BERLIN — On a quiet and spotless street a 10 minute drive from the Bundestag, or German Parliament, a senior leader of the German rightist party Alternative für Deutschland, Beatrix von Storch, tells the Sun that her party’s rise to the top of German politics is inevitable, that it is “not antisemitic,” and that the firewall keeping the AfD in the political wilderness will soon be rubble.
Ms. Von Storch, who is the granddaughter of Adolf Hitler’s finance minister — he also served in the Weimar Republic that preceded the Third Reich — was born Her Highness Duchess Beatrix Amelie Ehrengard Eilika of Oldenburg. She is related to the royal houses of Denmark and Norway, the deposed Romanovs of Russia, and the abolished Greek royal family. She is related to King Charles III, and enjoys a remote claim to the English throne.
The scion of the House of Oldenberg, though, is now aiming to make her way in electoral politics. Ms. von Storch is the AfD’s deputy parliamentary leader, making her one of the ascendent party’s leaders. In February, the AfD garnered some 20 percent of the vote in federal elections. That was the second most, trailing only Chancellor Merz’s center-right alliance of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria .
The AfD, though, is nowhere to be found in Mr. Merz’s coalition, which was forged with the leftist Social Democratic Party, straining the ideological cohesion of the government. That coalition was formed even as polling suggests that a quarter of Germans now support the AfD, a number that appears to be rising in the country of some 84 million. Politico reckons these results amount to a “bombshell.”
One poll reports that the AfD is now the most popular party in Germany notwithstanding what Germans call the “firewall” — Brandmauer — whereby “mainstream” parties refuse to work with parties they deem far-right. That policy has been in place since the end of World War II.
Germany’s next parliamentary elections are scheduled for 2029, and Ms. Van Storch tells the Sun that the firewall is on borrowed time as her party gathers strength. The AfD’s heartland is not at Berlin — a liberal outpost where Ms. Van Storch lives and works — but in the country’s less affluent eastern regions, the former German Democratic Republic. In 2024 the AfD won nearly a third of the vote in the state of Thuringa.
Ms. Von Storch tells the Sun that Germany’s previous government, under Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats, “was a disaster — and this one is worse.” Despite being shut out of power, she claims something of a mandate because “people voted for change.” The AfD’s growing popularity, she reflects, means that her party “must get ready to take responsibility” for Germany “sooner rather than later.”
The AfD was founded in 2013, and is generally seen as Euroskeptic and open to the possibilities of closer ties with Russia and Communist China. Its top priorities now, Ms. Van Storch tells the Sun, are a stricter immigration policy — “we are a sovereign state,” she declares — and ensuring low energy prices. In May, Germany’s domestic intelligence service reckoned that the party was “extremist.”
German intelligence based that categorization on the position that “The ethnicity- and ancestry-based understanding of the people prevailing within the party is incompatible with the free democratic order.” The AfD subsequently sued, and as a result won what German law calls a “standstill commitment,” or Stillhaltezusage, which pauses the classification pending further litigation.
The party contends that the designation is pure politics. One erstwhile leader of the party, though, Alexander Gauland, called the Holocaust a speck of “bird shit” in Germany’s otherwise glorious history. A lawmaker, Maximilian Krah, told an Italian newspaper last year that members of the Nazi SS, who undertook mass slaughter of Jews and others, were not necessarily criminals. A party official in Thuringa, Björn Höcke, was twice convicted and fined last year for using a banned Nazi slogan — “everything for Germany.”
The AfD has also called for Germany to eschew what its leaders contend is an undue focus on the crimes of the Third Reich — especially the murder of some six million Jews. A former chairwoman of the party, Frauke Petry, ventured that “The negation of our own national interests is something that has become a political maxim in Germany since World War II.” An AfD candidate for office, Jens Maier, told crowd Dresen in 2017 that “I hereby declare this cult of guilt to be over! To be over, once and for all!”
Ms. Von Storch has a plan, which she shares with the Sun, for advancing the AfD’s cause even as it is on the outside looking in in respect of coalition politics. Her party aims to divide Mr. Merz’s CDU and the more leftist CSU by hammering on social wedge issues — Ms. Von Storch is ardently anti-abortion and opposed to gay marriage. The AfD’s chairwoman, Alice Weidel, is a lesbian. Ms. Weidel’s grandfather was a Nazi judge personally appointed by Hitler.
Abortion is illegal in Germany, but there are no penalties if an abortion transpires up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy. Ms. Von Storch publicly accused one of Mr. Merz’s nominees for Germany’s constitutional court, Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, of supporting unlimited abortion. The resulting uproar forced Mr. Merz to postpone her confirmation vote. Ms. Von Storch counts that as a scalp secured in her aim to bring down the government.
Ms. Von Storch, casting her eyes to Europe, tells the Sun that she is solidly behind Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which is rising in the British polls. “I hope it succeeds,” she says of the new initiative from Mr. Farage, whom she remembers fondly from their time together in the European Parliament. She also endorses Marine Le Pen in France, acknowledging that they are “on the same team.” Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally leads the latest polls in France.
Ms. Von Storch rejects the notion that the AfD represents a continuation with Germany’s Nazi past. Instead, she points an accusing finger to left-wing parties like Britain’s Labor, which she asserts is “openly antisemitic.” She also contends that the most active threat to Jews in Germany comes not from the extreme right, but from the ranks of the more than one million immigrants from the Arab world who have entered Germany in the last decade.
This correspondent saw anti-Israel graffiti scrawled throughout Berlin, which has especially stringent laws against public expressions of antisemitism. One graffito lambasted “Zionist pigs.” Ms. Van Storch tells the Sun that her party “supports Israel” and is not willing to take in “one single Palestinian refugee.” Mr. Merz last week announced that Germany, for whom support for Israel is a “reason of state,” or Staatsräson, will no longer supply arms to Israel that can be used in Gaza.
Mr. Merz’s decision has prompted a rebellion within his own party, with one backbencher, Carsten Müller, calling it a “significant misjudgment” and one CDU board member telling the the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that the decision could mean that “the administration will be finished by Christmas.” Germany is the second-largest arms exporter to Israel after America.
When the Sun asked Ms. Von Storch her opinion of President Trump, she expressed skepticism toward his tariff policy — she would have the rates at zero — but avers that her party and the 47th president are “on the same team” with respect to “globalism.” Ms. Von Storch warns against “trying to appease those who will not be appeased” — meaning those she sees as hostile to the values of the West.
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