered that German capitalism had few objections to their critique - indeed some actively welcomed it - with the red-green government absorbing countless ‘radical anti-fascists’ and employing them in worthy foundations against ‘anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance’. To this day, these people continue to serve as particularly zealous defenders of Atlanticism, only ever becoming critical of the German state when it threatens to deviate from the US foreign policy line. Elsässer remained a nonconformist and went the opposite way.

Plague

A much-cited example of Elsässer’s emerging ‘anti-Semitism’ around that time period is worth a look. In 2005, then-chair of the Social Democratic Party, Franz Müntefering, provoked a controversy - the so-called ‘locust debate’ - when comparing the economic behaviour of “anonymous investors” (private equity companies, hedge fund managers, etc) to locust plagues. In an interview, he said: “Some financial investors give no thought to the people whose jobs they destroy - they remain anonymous, have no face, attack companies like swarms of locusts, graze them and move on. We fight against this form of capitalism.”¹⁰ Elsewhere, he argued that “We need to help those entrepreneurs, who have the future viability of their companies and the interests of their employees at heart, to stand up to the irresponsible swarms of locusts.”¹¹

A broad front of critics - from employers’ organisations and stock market traders to their ‘anti-German’ defenders - foamed at the mouth at these ‘anti-American’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ comments, arguing that they not only besmirched the honourable work of finance capitalists and corporate raiders, but also drew on Nazi propaganda in their use of a dehumanising animal metaphor. Elsässer, by contrast, took to Müntefering’s defence. In fact, he liked his comments so much that he titled his next book, Attack of the locusts: the destruction of nations and global war, in which he explained how the world’s only remaining superpower, the US, “like locusts, devastates even flourishing economies”. A ‘people’s initiative against finance capital’, which he helped launch after the 2008 stock-market crash and which aimed to unite elements “from Oskar Lafontaine [of Die Linke] to Peter Gauweiler [of the Christian-Social Union]”, also used locust imagery.

Does that metaphor make Münterfering and Elsässer anti-Semites or Nazis? On its own, hardly. While it is likely that Hitler’s and Goebbels’ propaganda used the ‘swarm of locusts’ image at one point or another (though a search of Mein Kampf yields no results), Marx used terms such as “sharks” and “stock-exchange wolves” with reference to finance capitalists.¹² He spoke of “usurer’s capital or merchant’s capital” that feeds on artisans and peasants “like a parasite”,¹³ while describing industrial capital as “vampire-like”, something that “only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”.¹⁴ His and other classical Marxist writings, often by authors from Jewish backgrounds, are replete with such ‘dehumanising’ metaphors.

But what about Elsässer’s focus on finance capital to the exclusion of its industrial counterpart? It is true that the Nazis, at least in theory, differentiated between ‘productive’ (national, industrial) and ‘rapacious’ (financial, international) capital - see their ideologue Gottfried Feder’s seminal Manifesto for the abolition of interest-slavery (1919). But the dichotomy between ‘hard-working entrepreneurs’ and ‘parasitic finance’ - two interdependent sectors of capital coexisting in an uneasy and conflicted symbiosis - is not exclusive to Nazism, but a broader ideological hallmark of conservatism proper, which tends to champion industrial capital.¹⁵ What distinguished the Nazi version was its racialisation of this dichotomy as ‘Aryan’ versus ‘Jewish’ - a notion conditioned by historically specific factors and not an inevitable feature of radical conservatism or economic nationalism.

New right

While I cannot confirm that Elsässer became a staunch anti-Semite around that time, his anti-liberalism certainly began to take on more conservative hues. Attack of the locusts was not only a denunciation of global speculative capital, but also bore the first signs of an idealisation of “family fathers” and “struggling homeowners” with their traditional values, displaced by “constantly mobile singles”, LGBT and feminists, whose lifestyles align perfectly with the flexibility demands of neoliberalism.

As an antidote to neoliberal globalisation, he discovered the nation. Moreover, he began to romanticise the tranquil days of Fordism, supposedly characterised by an “alliance between big capital and core labour”, which had been broken by neoliberalism. Elsässer seemed to overlook that the good old days of the ‘social market economy’ had depended crucially on the existence of the Soviet Union and the potential threat it posed to western capitalism. He believed the clock could be turned back, even if the circumstances had changed.

As in Müntefering’s speech, German national capital - once Elsässer’s bête noire - was now composed of “entrepreneurs who have the future viability of their companies and the interests of their employees at heart”. They had to be defended against globalist “swarms of irresponsible locusts”. At this stage, Elsässer had essentially prefigured the left-conservative programme of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) that would emerge 17 years later.

The problem with Elsässer’s outlook was not his denunciation of the “locusts”, but the idealisation of equally parasitic industrial capital - the kind that “only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”, and is always ready to discard you if that serves its profit-maximisation objectives. Elsässer had come to see the interests of the German working class and its national bourgeoisie as one and the same. From there, it was a relatively small ideological leap to the far right, evident in his involvement with Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (Pegida), and later in his support for AfD, for which his Compact magazine served as an unofficial journal from 2016 onwards. He, who had once called for the “destruction of the German state and its replacement by a multi-ethnic state, as well as the liquidation of the German people into a multicultural society”,¹⁶ had become a straightforward German nationalist.

Browsing through various issues of Compact (which, despite the ban, are easily accessible via file-sharing websites), much of their content resembles that found in Britain’s Spiked Online. Both feature formulaic articles railing against ‘woke’ culture, the LGBT lobby, Islamism, ‘climate terrorists’ and antifa - usually in a manner that is condescending to the readers’ intelligence. Part of me was hoping to find the “unspeakable hatred of Jews” cited by the interior minister, if only because it would have been amusing to showcase Elsässer’s shift from philo-Semitism to anti-Semitism as evidence of the close psychological relationship between the two. But, while I have little desire to defend the man, what I found seemed to manifest at best at the level of so-called ‘structural’ anti-Semitism. Elsässer portrays George Soros as a sinister puppeteer with a hand in everything. But so does Benjamin Netanyahu, who is not an anti-Semite, but a Jewish chauvinist.¹⁷ Soros is a liberal billionaire who supports liberal causes - of course the far right detests him, Jewish or not!

It is a similar story with the ‘great replacement’ narrative, also frequently pushed in Compact. This conspiracy theory is sometimes cited by well-meaning leftists in an attempt to expose the right’s lingering anti-Semitism, despite the right’s claims to have reformed on this issue. But how many adherents of this theory believe that, or even care if, the globalist elites supposedly orchestrating mass migration are Jewish? Yes, anti-Semitic variations of the ‘great replacement’ theory do exist in the murkier corners of 4chan. But the original, mainstream variant - coined by the virulently pro-Israel, anti-Islam, anti-immigration French former gay activist, Renaud Camus, in the 90s - happens to be particularly popular with rightwing Jewish websites such as JssNews, Dreuz.info and Europe-Israël. Some political scientists have suggested that its appeal lies precisely in its lack of an anti-Semitic narrative.¹⁸

German antifa websites point out that, in addition to so-called “Israel-related anti-Semitism”, conspiracy theories promoted in Compact often contain “anti-Semitic codes”, such as frequent references to Bill Gates and Rockefeller (neither of whom are Jewish), the Illuminati (a Bavarian Enlightenment-era society that explicitly excluded Jews), the Bilderberg meetings (originally convened by a Dutch aristocrat and currently by a devout French Catholic) and - okay - Rothschild. It seems that Elsässer is none to picky when it comes to conspiracy theories - anything will do.

However strong the temptation to look for ‘dog whistles’ is, it would be more productive to recognise that the socio-historical context has changed and that the ideological coordinates of the far right are not the same as they were 100 years ago.¹⁹ The core aspect of the ‘great replacement’ narrative is racist incitement against immigration from the global south, most of all the so-called Islamisation of the west - a theme that is more than just ‘structural’ or ‘secondary’ in Compact. In this respect, Elsässer, who has declared that “Christians and Jews are bound together in a common destiny in this historical epoch”, while facing a “common enemy in Islamo-fascism”, is in line with Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen and other exponents of the modern European far right.²⁰

AfD and BSW

Either way, the idea that Nancy Faeser’s interior ministry saw fit to issue a legally dubious ban on his magazine on the grounds of inciting hatred against Jews, Muslims or immigrants is not very convincing. Nor does it seem likely that the government regards Compact’s occasional putsch fantasies or its sympathies for the nutter movement known as the Reichsbürger as a serious threat.

More importantly, Compact was closely aligned with the AfD and also showed strong support for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). These two parties have emerged as the two real winners of the recent EU elections in Germany. While the AfD did particularly well among blue-collar workers (33%) and those with a low standard of living (32%), Wagenknecht’s outfit, which won three times as many working class votes as Die Linke, explicitly targets the same ‘bloc of two classes’ - national capital and the working class - that Elsässer has identified as the national-revolutionary subject for the past 15 years.²¹ Both parties oppose German involvement in Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine, which, along with concerns about immigration and Germany’s economic development, have been identified in recent studies as the main motivations for their voters.²²

Although the AfD’s and the BSW’s working class supporters hardly constitute a conscious, organised class ‘for itself’ (rather a mass of atomised, frustrated and anxious ‘left-behind’ voters), in a sense both parties do represent the immediate material interests of the (native) German working class: they want to end Germany’s involvement in Ukraine and lift its self-embargo on affordable Russian energy, which aids Nato’s eastward expansion and benefits US fracking companies, but impoverishes segments of the German population. The German working class shares this limited, short-term interest with national manufacturing capital.

Elsässer, no matter how far to the right he drifted, always retained his interest in building ‘cross-fronts’. Thus, the April 2023 issue of Compact featured a front-page photomontage of Wagenknecht alongside an AfD activist, titled “Querfront - How rightists and leftists can stop the warmongers”. The December 2022 issue showcased Wagenknecht with the caption, “The best chancellor - a candidate for left and right”.

For German capitalism, the rapid rise of the AfD from the right and the BSW from the left - of which Elsässer’s magazine, as an ‘organiser’ and ‘networking hub’, has become a symbol and bogeyman - is a matter of great concern. The governing coalition parties understand that German capitalism ultimately owes its position in the world to the US, its military apparatus, its protection of German investments in the southern part of the globe. Whether reluctantly (like Scholz) or fanatically (like the Greens), they sacrifice German sectional interests to those of the American ‘locusts’, even if it means the downfall of parts of the German Mittelstand. For the establishment, it is a dreadful prospect that a party representing a short-sighted faction of capitalists - one focused solely on its own immediate advantage and threatening to throw a serious geopolitical spanner in the works - might win the next general election.

In this sense, the war against the AfD and the BSW - through propaganda, but also legal attempts - is not just a war of the current political establishment against the competition. It is also a struggle of US and transnational capital against a wayward, subordinate faction of capitalists - one that will not accept that, under capitalism, there is no escape from the locusts.

Final days?

There is another dimension to consider. With the steady rise of the new right roughly since the Trump victory of 2016, one could be forgiven for thinking that we are living through the final stages of western liberalism as we know it. Here and there, a Donald Tusk or a Kamala Harris might still win an election - or a New Popular Front might somehow sneak the bankrupt ‘democrats’ into the next legislative period. But the general trend is clear: a new conservatism is on the rise, poised to supplant the ailing liberal hegemony. The next stage of capitalism’s efforts to overcome its crises can be delayed a little - but can it be stopped?

The liberals sense that they are losing the fight, which partly explains why they have become so authoritarian and indeed illiberal over the past decade. Hence the deplatforming and cancelling, hence the extreme conformity of thought demanded within the ‘bubble’, enforced under the threat of social and professional ostracism.

The world they have built in the 90s seems to be collapsing around them, and they are panicking. The banning of Compact magazine in Germany is symptomatic of this.

weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/847/jailbirds-extremists-and-white-power-rock.↩︎
www.jungewelt.de/artikel/479654.zur-kenntlichkeit.html.↩︎
The German name of the group was Kommunistischer Bund and the paper was Arbeiterkampf. Martin Veith’s book Eine Revolution für die Anarchie, which documents anarchism and anti-fascism in Stuttgart in the early 1990s, contains a few paragraphs about Elsässer’s time in Stuttgart in the early 1990s.↩︎
This was accompanied by the growing popularity of Moishe Postone’s theory of anti-Semitism, which was to assist in the complete political degeneration of the German left over the next decade. For more on this, see my translation of Michael Sommer’s Anti-Postone, available from Cosmonaut Books, and Paul Demarty’s review, ‘Abstraction and obfuscation’ (Weekly Worker February 10 2022: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1382/abstraction-and-obfuscation).↩︎
In a video from 1990, he can be heard saying these sentences at a conference of the magazine Konkret entitled ‘No, we don’t love this country and its people’: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3US3vk5rOas.↩︎
The relevant scene from Manhattan can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf9d3cwVWBY&ab_channel=Movieclips.↩︎
This only happened in 2024, when most participants arrested in crackdowns on Palestine solidarity protests in Germany appeared to be Jews.↩︎
See the four-way discussion at jungle.world/artikel/2005/46/ausgedeutscht.↩︎
See the interview at jungle.world/artikel/2007/03/wer-keine-antiamerikanischen-reflexe-hat-ist-hirntot. Historically and today, Querfronts - or red-brown alliances - are far rarer than domesticated anti-fascists would have you believe.↩︎
Bild am Sonntag April 17 2005.↩︎
Tradition und Fortschritt January 2005: web.archive.org/web/20050905185716/http://www.partei.spd.de/servlet/PB/show/1043150/221204_programmheft_1.pdf.↩︎
K Marx Capital Vol 3, part V, chapter 27: ‘The role of credit in capitalist production’: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm.↩︎
K Marx Capital Vol 1, London 1990, p646.↩︎
Ibid p342.↩︎
In his article, ‘Liberal and illiberal delusions’, comrade Mike Macnair very helpfully explored how conservatism and liberalism each ideologise different spheres of capitalism (Weekly Worker August 2 2019: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1262/liberal-and-illiberal-delusions).↩︎
Arbeiterkampf No2, 1990.↩︎
For examples of Israeli denunciations of Soros, see www.reuters.com/article/world/israel-backs-hungary-says-financier-soros-is-a-threat-idUSKBN19V1IY; www.haaretz.com/us-news/2017-09-10/ty-article/why-netanyahu-hates-george-soros-so-much/0000017f-e3c9-df7c-a5ff-e3fbd59b0000; www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-george-soros-behind-bid-to-thwart-migrant-deportations.↩︎
“The success of that umpteenth incarnation of a theme launched immediately after World War II (Camus has personally declared his indebtedness to Enoch Powell) can be explained by the fact that he subtracted anti-Semitism from the argument” - J-Y Camus and N Lebourg Far-right politics in Europe London 2017, pp206-07.↩︎
For more on the links between Israel and far-right movements around the world, see also www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190401-the-great-replacement-why-far-right-nationalists-love-israel.↩︎
www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/compact-juergen-elsaesser-herausgeber-portraet-lux.KAaDrPLaxx7w5vHPaT2Sxm.↩︎
Wagenknecht made this approach quite explicit in a controversial speech in parliament in October 2022, when she was still a member of Die Linke. She expressed concern for national manufacturing capital (“German industry, with its robust medium-sized businesses”) and the working class (“millions … afraid of the future, of escalating living costs, of overwhelming bills and, increasingly, of losing their jobs”). See zuriz.wordpress.com/2022/10/01/the-dumbest-government-in-europe-sahra-wagenknechts-speech-of-8-september-2022.↩︎
www.infratest-dimap.de/umfragen-analysen/bundesweit/ard-deutschlandtrend/2024. I do not wish to repeat the German establishment’s claims that the AfD and Sahra Wagenknecht’s party are “the same”. While they share some issues (Ukraine, Euroscepticism, immigration, opposition to cultural liberalism), they strongly differ on others. Wagenknecht’s nostalgia for Rhineland capitalism could be compared to the economic policies of the left wing of European Christian Democracy during the cold war era, while the AfD is economically libertarian and seeks quick fixes for the Mittelstand - for example, by abolishing the minimum wage.↩︎