Alarm bells sounded last week when Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump adviser Elon Musk praised the far-right German party Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), just weeks before that country’s snap national elections are scheduled to take place.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk posted on X, prompting backlash from conservative and mainstream German leaders and the global Jewish community about a key Trump adviser’s endorsement of a party that has flirted with Nazi and white supremacist slogans and espoused dehumanizing and hateful rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims. In the wake of the criticism, Musk doubled down, writing the next day that “AfD is the only hope for Germany.”
Make no mistake: It is extremely dangerous to have an American vice president-elect and a core Trump adviser voice support for the AfD, therefore normalizing very extreme political positions.
Vance’s more tacit endorsement for AfD came in the form of a post responding to claims that AfD is dangerous. “It’s so dangerous for people to control their borders,” Vance tweeted sarcastically Saturday, implying support for the party’s anti-immigration positions. “So so dangerous. The dangerous level is off the charts.”
Make no mistake: It is extremely dangerous to have an American vice president-elect and a core Trump adviser voice support for the AfD, therefore normalizing very extreme political positions. The AfD has called for mass deportations, argued that children with disabilities should be removed from regular schools, and runs social media ads blaming immigrants for crime and sexual violence. One anti-immigrant ad run by the AfD showed the belly of a pregnant white woman with the phrase “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.” Another campaign billboard used a 19th century painting of a slave market — depicting a nude, white woman having her teeth inspected by turban-clad, brown men — to warn that Europe could become “Eurabia,” a reference to a conspiracy theory favored by white supremacists.
State-level German domestic intelligence authorities formally monitor some local branches of the AfD as extremist organizations that are working against German democracy. One of the party’s regional leaders has been fined multiple times by German courts for using a banned Nazi phrase, “Everything for Germany” (Alles für Deutschland), prompting another politician to refer to the AfD itself as a “Nazi” party earlier this year.
Even other European far- right parties have disavowed the party as too extreme. In May, the far-right coalition in the European Parliament expelled the AfD after its leading candidate stated that not all Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel, the guards in World War II concentration campus) were criminals. On Dec. 20, an AfD supporter, a doctor and self-described “former Muslim” who was angry at the “Islamification” of Germany, drove his car into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing five, including a 9-year-old girl, and injuring dozens.
The overall risk of an AfD victory in the upcoming February snap election is very low. Most Germans view the party negatively, and thousands have marched in protest of its normalization of racist and xenophobic rhetoric. Still, the AfD has steadily gained voters, although it’s currently polling in second place nationally (with 19% support), trailing a conservative alliance that is widely expected to win.








