Since the early morning hours, thousands of activists in the city of Erfurt in central Germany have been setting up roadblocks to block the party convention for the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany). The action coalition Widersetzen alone has brought 230 buses carrying over 10,000 people from all over Germany to block the party convention and use their bodies to prevent AfD members from arriving. Some traveled through the night to support the blockade and report live from the scene on the actions taking place.
Since 6:00 a.m., action units of the blockades known as the “pink finger,” the “yellow finger,” and the “colorful finger” have been blocking the AfD’s main access routes, including the A71 highway. In Erfurt itself, activists are blocking the tram tracks. The AfD, for its part, seems to have learned something from its past disasters and some of its members arrived as early as the middle of the night.
As of 9:00 a.m., when this article was written, there are eight large blockades and several smaller ones. The mood among the activists is good. The police are on site with a massive contingent of over 6,000 officers, water cannons, helicopters, and dogs. The “Pink Finger” area has already been detained by the police, and the first arrests have been made. However, around 500 activists managed to break through the blockade to make their way toward the city center.
This scenario shows us both the determination of thousands of people to fight against the AfD and the German state’s determination to accommodate the AfD.
How the German State Is Paving the Way for the AfD
If the party convention takes place at all, it will only be made possible by massive police violence: buses carrying AfD politicians are being escorted by dozens of police vans and hundreds of police officers. As in Giessen and Riesa, the police are acting brutally with batons and pepper spray. The first water cannons are appearing on the highway. (For more updates, check out our exclusive live ticker in English) It is completely illusory to think that this very same state would do anything against the AfD. The AfD can only be defeated in the struggle against state organs such as the domestic intelligence service (“Verfassungsschutz”), which are cracking down heavily on the Left.
The direction of the AfD party convention is expected to be that the party intends to integrate itself into the regime by taking over the state government in Saxony-Anhalt with Ulrich Siegmund. Its governing program promises, among other things, to make abortions significantly more difficult, to launch a Bundesrat initiative for the complete abolition of the right to asylum, to establish a deportation police force modeled after ICE, to introduce forced labor for the unemployed and refugees, and to classify “Antifa” as a terrorist organization. The bourgeois forces want to portray it as though one merely needs to “tone down” the AfD on the far right, as Jens Spahn does when he emphasizes that he cannot work with “this” AfD — implying he could work with a different one. In reality, however, the integration of the “moderate factions of the AfD” is happening alongside the strengthening of the fascist forces within the AfD, to which Siegmund himself is closely aligned.
Disciplining the party — which is intended to be achieved through the threat of a ban — is not possible and will only lead to even more racist policies by the democratic parties as well as repression against the Left. At the party convention, Höcke intends to install his confidant Stefan Möller on the party executive board and further water down the rules prohibiting ties to fascist groups, which will demonstrate his strength within the party.
Against the backdrop of the AfD’s integration into the political mainstream, we also oppose the Left Party’s policy of tolerating the CDU, which amounts to an alignment with right-wing politics. Parts of the Left Party are even cracking down on protests and resistance in the name of future governability; for example, Thuringia’s former Minister-President Bodo Ramelow has insisted on the right to freedom of assembly — even for the AfD — and has distanced himself from the possibility of violence in connection with anti-AfD blockades. In doing so, he aligns himself with the bourgeois distinction between “good” and “bad” demonstrators and stabs his own members in the back — members who have traveled to Erfurt from all over Germany to participate in blockades — after they had previously been slandered as “far-left” anti-Semites through a media campaign, as was the case with Linksjugend Solid.
Defeating the AfD — and Chancellor Merz
The “firewall” from the right has already fallen; the Union is just waiting for opportunities to collaborate with the AfD in some way. So, as leftists and workers, we should not allow our hands to be tied by supporting capitalist governments “against the AfD,” which only continue to pave the way for them and oppress us. Only by rejecting capitalist governments — including in Berlin — can the far right be defeated. To this end, we put forward radical-democratic demands, such as the abolition of the 5 percent electoral threshold and the dissolution of the domestic intelligence service. We advocate for a plan of action by the unions to fight back on the streets against the social attacks — such as the recently announced requirement to provide a medical certificate of incapacity for work (AU) starting on the first day and the abolition of the telephone AU, the expansion of fixed-term employment contracts, and the looming pension reform. We do not defend the democracy of the rich — the democracy of someone like Merz, whom a doctor can visit at home and who, thanks to his BlackRock money, does not have to rely on his own labor — but rather the democratic rights of workers and the oppressed, and we fight for their expansion, such as through voting rights for everyone who lives here.
To defeat the AfD, we must also defeat the Merz government. Its militarism and social cuts are grist to the mill of the Far Right. The school strike demonstrates that it is possible to organize from within schools against the authoritarian policies of this state. The success of the movement against the AfD depends on how resistant it can be to co-optation by the state, which seeks to instrumentalize it for its capitalist governments under the slogan “All Democrats Against Right-Wing Extremism,” while itself increasingly incorporating the AfD’s policies. Only by uniting with the strikes and a youth movement against capitalism and war in schools, universities, and workplaces can we defeat the right wing.
We therefore need to link anti-fascism with the anti-militarism of the school strikes, since more aggressive German imperialism — with its military buildup and support for genocide — is part of the shift to the right. It was U.S. imperialism, with Elon Musk’s support for the AfD, that made the party “socially acceptable” to German capital ahead of the 2025 election. Against this backdrop, we demand the expropriation of Rheinmetall under workers’ control and the closure of Ramstein Air Base, along with its conversion to civilian use. As soon as Germany’s imperialist strategy changes, the main obstacle — Russia — to the AfD’s integration could disappear; the strength of the fascists in the AfD and capital’s reservations toward the AfD depend more on Germany’s relationship with Russia than on the AfD’s racism. Only a working-class and youth internationalism — opposed to our own imperialism and independent of the capitalist blocs — can counter this.
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