The Deportation Order is still coming.
By M.G.
The AfD, whose election manifesto has set its sights on a national reordering of population and institutions, has won its second state election, this time in Saxony-Anhalt. The European right is delighted, while the left is consumed by a single question.
Has fascism arrived?
The question would be legitimate if the point were to examine which political programme is succeeding here, how it differs from its competitors and what use it intends to make of state power. But the alarmed public debate, set off by the most loyal defenders of the national cause and frightened pop-leftists alike, is only meant to settle whether the existing order still works or already needs defending. The verdict on the right becomes a verdict on how endangered democracy is. The deportations and the rearmament are then argued over chiefly in terms of whether they still belong to the good order or already herald its opposite. The question of what people are being subjected to, and to what end, is crowded out by worry over what to call the rule that subjects them to it.
Point of Departure
The AfD’s victory does not reveal how many voters want a dictatorship, which of its demands they particularly value, or how many are “protest voters” who put up with those demands as part of their protest. Anyone who votes for the AfD, for whatever reason, adds to its political power. Their vote does not go to some cleaned-up version of the party they might wish for, but to the organisation that is actually on the ballot. That holds even for the voter who rejects particular demands or expects just one specific improvement from the party. Voters turn their real grievances into grounds for a wrong-headed political decision, and they do so without necessarily holding a coherent worldview. The state, which by protecting private property makes exclusive control over the means of social life binding, also organises the conditions under which opposed interests may be pursued. It regulates the wear and tear on its workforce, manages the consequences of unemployment and poverty, and demands that its tasks be paid for. As a national economy, this whole nexus becomes the basis of state revenue and international power. The population’s well-being is thus subject to a proviso: it has to be compatible with the success of the economic order on which its livelihood has been made to depend. Conditions in which a worker loses their job and cannot pay the rent, while rising corporate profits are celebrated as the economy’s success, already contain reasons to criticise the separation of livelihood from social wealth. It takes political judgements to turn this into a reason for blaming migrants, of all people. People measure the damage done to them against what they are supposedly owed as decent members of the nation. Allegedly work-shy immigrants and other minorities then appear as undeserving beneficiaries. The question of which social relation makes one’s own existence insecure is replaced by the demand that the state favour the right people. That is why it is a mistake to treat the right’s success as a mere communication problem: the voter can find a promise precisely in a programme designed to harm others. To act as if one had merely explained one’s own policies badly (“But the Left has the better policies for workers!”) is to treat the content as uncontested and the dispute as a matter of getting the message across. Concede, on top of that, that people’s concerns were not taken seriously enough, and the right’s account of what is troubling them has been accepted. All that remains in dispute is who represents these concerns more credibly. In that contest, the answers are soon taken over along with the concerns.
Nationalism’s achievement is to turn dependence on the success of other people’s property into a claim on one’s own state to be better looked after. The person affected declares his belonging to the country a credit that the government has to honour against the claims of others. In response to what competition imposes on him, he calls for it to be sharpened along national lines. The nationalist clings to the state as the means of his advancement and therefore looks for reasons why it withholds the service he expects. Too many independent claims, too many organised special interests, too much consideration for people of doubtful usefulness and loyalty. Suspicion falls on an incompetent or treacherous leadership and on those it allegedly lets get away with too much. The political order is what keeps the nation from getting its due.
This is why the formula that capitalism produces insecurity and fascism grows out of it does not explain the decisive process. A crisis founds no party and demands no Volksgemeinschaft. It changes living conditions and the terrain of political action. What conclusions are drawn from this is decided by actors and their judgements.
Aim
Fascism regards the democratic form as a scandal. It sees a state that needs its citizens yet grants them rights against particular impositions. Instead of leading, the government wrangles with opposition and procedure. Citizens are allowed to make claims and to fight for changes in policy. Officeholders, too, are bound by law; the separation of powers and formal procedure ensure that the established order decides, not the whim of some functionary. The government has society at its disposal, but its own competences only within limits. And political competition is part of how this rule reproduces itself: another team may come forward with the promise of governing the same nation better. What the democratic state has set up as its way of functioning appears to fascism as organised weakness.
Whether farmers take to the streets over cut subsidies or care workers over their rotas, fascism will find its verdict confirmed in every conflict: the failure of a government. From the protest it keeps only the call for an authority that cracks down, and it turns that call against the very interest that protested. Anyone who insists on their own cause instead of calling for a firm hand is, in its eyes, part of the problem. That citizens as such already ask too much is a complaint democratic governments make themselves, regularly finding it necessary to point out that the welfare state is no longer affordable and that people work too little. Their challengers respond with the reverse accusation. Those in power, they say, abandon their own people, are too soft on criminals and foreigners and squander taxpayers’ money. The country is in crisis, and anyone making demands now only makes it worse. What distinguishes the fascist from the democrat is not this opinion but the fact that he acts on it. He mobilises against the existing state power because it buckles before foreign powers and fails to get anything out of its own people. The remedy is to be a leadership that sweeps away whatever relativises national power. The existing state power is to be replaced by one that organises society directly as service to the state. Citizens may then assert their interests only as contributions to the national mission. Independent dissent no longer counts as a legitimate antagonism that a government has to cope with; it proves the bad attitude or harmful activity of those who voice it. The leadership claims to carry out the will of the nation, and anyone who does not go along is suspected of not belonging to the real people at all. The nation becomes the title under which a party directs its claim to state power against the very existence of legitimate opposition. This also abolishes the worker’s right to fight out the antagonism independently of the national mission. He has to prove his performance and willingness to sacrifice; his organised resistance to the conditions under which he is used counts as an attack on the community. The fascist “critique of capital” is of a piece with this. It berates owners who fail to live up to their supposed responsibility, take their money abroad or put their business above the nation. The state is to free the property order from the considerations that hamper its national use and to bind its beneficiaries to that use. Capital keeps its property and is obliged to put it at the nation’s service; its business is to secure the country’s power and its ability to prevail. To this day, bourgeois antifascists cite this plank of the programme as proof that National Socialism was a variety of socialism. The argument is so serviceable that in January 2025, in conversation with Elon Musk, Alice Weidel turned it against the charge of fascism and declared Hitler a communist. As if Krupp, Flick or IG Farben had lost their property under Hitler instead of profiting from rearmament, “Aryanisation” and forced labour. The real antagonisms of capitalist society are thus to be made controllable through the unconditional subordination of those who bear them, and through selection. Any shortfall in returns appears as a lack of willingness to sacrifice. The less the national calculation adds up, the more urgent it becomes to purge the people and eliminate those who supposedly harm it. What makes a claim fascist is that it treats the existence of legitimate social and political opposition as a national defect and makes its removal part of producing the Volksgemeinschaft. The same yardstick is turned outward. A nation that allots its members their entitlement according to their service to its power does not treat its relations with other states as the peaceful recognition of equal ends. Success in the international struggle becomes proof of national right and national prowess. In fully developed fascist logic, war is the nation’s ultimate test. Fascism wants to free the state from having to consider its citizens, so as to harness them all the more thoroughly for the nation. Nothing that state power would be obliged to respect is to stand between state and society any longer. A fascist movement anticipates this state by exercising violence on its own account. It persecutes leftists and assaults foreigners because the responsible authorities are supposedly failing. With its terror it recommends itself as the force that takes the national mission seriously and does not shrink from its consequences. The deed proves a readiness to serve a harsher state power, and it does so before the movement itself governs. Anyone who waits for an unambiguous historical signal, such as the seizure of power, before reading these hallmarks ends up in an endless loop: as long as the attack on the political order has not fully succeeded, the obstacles still in its way are supposed to prove that it is harmless.
Development
The AfD does not campaign on the claim that the government is making this or that mistake. Its charge is that the “old parties” as a whole are in the process of ruining state power and the people. What it is after, then, is a redefinition of what the nation is and what it has to do. And because the population’s loyalty is not supposed to stop at its legal and economic obligations, the rest follows: Leitkultur (a national “guiding culture”) instead of multiculturalism, along with the devaluation of every other way of life, and the purging of curricula and universities. Who does not belong is easier to determine than what belonging consists of — a programme that can be grasped more precisely by its exclusions than by its content, and therein lies its capacity for escalation. The same ambitions can be observed in France, and in Italy. The “Citoyenneté-Identité-Immigration” bill introduced in 2024 by Marine Le Pen and the RN parliamentary group comprised fourteen articles aimed at making human rights conventions inapplicable to migration policy. The existing constitutional framework, so the argument runs, restricts the capacity of political power to act, and the people are to empower their government to rid itself of certain considerations for those affected. Italy has seen similar legislative developments, with criminal measures against protest expanded in recent years.
Anyone who takes the liberal constitutional order as the measure of all things has seen enough by now. But the question is not whether these programmes look frightening by its standards; it is what they want to change in the relationship between state power and people — and that is where the decisive finding lies: proposed constitutional amendments to be pushed through by referendum. Security decrees passed by parliamentary majorities. The Italian government criminalises forms of protest; it does not declare the opposition a pest whose removal will establish the unity of the people. The RN wants to clear away judicial review in one policy field and seeks the voters’ consent for doing so; it does not abolish the competition for power, it wants to win it. Of the three, the AfD formulates the most comprehensive programme, and it takes its cases to the courts of the very state it wants to remake. In 2025 the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified it as “confirmed right-wing extremist”, chiefly because of a concept of the people that distinguishes Germans by descent from mere “passport Germans”; the Administrative Court in Cologne has provisionally halted the classification in interim proceedings. Under this concept of the people, belonging hinges on origin rather than legal status, and the “deportation and remigration offensive” in its Saxony-Anhalt manifesto draws the practical consequence. Whether the party also treats the competition of interests and parties as a national defect need not first be demonstrated in government, though that is where it would be hardest to miss.
In the United States, the separation between movement and authority is particularly ill-suited to grasping what is politically at stake. On the first day of his second term, Trump granted sweeping pardons and commutations for the offences connected with 6 January 2021 and ordered the remaining indictments to be dropped. His proclamation declared this the end of a grave national injustice. The president gave the connection between movement and state a national justification: the state’s prosecution of his supporters’ acts was declared a wrong to be righted in the name of national restoration. The executive order of 18 February 2025, meanwhile, aimed to place even independent federal agencies more firmly under the president’s political direction by centralising regulatory decisions and the legal interpretations that bind the executive branch. Shortly afterwards came the order exempting numerous agencies and subunits of the federal service from the statutory system of union labour relations on grounds of national security. These measures did not raise the claim to treat independent opposition as illegitimate in principle, or to equate the leadership with the nation. More importantly, though, it will not do to object that the American right is no stand-in for a negligent authority on the grounds that the authority is acting itself. Access to state power is exactly what changes the means of a political programme. What a movement previously demanded, threatened or carried out by its own hand can now become an agency’s mandate. Trump himself wrote: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” A presidential memorandum of September 2025 lists “anti-Americanism” and “anti-Christianity” among the indicators of domestic terrorism and sets the FBI’s counterterrorism apparatus, together with the IRS, on networks and funders. Independent opposition thus counts as a threat to the nation, and the leadership declares itself entitled to override the law when it is saving the country. The administration also wanted to redraw the boundary of belonging: an executive order was to deny citizenship to children born in the country if neither parent is a citizen or a permanent resident. At the end of June 2026, the Supreme Court struck it down. The institutions can dig in their heels; the claim has been made all the same. The agencies are to function as organs of the elected ruler, and their fitness is measured by whether they stand in his way. The impositions ultimately in dispute do not presuppose a fascist seizure of power. The coalition in Berlin, which rules out any alliance with the AfD, has had asylum seekers turned back at the borders, deports people to Afghanistan and is arming for confrontation with Russia. All of this is pursued by an elected government with a parliamentary majority, backed by parties that draw a line against fascism. In short: democracy.
Firewall
Drawing a line against the right in no way obliges a democratic party to reject the right’s national definitions of the problem. The German government demonstrates as much, and it is not alone in this. In October 2025, Geert Wilders and his right-wing populist party came close to winning the Dutch general election. The government that has since taken office consists of three bourgeois parties of the centre. In its own account of its asylum policy, it states that fewer asylum seekers should come and that applications should in future be lodged outside Europe. At the same time, it stresses faster procedures and quicker integration for those allowed to stay. The guiding consideration is the state’s selection of a desirable population, sorting people by residence status and by the burden they place on the community. To do this, the government need not be called Wilders, nor adopt his entire programme. That is exactly when competing parties can outbid one another: the democratic centre promises to be the one that finally remedies the weakness the right decries. Whoever wants to save the nation from the right is thus drawn into a peculiar competition with it and has to prove that their administration serves national interests better. This standpoint has no objection in principle to measuring people by their usefulness to the country. What it disputes is who should be in charge and which methods are fit for purpose.
National Salvation
That the differences between democratic rule and the fascist programme are considerable is beyond dispute. Paradoxically, though, they are blurred time and again by precisely those who appoint themselves special guardians against fascism, and who accordingly want to find proof of fascism in every restructuring within democracy. Whether they mean to or not, they give themselves a mandate for the political rescue of the nation. Democratic antifascism demands that the “democrats” close ranks. This closing of ranks is also to be aimed at those who reject the term fascism and point to functioning institutions and parliamentary procedure. It makes the endangered order a common purpose and subordinates the complaints against it to that purpose. Those affected are to set aside their reasons for opposing a policy because its personnel, they are told, must keep the worse competitor out. The government thus derives a claim to allegiance from, of all things, criticism of what might follow its replacement. Talk of the “lesser evil” gives this imposition its sober form. The citizen is to make his dependence on state decisions the reason for empowering whichever administrator of that dependence will probably do less harm. His intention may well be to avoid a particular harm, but the political act remains participation in deciding who wields state power, and it certainly creates no binding mandate to realise his particular interest.
The question “Is this fascism?” has its proper place: in examining a political programme and its form of rule. It becomes the wrong question as soon as a negative answer serves to exonerate what is happening, or a positive one to commit people to the existing order. One has to be able to determine what fascism is without acquitting democracy. And one has to be able to criticise democracy without taking its fascist opponents for merely more consistent specimens of the same. It is not people who owe the nation a useful existence. A society that sorts them by their usefulness to business and state power is the object of their critique.