#5 Umberto Eco and the AfD

On Modern Fascism

Germany will hold a Superwahljahr in 2026, a year with an exceptionally high number of elections. One of the parties eligible to vote for is Alternative für Deutschland, a party labeled as right-wing extremist by the German intelligence service in 2025, yet won over 20% of the seats in the Bundestag that year. The question now, of course, is whether, given the history of the past hundred years, we should be concerned: is there a risk of fascism, in Germany or even on a larger scale?

Perhaps some people find it too simplistic to label the AfD's right-wing extremism as fascist. This naturally raises the question of when that would be permissible; at what point should we start to worry, and should we sound the alarm? Fascism is certainly a highly charged term, but it does seem important for identifying truly dangerous ideologies within society. On the one hand, we don't want to be too loose with the freedom to form a political party and express one's opinion as a citizen, but on the other, we don't want to fall back into the abyss of totalitarianism. Moreover, fascists ofcourse benefit a lot from the fact that the term is so hard to define: they can always say that they are not as extreme as real fascists, that you are using the word in the wrong way by applying it on them. It is kind of the same as those people who say that they are not actually homophobic because they don't out-right hate gay people, and that their general distrust of homosexual people is not the same as real, extreme homophobia.

The Italian thinker Umberto Eco could help us. In 1995, he wrote Ur-Fasiscm, a list of characteristics to identify whether an ideology falls under the "fuzzy" term fascism. [1] I won't list them all in this column, but according to Eco, this isn't necessary: ​​the difficulty with fascism is precisely that an ideology can't contain all or more of the characteristics he describes, and still be clearly fascist. The application of Eco's text seems clear: if we test the AfD against some or all of the criteria he mentions, we can determine whether the party is fascist or at least exhibits fascist characteristics in his view. The aspects chosen for application here are the cult of tradition and the rejection of modernism. These are the first two Eco describes in his essay, and they also seem to me to be the most dangerous within an ideology.

The two characteristics often go hand in hand. Fascist ideologies see the truth about the world as a given at the beginning of history, and new knowledge can therefore never rightly replace old ideas, but only expand existing knowledge. Consequently, they see the Enlightenment, with its rational science for producing new knowledge, as an obscene attempt to corrupt correct, older knowledge. Eco, however, distinguishes this obsession with tradition as primarily spiritual, and not simply a rejection of technology; fascists often see their technological developments as an expression of their vitality. A glance at the AfD's party platform quickly reveals similar positions. It discusses the protection of German culture, but here we see something striking: in addition to the Christian church and the Roman legal tradition, the AfD considers Germany's scientific and humanist tradition since the Renaissance and Enlightenment as an important part of its culture. Therefore, there is no anti-modernist ideology within the party. This is perhaps logical given the party's history, which was founded by scientists and is also known as the Professorenpartei. Moreover, Eco also identifies the cult of tradition with religious and ideological syncretism, while the AfD is primarily Christian and explicitly anti-Islam.

It is possible that Eco's focus on syncretism [2] is a result of the age of his essay: most modern right-wing. extremists seem to be very focused on their nations history. I would also say - more intuitivly - that fascism could be better characterised as paranoid or as repression, instead of as this free, almost schizophrenic thing.

The ideology of Alternative für Deutschland, therefore, does not seem to fall under Umberto Eco's definition of a cult of tradition or anti-modernism. However, this does not necessarily mean that the German intelligence service made a mistake in labeling them extremist. The party appears to exhibit many other, more fascist characteristics, and fascism is not the only dangerous direction a political party can take. It is therefore important that we never let politicians get away with extremism and that we always hold them accountable, for example, by drawing on Eco's work.

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