The staggering 44 percent support for the neo Nazi Alternative for Germany in Saxony Anhalt has triggered justified alarm about fascism resurfacing in the country that produced Hitler. Call it economic determinism if you like, but “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Germany has seen this nightmare before. Hitler rose amid economic collapse, mass desperation, and the punitive terms imposed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, conditions that allowed authoritarian nationalism to feast on public anger.

During the prosperous decades after World War II, Germany experienced plentiful employment and rising living standards. Support for fascist politics virtually disappeared because most workers had something tangible to lose and considerably less reason to embrace political arsonists.

The far right National Democratic Party, founded in 1964 with former Nazis among its leaders, never cleared the 5 percent threshold required to enter the Bundestag. Economic security did what solemn speeches alone could not accomplish.

That stability began cracking after reunification in 1990. Conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government rushed the former East Germany into the Western market system without adequately protecting the workers whose livelihoods depended on its state directed economy.

Living standards in East Germany had lagged behind those in the West, but residents had jobs, health benefits, pensions, and child care. When the Berlin Wall fell, anxious East Germans repeatedly warned, “Not everything here was bad.”

The Kohl government invested in infrastructure but pushed thousands of state owned companies through the Treuhandanstalt, a transitional privatization agency. Within five years, more than 8,000 enterprises had been sold, liquidated, or returned to owners from before communist rule.

That rapid conversion looked efficient on a balance sheet, which is often where conservative economic triumphs look best. It paid far less attention to the inconvenient human question of what displaced workers were supposed to do once their jobs vanished.

Retraining programs, environmental cleanup projects, and temporary infrastructure work never matched the scale of the destruction. For much of the period after reunification, unemployment in the East remained roughly twice the Western rate, while Eastern wages continued trailing behind.

The fate of East Germany’s camera industry offers a revealing example. Praktica cameras were affordable, capable products built by skilled workers, and their quality challenged the lazy assumption that everything produced under communism was worthless.

Zeiss Jena, the Eastern branch of the famous optical company, once employed about 70,000 people and produced lenses for Praktica cameras. Today it employs roughly 3,000, while Pentacon, the Dresden company that made the cameras, went bankrupt after once employing 6,000.

Those were not imaginary jobs or disposable workers. They were skilled positions that anchored families and communities, and their disappearance fueled political rage that moved some voters toward the far right and others toward the far left.

Now the crisis has spread beyond the old East German divide. Volkswagen workers represented by IG Metall have accepted 50,000 layoffs, while another 50,000 positions are expected to disappear by 2030 and four plants are slated for closure.

China’s growing command of the global automobile industry has battered Volkswagen exports and exposed the weakness of Germany’s manufacturing model. A country long celebrated for high end engineering is watching that advantage erode while mainstream leaders offer caution, delay, and familiar market sermons.

Germany’s real per capita economy grew only 8 percent between 2012 and 2025. Voters have punished the established parties, while the AfD captured 20.8 percent nationally in 2025, doubled its 2021 share, and became the official opposition with 152 Bundestag seats.

Anti immigrant hostility matters, but it does not explain the full trajectory. Germany tolerated foreign guest workers during the booming postwar years because secure employment made demagogic scapegoating less politically potent than it becomes when wages stagnate and factories close.

This is where American leadership should matter. Europe and the United States need a strategy that allows China to participate in global trade without letting predatory practices and suppressed wages hollow out industries across democratic nations.

Donald Trump, naturally, is consumed by vanity projects and the appearance of the White House ahead of Chinese President Xi’s visit. Strategic industrial policy apparently cannot compete with decorating choices in the mind of a president forever auditioning for his own gilded reality show.

Neither Trump nor the AfD offers an economic program capable of addressing the grievances they exploit. Immigration becomes the convenient villain because blaming vulnerable people is easier than confronting corporate power, unfair trade, and decades of elite economic failure.

The same pattern is visible across Europe and throughout America’s Rust Belt. When good jobs disappear and governments shrug, nationalist movements gain strength by offering enemies instead of solutions.

The West needs an economic model built around fair trade, strong labor rights, industrial investment, and plentiful good jobs. Without that change, the AfD’s rise will not remain a regional warning from eastern Germany, but a preview of something much darker.