Germany

In the first week of January, I received a letter from the Berlin Immigration Office, informing me that I had lost my right of freedom of movement in Germany, due to allegations around my involvement in the pro-Palestine movement. Since I’m a Polish citizen living in Berlin, I knew that deporting an EU national from another EU country is practically impossible. I contacted a lawyer and, given the lack of substantial legal reasoning behind the order, we filed a lawsuit against it, after which I didn’t think much of it.

I later found out that three other people active in the Palestine movement in Berlin, Roberta Murray, Shane O’Brien and Cooper Longbottom, received the same letters. Murray and O’Brien are Irish nationals, Longbottom is American. We understood this as yet another intimidation tactic from the state, which has also violently suppressed protests and arrested activists, and expected a long and dreary but not at all urgent process of fighting our deportation orders.

Then, at the beginning of March, each of our lawyers received on our behalf another letter, declaring that we are to be given until 21 April to voluntarily leave the country or we will be forcibly removed.

The letters cite charges arising from our involvement in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. None of the charges have yet led to a court hearing, yet the deportation letters conclude that we are a threat to public order and national security. There has been no legal process for this decision, and none of us have a criminal record. The reasoning in the letters continues with vague and unfounded accusations of “antisemitism” and supporting “terrorist organisations” – referring to Hamas – as well as its supposed “front organisations in Germany and Europe”.

This is not the first instance of Germany weaponising migration law. Since October 2023, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has unlawfully frozen the processing of all asylum seekers from Gaza. And on 16 April 2025 a federal administrative court in Germany will reportedly decide on a case that could set a precedent for the German state to increase deportations of asylum seekers to Greece.

These extreme measures are not a sudden shift or solely a fringe rightwing position. They are the result of a more than year-long campaign by the liberal Ampel coalition – the Social Democratic party (SPD), the Free Democratic party (FDP) and the Greens – and the German media, calling for mass deportations, widely seen as a response to the growing pro-Palestinian movement, and targeted predominantly at the Arab and Muslim German population.

Political scientist Cas Mudde has suggested a classification I find particularly helpful, especially when it comes to determining what, exactly, we are confronted with in case of the AfD. Mudde has been at the forefront of the research on far-right parties and movement across Europe – few people can offer the kind of broad, comparative perspective he can provide. In his 2019 book The Far Right Today, Mudde concisely outlines what I believe is an extremely useful typology.

The first key distinction to draw is between the mainstream right and the far right. On the mainstream right, we find established conservative parties that are largely on board with the foundations of liberal democracy: the rule of law, universal suffrage, free and fair elections, minority rights, protection of baseline civil liberties. What defines them as parties of the right is that they are skeptical towards the idea of egalitarianism; they accept “natural” hierarchies which they contend should either be preserved or, at least, not leveled via state intervention. But they tolerate some measure of pluralism, respect democratic deliberation, and ultimately support and stabilize the democratic system.

Far-right movements and parties, by contrast, reject the system – they are fundamentally not on board with liberal democracy. Crucially, the far right is itself not a monolithic bloc but covers a range of ideologies as well as attitudes and dispositions. Cas Mudde helpfully distinguishes two main camps on the far right: the radical right and the extreme right. The distinction really comes down to a reactionary (on the radical right) vs revolutionary (on the extreme right) attitude and political project. The radical-right reactionaries disdain liberal democracy, but prefer to work mostly within the existing political and constitutional system to turn the clock back; they begrudgingly accept some level of restraint in their anti-democratic pursuit. If they got their way, they would probably erect something that is best described as an illiberal democracy: It still looks democratic on the surface, with elections and opposition parties, but the system is set up to entrench certain hierarchies, discriminate against historically marginalized groups, and consolidate power in the hands of the right. To me, Chief Justice John Roberts belongs in that bucket (and has a case to be one of their standard-bearers in the United States).

The extreme-right revolutionaries, on the other hand, will never be satisfied with just reformist reactionary measures. They desire to tear the system down. They accept no opposition, no restraint. They are not content to bend the law, they believe they stand above it. They don’t just want to make it harder for certain groups to participate in the political process, they want to purge them from the nation.

In the autumn of 1938, an internal memorandum was circulated among Reichsbank officials about the dire economic situation of Nazi Germany as a result of the frenzied rearmament policy through central bank monetary expansion. Warning against its inflationary effects, the memo suggested a “smooth landing” from a war to a peacetime economy. In the following months, seeing that instead of restraint there was a further acceleration of the armament race, Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht and the banks’ directorate decided to issue an official memorandum, which Schacht delivered directly to Hitler’s hands. Emphasizing that the Fuhrer himself had always “rejected inflation as stupid and senseless”, the letter stressed that “Reichsbank gold and foreign exchange reserves were ‘no longer available’”, that the trade deficit was “rising sharply” and that “price and wage controls were no longer working effectively”. With the volume of notes in circulation accelerating, state finances were bluntly described as “close to collapse”.