As leader of the AfD’s most radical faction, he is infamous in Germany and his critics have long accused him of using language that echoes the Nazis. This year, a court put that question to the test
Björn Höcke, a former history teacher who has become arguably Germany’s most successful far-right politician since the second world war, has the sort of piercing, deep-set eyes that, depending on your perspective, can either give you the impression that he is wrestling with weighty matters of life and fate, or thinking up elaborate ways to kill you – a philosopher-statesman’s eyes, or, as the comedian John Oliver recently called them, “Nazi eyes.”
Höcke, 52, is not like other figures in German politics. In a country where politicians often deploy dullness as a prophylactic against charges of demagoguery, Höcke gleefully takes a different tack. In his speeches, he thunders against a familiar cast of the far-right’s villains – immigrants, Islamists, European Union bureaucrats – but he also veers into an anecdotal, lachrymose style so distinctive that even one of Höcke’s closest colleagues told me he used to find it “strange”. His rhetoric of decline and redemption – he has told Germans they must choose between being sheep or wolves, and urged them to be the latter – has garnered comparisons to Joseph Goebbels, whose speeches many political analysts assume he has studied. To his critics, Höcke is one of the gravest threats to Germany’s postwar democracy since it was established. More than any other person, he is responsible for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party’s metamorphosis from a Eurosceptic, economically liberal movement into a nativist, anti-Islam, climate-denialist party. In 2020, Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, was asked whether Höcke was a rightwing extremist. “Björn Höcke is the rightwing extremist,” he replied.
