The Italian socialist writer Ignazio Silone, a former communist who broke with Stalinism, is credited with the observation—relayed by the Swiss journalist François Bondy after a 1944–45 conversation in Geneva—“If fascism returns, it will not say: ‘I am fascism.’ No, it will say: ‘I am anti-fascism.’”
Large sections of the political and mass-media class in Germany appear determined to fulfill this prediction in the wake of the election of a state parliament president from the ranks of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Magdeburg.
On 6 September 2026, the AfD won the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag election with 43.8 percent of the vote and 39 of 83 seats—the first time the party has finished first in a German state contest—while the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) collapsed to 17.2 percent. Turnout reached 77.8 percent. In the constitutive session on 6 October, the AfD’s Tobias Rausch was elected Landtagspräsident by secret ballot with 48 of 82 votes cast. The AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which had pledged support, together held 44 seats; the surplus indicated votes from other parties. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider was likewise elected a vice-president.
Under long-standing parliamentary custom in the Federal Republic since 1949, the strongest parliamentary group nominates the president. When that custom produces an office-holder from an established party, it is treated as the fulfillment of the voters’ mandate. When the office-holder belongs to the AfD—classified by the Saxony-Anhalt Secret Service as confirmed right-wing extremist—the same procedure is denounced as a unique breach of taboo.
At the Bebelplatz in the heart of Berlin, the precise site where National Socialists burned books on 10 May 1933, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) declared: “What we have experienced today is a unique breach of taboo in parliamentary democracy, one we have not seen in this form for more than 90 years. Namely, that democrats have served as enablers for right-wing extremists and fascists.”
He and members of the SPD Bundestag group had marched from the Bundestag through the Brandenburg Gate to the square, several carrying copies of the Basic Law; Pistorius then led the singing of the national anthem which, to no one’s surprise, few knew.
The choice of location and the invocation of 1933 constitute a classic anti-fascist trope: the equation of any electoral advance by a party outside the post-war consensus with the seizure of power by the NSDAP. The trope collapses distinctions between a secret-ballot parliamentary vote conducted under the Basic Law and the street violence and Enabling Act of 1933.
Such statements amount to a declaration of war on the ordinary functioning of parliamentary democracy. They rest on the premise that the AfD’s program and personnel place it outside the constitutional order, so that any cooperation, even the routine election of a presiding officer, constitutes “enabling” fascism. The same logic has long underpinned the “Brandmauer” (firewall) policy and the intermittent campaign, recently amplified by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD), to explore a ban of the AfD.
In addresses marking 9 November—commemorating both the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms and the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall—Steinmeier warned that attempts to tame anti-democrats by granting them power failed in Weimar, insisted that democratic parties must not cooperate with extremists in parliament or government, and stated that a party embarking on “aggressive hostility toward the constitution” must reckon with the possibility of prohibition. Although he has not always named the AfD, the referent has been unambiguous.
Public broadcasting and large segments of the press have amplified the same framing, treating the Magdeburg outcome less as an electoral result than as a moral emergency requiring extra-parliamentary protest and historical analogy.
These are recognizable anti-fascist tropes. Historically, the Communist International and the German Communist Party (KPD) deployed “anti-fascism” against social democrats as much as against Nazis; in August 1931 the KPD joined the NSDAP in supporting a referendum aimed at bringing down the Social Democratic government of Prussia. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, anti-fascism was temporarily subordinated to the strategic needs of the Soviet Union. Silone’s warning reflected precisely this instrumentalization: a rhetoric that claims exclusive ownership of democratic virtue while expanding the category of “fascist” to include any rival who accepts electoral competition.
Contemporary variants include the routine application of the label to parties advocating stricter immigration controls or national sovereignty, the elevation of Antifa-linked violence—monitored by the Secret Service as a core field of left-extremist agitation involving assaults, arson, and intimidation directed at AfD members and others deemed “fascist”—to the status of legitimate resistance, and the demand that constitutional organs (courts, intelligence services, public media) act as permanent guardians against the largest opposition party.
The Magdeburg election and the Berlin protest illustrate the pattern. An office filled by secret ballot under established rules is redescribed as a 1933-style taboo breach because the winner’s party is politically unacceptable. Every state office and the apparatus of public broadcasting is mobilized in unison under the banner “I am antifascism.” The effect is to delegitimize not merely the AfD but the parliamentary mechanism that produced the result.
It will do them no good. In December, Saxony-Anhalt’s Landtag is scheduled to elect a new Minister-President. AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund has indicated he will stand; an absolute majority requires 42 votes. Escalation of the anti-fascist rhetoric now narrows the room for any subsequent compromise or further escalation.
German voters are facing a conundrum in which the ordinary translation of electoral strength into parliamentary office is treated as an existential threat, while the language of anti-fascism supplies the justification for treating that translation as illegitimate. Silone’s pessimistic prediction is being tested in real time.