Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
Even among liberals there are those who see in the New Right comrades in the fight against the left-wing zeitgeist. They overlook that the supposed partners are in truth false friends.
The feminism activist Kristina Lunz had probably pictured it differently. Her NGO Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, which over the past years had, with two handfuls of staff, advocated a foreign policy in the style of Annalena Baerbock, had to close in the summer of 2025 after a shitstorm. The remarkable thing: the shitstorm was sparked not by something Lunz had said, but by something she had not said. And it came not from the right, but from the corner of her supposed allies on the left.
This is not the right place to set out the whole episode. Anyone interested in the background should read the interview with Kristina Lunz in the FAZ. What is interesting about this case is something one can learn about the relation between moderate and radical leftists, because it applies analogously to the relation between liberals and conservatives on one hand and radical rightists on the other: as soon as the radicals feel strong enough, they throw their supposed partners from the middle under the bus. Anyone who thinks he can dance with wolves ends up not as pack leader, but as appetiser.
I am aware that many think this comparison overdone. Why should one be afraid of this old gentleman with dog-tie and tweed jacket and his troop, which includes not a few former members of FDP and CDU? Especially since they do sometimes say things that sound clever and could just as well come from centre-right politicians, on bureaucracy reduction, say, or on technological openness regarding automotive drivetrains. And I do understand the impulse. The bearing of Gauland, Weidel, Chrupalla and co. barely differs from what one knows from the Rotary Club, the chamber of commerce, or the business environment. The left-wing milieu is far more foreign to one, regardless of whether one is dealing with the vegan big-city hipster or the radical Antifa activist. But think again of Kristina Lunz: in dealing with radical activists from the left it did not help her either that she had followed (almost) all the rules of the left-wing milieu and in many questions probably holds similar views. If the submission is not complete, the alternative is, as a rule, annihilation.
The New Right does in part use terms that are also important to liberals. What they concretely mean by them, however, differs. When they warn that more „echte Demokratie” is needed, liberals may nod. But at the right edge the enemies of democracy are seen first and foremost in economic globalisation and social liberalisation, two pillars of liberal thinking. Alexander Gauland formulated this clearly back in 2002, then still as a member of the CDU, in his little-noticed book Anleitung zum Konservativsein, when he warned of the »Neigung […], die historischen Kräfte hinter blutigen Konflikten zu leugnen und die Welt durch Markt und Menschenrechte zu erneuern«, because that would »in Wahrheit eine intellektuelle Rebarbarisierung« amount to. What sounds familiar suddenly means the opposite. One can easily get spun around.
Other thoughts from Gauland’s book are remarkable too and let one suspect that the harmless and, for many bourgeois readers, easily compatible bearing described above is part of a strategy. The current AfD honorary chairman was already convinced back then that we shall in the future be dealing with »zwei kulturellen Milieus […], einem liberal individualistischen, das sich für Zuwanderung, die Anerkennung von homosexuellen Lebensgemeinschaften und jede Art von Selbstverwirklichung starkmacht, und einem wertkonservativen, das auf einer verbindlichen Identität aus moralischen Prinzipien und abendländischen Traditionen besteht und wirtschaftlichen Notwendigkeiten wie wissenschaftlichen Erfolgen eher skeptisch gegenübersteht, also nicht mehr das bürgerliche Lager gegen die Sozialdemokratie, sondern Konservative versus Liberale in allen Parteien.« And there should be no doubt on which side Gauland, the AfD, and the entire New Right stand.
Gauland is by no means the first to have used this definition of the enemy. In the relevant texts of the New Right, as in those of its intellectual predecessors of the Conservative Revolution, one finds plenty of the same. »Am Liberalismus gehen die Völker zu Grunde«, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck had already set the direction. And further: »Liberalismus hat Kulturen untergraben. Er hat Religionen vernichtet. Er hat Vaterländer zerstört. Er war die Selbstauflösung der Menschheit.« The next generation saw it the same way. Gegen die Liberalen is the title of Armin Mohler’s polemic, the chronicler of the Conservative Revolution, from 1988. There he calls the liberals »Feind Nr. 1«. »Mit einem Linken kann ich mich unter Umständen verständigen, denn nur zu oft hat er eine Teilwahrheit für sich. Mit dem Liberalen jedoch kann es keine Verständigung geben«, Mohler is convinced. Even Alain de Benoist as recently as 2014 again stressed that he had »den Liberalismus zum Hauptfeind erklärt«, since it was »das schädlichste und anfechtbarste System«. Likewise Felix Menzel and Philip Stein, born in the 1980s and 1990s and thus a quite different generation of right-wing thinkers from Mohler, de Benoist, or Gauland, note in a co-authored book: »Es ist doch so, dass alle gründlich denkenden Linken (von denen es nicht viele gibt) und Rechten heute einen gemeinsamen Feind ausmachen können.«
The defining feature of liberalism is seen to be Western-style parliamentarism. On this, not least Carl Schmitt has formulated a fairly clear opinion: »Es kann eine Demokratie geben ohne das, was man modernen Parlamentarismus nennt, und einen Parlamentarismus ohne Demokratie; und Diktatur ist ebenso wenig der entscheidende Gegensatz zur Demokratie wie Demokratie zur Diktatur.« Schmitt thereby puts into writing a motif that crops up again and again with the Conservative Revolutionaries as with the New Right: democracy as the rule of the people gets reinterpreted in the sense that »wahre Demokratie« is the form of state in which the best politics for the Volksgemeinschaft is made. While parliamentarism, in their view, artificially divides this people and turns them against each other in the contest of political opinions, a strong leader — a »wohlmeinender Diktator« — or an elite as representative of the »Volkswillen« can rule through.
Against this background one has also to understand the enemy image of the „party state”, which one meets so often in the New Right. All of this fits with what is probably the best-known motif Schmitt created: the elementary distinction between friend and foe, which he regarded as essential. In his 1932 work Der Begriff des Politischen he wrote: »Solange ein Volk in der Sphäre des Politischen existiert, muss es, wenn auch nur für den extremsten Fall, über dessen Vorliegen es aber selbst entscheidet, die Unterscheidung von Freund und Feind selber bestimmen. Darin liegt das Wesen seiner politischen Existenz. Hat es nicht mehr die Fähigkeit oder den Willen zu dieser Unterscheidung, so hört es auf, politisch zu existieren. Lässt es sich von einem Fremden vorschreiben, wer sein Feind ist und gegen wen es kämpfen darf oder nicht, so ist es kein politisch freies Volk mehr und einem anderen politischen System ein- oder untergeordnet.«
Schmitt thus stands for a political approach of consequence and ruthlessness, for which he is to this day revered by the new right. Thinking this radical image through to the end, one inevitably arrives at a model of rule that does not correspond to the type of Western democracy. The ideas about its concrete shape vary considerably in the new-right scene. Common to all, however, is the goal of overcoming this democracy and these rules of living together. Some sketch as an attractive solution something like an expert government standing above the political opinion war. Edgar Julius Jung wrote on this concept already in 1927: »Würde ohne Rücksicht auf Parteiwünsche eine Regierung gebildet, die sich nur dem deutschen Volke und der Stunde verantwortlich fühlt, würde sie mit den notwendigen Vollmachten ausgestattet, so hätte sie das Volk an ihrer Seite. […] Das Volk würde dem zujubeln, der den Mut hätte, den Parteispuk mit harter Hand zu vertreiben.« Liberals who make common cause with this thinking should not hope to be on the winners’ side on the day democracy dies. What use is it to a liberal under an AfD government if he can still drive a petrol car but his bourgeois freedoms are gone? An aversion to left-wing thinking and action must not push one into the arms of the right. The alternative to both convictions is and remains liberalism, and this fight its supporters have to take up.
