Can the German anti-fascist protests be trusted?
A French person living in Paris I met while traveling recently told me how impressed they were by Germany’s massive protests against the far-right party AfD, and how lucky I was to live in a country that so adamantly rejects fascism. I so wish they were right.
Over the past eighteen months, Germany has consistently demonstrated that while it may stage grand performances of anti-fascism, it remains deeply complicit in upholding the very structures of fascism.
Those who actively challenge these structures—whether through their politics, activism, or public speech—are not celebrated as defenders of democracy but punished, ostracized, and vilified.
The contradictions are glaring. Do you really trust the people who claim to oppose the AfD but refuse to condemn the Israeli government’s far-right policies? Can you believe that those who tolerate the mass killing of Palestinians by an ultra-nationalist Israeli government will defend the people most at risk from the AfD and other right-wing forces in Germany? The silence around these issues exposes the limits of so-called German anti-fascism: it is comfortable when it aligns with the state’s interests, but when real moral courage is required, many fall silent.
A person’s integrity is not determined by their ability to oppose a widely condemned enemy. Right now, in most German political and social circles, being against the AfD is still a safe stance—it is the respectable, mainstream position.
But for how long? Where is that same vocal opposition when the German state enacts racist migration policies, when it violently deports people to countries where they face persecution and death, when its police forces disproportionately target non-white people, or when it uncritically arms and supports regimes committing war crimes? Defending Palestinian lives is not mainstream. Calling out racist border regimes and violent deportations is not mainstream. Speaking up about police brutality is not mainstream. Defending non-white lives has never been popular in Germany.
This is why I cannot trust the white Germans who are eager to shout down the AfD but remain silent about the genocide of Palestinians and their own government’s direct complicity in mass murder. Their selective morality is dangerous because it suggests that their supposed opposition to fascism is not rooted in principle but in convenience. And when the political winds shift, as they always do, where will these people stand? Will they speak out when being against deportations is labeled as radical? Will they resist when being anti-racist means facing real personal and professional consequences?
The people who scare me most are those who perform their opposition to fascism when it costs them nothing but will stay silent when mass deportations of non-white people become normalized policy.
We are already watching this happen. It was only a year ago that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz—whom many of these anti-AfD protesters would consider a lesser evil—called for ramping up deportations. Do people truly believe that a government capable of facilitating ethnic cleansing abroad will not, in time, escalate its repression at home?
Yes, we should all take to the streets against fascism. But performative protest can be tremendously harmful because it creates a false sense of moral high ground.
It allows people to believe that simply standing in a crowd with a sign that says “Stop AfD” is enough, even as they ignore or even justify policies that lay the groundwork for the very fascism they claim to oppose. It reassures them that they are unlike those who continue to tarnish the German identity without ever having to confront the uncomfortable truths about their own country, their government, or themselves.
While I have to admit that I am moved by these protests, I also fear that these people will no longer be there when we really need them.
At their core, there is honesty and a real desire for justice, but for them to truly matter, they must become more than symbolic acts—they need to be rooted in sustained, radical action. True anti-fascism demands more than a protest. It demands a relentless commitment to justice, even when that justice is inconvenient, unpopular, or dangerous. It demands rejecting not just the AfD but the entire system of racialized violence that enables it. Anything less is not resistance—it is compliance.
I was at one of the protests and at some point there was an animator who made the crowd sing „One love“ for about ten minutes. It made me feel embarrassed to be in an almost all-white gathering and hear „Let‘s get together and feel alright“ which seemed to express the purpose of the protest rather well, since only in the end there was a speaker with non-german passport who adressed the actual situation in its seriousness and called for action, but was not applauded in the same way like the others.
Thanks a lot for this article. It speaks directly to some of our experiences here in Germany since the last 30 years. Here is a piece I wrote recently about this issue: https://bresoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Commentary_Omwenyeke_Beyond-finger-pointing.pdf