First , now . Prominent members of the incoming US government have been lending their support to the German far-right party, .
Musk, the world’s richest man, and Vance, the designated US vice president to , have both recently made highly polarizing statements.
Vance has criticized US media that described the AfD as being “Nazi-lite” because, he wrote on social media on January 2, “the AfD is most popular in the same areas of Germany that were most resistant to the Nazis.”
But is that really true?
Claim: In a post on that has now been accessed more than 7.8 million times, Vance claimed the US media were slandering the AfD.
DW fact check: False. In fact, election results and other research indicates the opposite is true.
It is true that US media, including The New York Times and even Fox News, have on occasion linked the AfD with Germany’s National Socialists, or Nazism. This partly has to do with the fact that some AfD politicians have themselves used Nazi slogans. In 2021, AfD member Björn Höcke, who formerly worked as a history teacher, , which is banned in Germany today.
Alice Weidel, the national party’s co-chair, has said she sees May 8, the date on which Germany was freed from the Nazis, as the anniversary of the defeat of her country rather than its liberation. In addition, as well as its youth organization have been .
Popular in former East Germany
Vance has maintained that the AfD is popular in regions that put up the most resistance to the Nazis.
The AfD is, indeed, most popular in states in what was formerly known as East Germany. At the last federal election in 2021, the AfD was victorious in getting locals’ second vote in parts of the eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony. Second votes are cast for a party, and determine how many seats each party receives in the German lower house, or Bundestag.
Altogether, the AfD was particularly strong in the so-called “new” German states — that is, states that were formerly part of East Germany — such as Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Thuringia. Only in Berlin, also one of the “new” states, did it win fewer votes.
It’s a similar picture when one looks at the German results of the European elections in June 2024. Here, too, the AfD was successful mostly in eastern regions. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Thuringia, the AfD gleaned at least 27% of the vote, giving it the biggest share in those states. In all of Germany, the AfD received 15.9% of votes.
In the latest regional elections held in the above states, the AfD was particularly strong. In Berlin, the Greens were the strongest party at the 2024 European elections (19.6%), while the AfD received 11.6% of votes.
In terms of the upcoming , the AfD is popular but it’s hard to know exactly where, because polls tend to document all of Germany and don’t look in detail at individual regions.
Why JD Vance is wrong
So where were the Nazis most popular? And where was most resistance to them — was it in eastern Germany?
The party of , the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), came to power in 1933. In the last Reichstag election before he took power, on November 6, 1932, the NSDAP came out the strongest with 33.1% of the vote.
If we look at the election results from German regions in 1932, the NSDAP received the biggest share of the vote in almost all of Germany, including in eastern Germany, in the regions where many people vote for the AfD today.
At the Reichstag election in March 1933, the NSDAP was even stronger. However, this election is described by historians as not free because the NSDAP and its supporters intimidated voters, sometimes violently.
This is why Vance’s claim is wrong. Hitler’s NSDAP had Germany-wide support, including in those areas which favor the AfD today.
An as-yet unpublished study by researchers at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, from which some excerpts are already available, has confirmed this finding. The study analyzes connections between districts in which many vote for the AfD today and those that strongly supported the NSDAP in 1933.
There was high voter support in 1933 for the NSDAP in the districts in which the AfD receives strong support today, Felix Hagemeister, a co-author of the study, told DW.
“It would be wrong to speak of any causality in this regard,” he said. According to Hagemeister, it’s more about handing down right-wing tendencies from generation to generation. “There is research showing, for example, that children mostly tend to take on attitudes similar to those of their parents,” he said.
In eastern Germany, this connection between regions in which the NSDAP was strongly supported in the past and the AfD today is particularly clear. But it also exists in Rhineland-Palatinate, a state in Germany’s west.
However, it’s important to exercise caution and not directly compare the voters of today with those alive almost a century ago, wrote Christian Booss for the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb).
He pointed out that an analysis from 2024 showed that the AfD’s popularity is also partly determined by socioeconomic differences — that is,how people in certain regions live, and how this leads to cultural and ideological differences.
This article was originally written in German.
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The post Fact check: JD Vance is wrong about AfD, Nazis appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
