“So where’s my German friends?” Donald Trump asked a fawning Mar-a-Lago crowd on Election Day, before flashing a grin and a thumbs up for a photo with a group of young men.
The German friends in question: Fabrice Ambrosini, a former politician forced to resign after a video surfaced of him doing a Hitler salute; Leonard Jäger, a far-right influencer who has promoted the Reichsbürger movement, an extremist group behind a failed coup attempt in 2022; and Phillipp-Anders Rau, a candidate for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right party.
Giddy with excitement, shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump, they cheered “fight, fight, fight,” echoing Trump’s post assassination-attempt rallying cry, before repeating it in German—“kämpft, kämpft, kämpft”—fists pumping.
“Let’s hope Donald Trump creates the renewal for his country that we in the AfD are planning for our country,” Rau wrote on Instagram after.
Inspired by his tough-guy bravado and promises to expel immigrants from the US, the German far-right has projected onto Trump a “fantasy of ethnonational power” they seek to replicate, says Mabel Berezin, director of Cornell University’s Institute for European Studies.
To them, he’s not just a kindred spirit—he could also be a harbinger. A mere 10 hours after he cemented his return to the White House, the German government dramatically collapsed over a budget dispute, opening up the German far-right’s best chance at seizing power since World War II. With support from about 1 in 5 Germans, the AfD has become the country’s second most popular party ahead of new elections in February.
And on Friday it received backing from one of Trump’s top allies. Elon Musk called the AfD Germany’s savior in a Tweet seen by more than 33 million people, sparking another round of far-right digital fist-pumping. The AfD instantly plastered Musk’s face on an ad and its co-leader recorded a video message profusely thanking him.
Only the AfD can save Germany https://t.co/Afu0ea1Fvt
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2024
“History has shown that developments that start in America eventually spill over across the Atlantic and ultimately influence our lives as well,” reads a translated post from Journalistenwatch, an influential far-right blog. “And we also know that in the USA, thanks to the triumphant success of Donald Trump, the pendulum has finally swung in the other direction and freedom for everyone has finally risen from the ashes.”
At the core of this transnational love affair—more so than their admiration for Russia, their demonization of the LGBTQ+ community, and their romanticized nostalgia for the past—is a single racist idea: that dark-skinned immigrants pose an existential threat and must be sent back to their home countries, a political concept known as remigration, which has become the global far-right’s cause célèbre over the last decade.
The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by non-white immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.
“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones.
If Great Replacement is the myth, remigration is its manual, taking the conspiracy theory’s white supremacy at face value and proposing the mass deportations Trump has championed. In fact, Trump used the term in a September post on Truth Social promoting his candidacy, writing, “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration). I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America.”
A viral dance hit among the party’s younger supporters, played at an AfD election party, features lyrics like “remigration is happening, put the turbines up real high” and the chorus “we’re deporting all of them!”
The term was popularized by Europe’s Identitarian movement (whose American offshoot, Identity Evropa, helped plan the 2017 Charlottesville riots) and its Austrian leader Martin Sellner (who was investigated for corresponding with the Christchurch shooter).
The AfD found itself in hot water last January when German journalists at Correctiv uncovered a clandestine conference with Sellner as keynote speaker. There, he pitched a remigration plan to senior party members that would deport millions of Germans, including citizens with non-German backgrounds and the “non-assimilated,” sparking nationwide protests and a debate about banning the party. Sellner has since been banned from entering Germany.
Since then, the party has been cagey about what exactly it means by remigration, with some AfD officials describing it simply as deporting asylum-seekers who’ve broken the law. Still others are more clear about their intentions to carry out widespread deportations, a taboo and unconstitutional idea that for many Germans is reminiscent of the not-so-distant history of the Holocaust.
This November, the AfD in the state of Bavaria passed a “resolution for remigration,” calling for the creation of new ways “to more easily revoke German citizenship that has already been granted” and “comprehensive remigration in the millions over the next 10 years.” The party has started using plane imagery in official posters and advertisements, like one papered all over the city of Erfurt showing a bright blue sky and a jet airliner above the words: “Summer, Sun, Remigration.”
A viral dance hit among the party’s younger supporters, played at an AfD election party, features lyrics like “remigration is happening, put the turbines up real high” and the chorus “we’re deporting all of them!” over AI-generated images of dancing flight attendants and downtrodden Black and Brown men pushing luggage through an airport.
“Within the AfD there’s people who say the quiet part out loud,” says Jakob Guhl, a researcher of the far-right at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank. “There might even be some people who don’t think there is a quiet part.”
One of those people is certainly Björn Höcke, head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia, where the party won a landmark victory this fall, toppling a nearly eight-decade postwar norm. A German court ruled Höcke could legally be described as a “fascist,” and he’s been convicted twice of using banned Nazi slogans.
“If Björn Höcke becomes Bundeskanzler,” Guhl says, using the German word for chancellor, “I think then really the aim is to make Germany more ethnically homogenous and revoke people’s citizenship in some way and then force them to leave.” In August, Höcke weighed in on a government proposal to regulate knives, writing on Telegram that the real problem was “the attitude of people who have a foreign background and despise our way of life and are prepared to use lethal force.”
He added, “We are confronted with mass immigration that can lead to a collapse in civilization. People from foreign cultures, whose lives are shaped by different values than ours and who are not prepared to assimilate, are permanently changing our social life simply through their numbers.”
“The implication of the AfD’s messaging is, these aren’t real Germans,” Beirich says. “They don’t belong here. They’re the ones causing crime, taking your jobs. This all sounds very much like Trump.”
This ideology spreads easily across a digital ecosystem of alternative media and social media apps. Central to the ecosystem is Telegram, known for its nearly non-existent content moderation and ability to create broadcast-style channels of unlimited size, which has become the app of choice for neo-Nazis, extremists, and conspiracy theorists.
In the two-month window surrounding the US presidential election, 449 far-right German Telegram channels mentioned Trump in more than 10,000 messages—that’s about 5 percent of the total messages these channels sent during that time.
There, users have breathlessly followed Trump’s cabinet picks and shared clips from American influencers, including Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. They’ve borrowed American complaints of a “censorship industrial complex” and amplified unfounded allegations of election fraud.
Watching what resonates in America, Germans then deploy their network of far-right podcasters, media personalities, influencers, and politicians to echo similar claims and conspiracy theories.
“The implication of the AfD’s messaging is, these aren’t real Germans. They don’t belong here. They’re the ones causing crime, taking your jobs. This all sounds very much like Trump.”
For example, Stefan Magnet, founder of the Austrian far-right news broadcaster AUF1, wrote in October without any evidence to his nearly 75,000 Telegram followers about a “globalist world of lies” in which German government ministers “are preparing to censor Elon Musk’s news service ‘X’ in Europe. Above all: If Trump wins, they will shut down the platform or brutally censor it.”
“Some of these debates are certainly being repackaged and refought with very different narratives and angles and in the German context as well,” Guhl says. “So you definitely see certain things that first pop off in the US seem to be working quite well there and that are then being adopted in Germany as well.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence in mid-December, officially triggering a snap election on February 23, only the fourth ever in the country’s modern history. The Christian Democrats, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s old party and the current opposition, are expected to come to power and invite other parties to form a coalition government.
Thus far, the Christian Democrats have promised to uphold a “firewall” against far-right parties like the AfD, forbidding them from joining a coalition. While that firewall is likely to hold in 2025, there’s already been collaboration between the Christian Democrats and the AfD in local government; and the more votes the AfD receives, the greater its ability to steer Germany rightward.
Take this statement from the center-left Scholz in August, after the AfD spent all summer hammering him on immigration: “We will have to do everything we can to ensure that those who cannot and are not allowed to stay in Germany are repatriated and deported.”
It marked a departure for a longtime supporter of Germany’s migration policies and a recognition that the AfD’s messaging—and, to some degree, Trump’s—was resonating with voters.
“Trump says he’s going to deport millions. He’s going to have huge raids. That is something that brings joy to the hearts of people like those in the AfD and other far-right parties,” Beirich says.