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    "parsed_content": "AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTnews analysisThe Fuel That Feeds Europe\u2019s Far Right: Nostalgia and Lost PrideThe populist emphasis on national identity and threats to it, real and imagined, finds a deep response in voters adrift in a world they no longer understand.Listen \u00b7 9:42 min Share full articleAttendees at a rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany party on Saturday in central Schwerin, Germany.Credit...Lisi Niesner\/ReutersBy Steven ErlangerSteven Erlanger, based in Berlin, writes about European security, diplomacy and politics.Sept. 21, 2026Updated 9:06 a.m. ETSee more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra m\u00e1s de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de b\u00fasqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google The rise of a far-right party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany, represents a skewing of history, fueled by its own, sometimes imaginary vision of the past. It feeds, analysts say, on widespread alienation from a liberal, multicultural, united Germany committed to the memory of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes.The AfD is now the most popular party nationwide, polls say, close to governing a German state for the first time, and did well again in two more state elections on Sunday. It has benefited from economic and industrial decline and a sense of insecurity, which the party blames on the extensive migration of young Muslims in the last decade.The party came first in the small eastern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and a good third in Berlin, while the Christian Democratic Union of Chancellor Friedrich Merz did poorly, in what he himself called \u201ca disaster.\u201d The results will heighten talk of the party\u2019s replacing the unpopular chancellor before the end of his term.The AfD has thrived on a key element that ties most populist parties together, especially those of the far right: nostalgia for a society and nation lost to time, even if they exist only in gilded memory or fantasy.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cWe live in a world today of fragmentation and growing inequality, no longer with unifying themes or a unifying narrative,\u201d said Mohamed A. El-Erian, an economist at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.That sense of insecurity, analysts say, is driving many people to yearn for the narratives they do know, especially in the past, when life is remembered as simpler, family structures seemed more defined, and Western nations were largely Christian and less diverse.Across Europe, far-right leaders have painted that idea of the past as preferable to the present, downplaying or dismissing inconvenient facts, such as Mussolini in Italy, collaboration with the Nazis, Soviet occupation or the inequalities of Margaret Thatcher\u2019s Britain.ImageAfD co-leaders on Friday during a campaign event in Neubrandenburg, Germany.Credit...Lisi Niesner\/ReutersFrance\u2019s far-right party, the National Rally, ahead in the polls for next year\u2019s crucial presidential election, has made French identity central to its ideology, which includes praising heroes like Jeanne d\u2019Arc and downplaying the Vichy regime. AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIts emphasis on national values, assimilation and state preferences for citizens is largely shared by other far-right parties, including the Party of Freedom of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats and the Reform U.K. party of Nigel Farage.Behind tough positions on restricting immigration \u2014 and the deportation, or \u201cremigration,\u201d of illegal immigrants and criminals \u2014 these parties envision a threat to their culture and identity. They see national or even European culture as largely white and Christian, threatened by globalization, Islam and the dilution of nationalism in institutions like the European Union.Leaders of the American MAGA movement have expressed similar fears, with Vice President JD Vance worrying about \u201ccivilizational death,\u201d both in Europe and the United States, and arguing that ancestry means more than adherence to a national creed.\u201cI think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say\u201d anyone who does not agree with \u201cprogressive liberalism\u201d does not belong in the country, he said last year.In his recent book, \u201cCommunion,\u201d Mr. Vance asserts that the shift from \u201cWestern Christian civilization\u201d to \u201csecular global liberalism\u201d is to blame for rising racial strife, the erosion of traditional marriage and a decline in population growth.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSecretary of State Marco Rubio, too, has emphasized Christianity as a \u201csacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the Old World and the New.\u201dThe yearning for a proud identity is particularly strong in the former East Germany, which was essentially annexed in a peaceful takeover in 1989. As the country unified, West Germans arrived as a new elite to run businesses, or shut them down, and as much as a quarter of the population moved west, including many young women.In a conversation in Weimar, in Thuringia, and where German democracy collapsed before the Nazis, Anna Wenske, 69, spoke of the East German identity as something lost.\u201cIt was more German,\u201d she said. \u201cNot little America, like the West.\u201dImageCampaign posters of the AfD and the Social Democratic Party in Schwerin, Germany, on Saturday.Credit...Lisi Niesner\/ReutersKey AfD figures like Bj\u00f6rn H\u00f6cke have played into that persistent division, suggesting that West Germans are not even German anymore, just colonized Americans, said Steffen Mau, a sociologist who was born in East Germany.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cThey give people with an inferiority complex the feeling that they were better Germans, and that they are authentic, they are the future,\u201d he said.Many East Germans felt that they resisted their Soviet occupiers more than West Germans resisted the culture of their occupiers, especially the Americans. Communist East Germany cast itself as the inheritor of the resistance to Hitler, historians have said, and hence did not embrace the culture of guilt that dominated the West after the war.For many young people in Germany, who are voting in large numbers for the far left or the far right, the war was not their responsibility, and the AfD\u2019s appeal to highlight national accomplishment, not collective crime, is attractive.Much as President Trump has pushed U.S. institutions to downplay slavery and highlight heroes like George Washington, the AfD wants to remake education, museums and public media to downplay German guilt and emphasize German pride and greatness.\u201cMore Bismarck, less Hitler,\u201d Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the AfD\u2019s deputy state chairman and education spokesman in Saxony-Anhalt, has said. AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTGermany is having \u201ca psychodrama over its own history,\u201d said Yascha Mounk, a German-American political scientist. \u201cThe debate over right-wing populism is in part what to make of German history,\u201d he said.ImageLast month in Quedlinburg, Germany.Credit...Lisi Niesner\/ReutersThe AfD, he said, wants to abandon the dominant \u201cErinnerungskultur,\u201d or Culture of Remembrance, about the crimes of the Nazis, for a different, prouder future.What the shift from memory culture really represents, said Ivan Krastev, a political scientist and analyst, \u201cis the end of the long political 20th century.\u201d Responsibility for the Nazis, he said, \u201ccannot be used to stabilize Germany\u2019s political system any longer.\u201dIn Eastern Germany especially, he said, the nostalgia is not for Communism or the Nazi regime. Instead, the yearning is for the huge numbers of people who left the East, and the quiet life remembered by those who stayed.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cThey are nostalgic for the world that they believe they understood, and now they\u2019re living in a world that they do not understand,\u201d Mr. Krastev said. \u201cThe pride people felt in their own lives was not honored, and people deprived of their pride are very easily tempted by political parties that start to talk about pride, grandeur and greatness.\u201dEchoes of the same arguments were clear in talks given at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy by Jordan Bardella, the deputy to France\u2019s National Rally, and by Roberto Vannacci, a former general who has started an Italian political party, National Future, which is further to the right than that of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.The far-right speakers were far from unopposed: Centrists at the annual economic forum attacked them, accusing them of tilting toward fascism, and cited Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand\u2019s last speech as French president, when he said that in Europe, \u201cnationalism is war.\u201dImageProtesters this month in Berlin at a rally against the AfD.Credit...John Macdougall\/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty ImagesWhere voters stand between these competing forces will be put to the test with key elections next year in France, Italy, Poland and Spain, all of which have strong far-right parties trying to push politics in their direction.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe West has grown complacent about democracy and \u201cstarted taking it for granted,\u201d said Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics and the author of \u201cWhat Happened to Liberal Democracy?\u201dDemocratic backsliding and the rise of populist politics are \u201cvery much driven by the failures of liberal democracy,\u201d he said.The two broad lines of that failure, he said, are economic \u2014 with rising inequality and the neglect of efforts to spread wealth \u2014 and the rise of what he said were \u201ctop-down cultural politics,\u201d which has treated less-educated and less-advantaged voters and their concerns with contempt, opening a void for far-right parties to fill.To a large extent, what is happening in Germany is an international phenomenon, noted John Kampfner, a British analyst of Germany, where he is also a citizen. \u201cEach of these populist movements have their specificities but follow similar tramlines,\u201d he said.\u201cA population that feels insecure,\u201d he said, \u201cthat equates globalization and transnational identity with insecurity, is very open to this kind of identitarian politics from the nationalist conservative point of view.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2026-09-21T09:02:23+00:00",
    "author_name": "Steven Erlanger",
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    "ai_headline": "The Fuel That Feeds Europe\u2019s Far Right: Nostalgia and Lost Pride",
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