I was meeting Sofia again after a year. I had first run into her in Vienna. I had been sad when she moved to Berlin to be with her girlfriend and ditch the eight-hour-long train ride she had to take almost every month.

We were seated in a café called Diskreet, where most of the staff were Australian. The café was full and noisy – it was rush hour for an early brunch. As I talked with Sofia about her fears and her hopes, we had to lean toward each other to hear our own conversation.

It is one of the most momentous times in modern Germany and post-war Europe. In the German election held on Sunday, the far-right Alternative for Germany party came in second, shaking the country’s steady commitment to constitutional democracy.

US President Donald Trump has abandoned Europe. He is echoing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric and has blamed Ukraine for the Russian invasion that is now in its third year. His vice president, JD Vance, has criticised European leaders for the supposed erosion of free speech on the Continent and has expressed support for the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel.

In Sunday’s election, the AfD won 20.8% of the vote. Never before in post-World War II Germany has a far-right party been so popular.

It is almost unfathomable how Weidel, a woman who shares her life with another woman from Sri Lanka and raises two babies with her partner, can at the same time lead a political party that demands “remigration”. The AfD has organised violent rallies across Germany under big banners that declare: “There are just two genders.”

Leipzig Central Station, August 17, 2024. Credit: Pius Fozan

Sofia moved to Berlin with the hope of building a shared life with her girlfriend, Marie. She wants children some day and to marry. But that hope is now in question. “I do not know if I would be accepted, if lesbian couples would have same freedom to have a baby or adopt a baby,” she said as our foreheads creased in quiet despair.

Freedom is such an elusive, fleeting thing. Who could have imagined that the United States, which legalised same-sex marriage in 2015, would, just a decade later, take an almost complete turn with political discourse now openly demonising the queer and trans community?

US politics is very relevant here. What starts as a distant storm across the Atlantic eventually reaches European shores.

“This is not the way,” Sofia said with a sigh. “We have already been there. We were there in the 1930s.”

I asked her what frightens her most, what would upend her life, given that the AfD is the second-most powerful party in Germany. Exactly as the opinion polls predicted, the AfD has surpassed all other parties except the Christian Democrats.

The election, Sofia maintained, was a mirror image of the US presidential election. “How Weidel speaks, how she argues, how she goes on live chats and election rallies with [US billionaire and Trump associate] Elon Musk, and there is a huge amount of money and media coverage her party gets,” she said.

During the election campaign, Musk had appeared at an AfD rally by video link. He frequently used his social media platform, X, to urge Germans to vote for the far-right party.

Sofia is angry. “She is talking to a fascist who isn’t shy about his Nazi salute, and transphobic attitude,” she said about Weidel and Musk. “I do not know how it is even legal for Elon Musk to interfere [in the German election]. I can’t imagine that a fascist like Weidel already sits in the German parliament.”

In May 2024, a German court upheld a decision classifying the AfD as a suspected far-right extremist organisation. The judges ruled that the AfD’s positions “disparage the democratic order and are incompatible with the principle of democracy.” Yet despite this legal rebuke, the AfD’s influence continues to rise – a reality that feels increasingly impossible to ignore.

“How can she be part of [German] democracy when her whole politics is against democracy?” Sofia’s exclamation echoes the fears and sense of disbelief of many people in Germany, but the answer is not so elusive.

It lies in Germany’s deeply problematic way of confronting its Nazi past. The nation condemns Adolf Hitler as the singular face of evil, but rarely questions the larger social and political infrastructure that enabled him. The burden of collective memory exists, but individual accountability slips through the cracks. A German today might acknowledge history but feel no personal responsibility for what their grandparents or great-grandparents did to uphold that regime.

This selective amnesia lets Germany denounce its past without confronting the conditions that made it possible. It separates ideology from the individuals who uphold it. It allows new politicians and people with old rotten politics to repeat history while insisting they have nothing to do with it.

And so, Alice Weidel can call for mass deportations, remigration, and still avoid being labelled a Nazi. Her colleague Björn Höcke can chant a Nazi slogan, be convicted for it – not once, but twice – and still deny being a Nazi.

Germany remembers its past without truly reckoning with it. Yet, for most who can afford to shut themselves off from it, life moves on.

For many young Germans in their early and late teenage years, the AfD is a new political start-up. It is just 12 years old, led by the firebrand Weidel and history teacher-turned-politician Björn Höcke. They offer simple, sweeping solutions to the challenges of an ageing German economy and society, and that simplicity is part of their appeal.

There are no jobs? Blame migrants. Trains running late? Blame migrants. Law and order broken? Blame migrants. Energy too expensive? Blame migrants.

Germany is facing a shortage of nearly two million skilled workers. Getting a doctor’s appointment can mean months of waiting, despite the healthcare sector already relying heavily on immigrant doctors, nurses, and care workers to keep it afloat. Traditional butcher shops are shutting down due to a lack of new apprentices. The meat industry is struggling with a severe labour shortage. Germany’s electric vehicle industry is falling behind China’s dominance and the IT sector remains in dire need of fresh talent.

Across the board, Germany’s socio-economic infrastructure is desperate for urgent investment and infusion. Most worrying, however, is the state of the “Mittelstand” – the small and medium-sized businesses that make up 99% of German enterprises and employ 60% of the workforce. Weighed down by a recession, a shrinking labour pool, an overly complicated tax system, and Germany’s notoriously stubborn bureaucracy, the Mittelstand is in crisis.

But for the AfD’s fire-breathing Alice Weidel, there’s only one culprit.

She euphorically declared to a cheering crowd in one of her election rallies, “We have the answers, we have a plan for the future of Germany which we will tackle in the first 100 days of [our] government participation [formation]. Close the borders completely. Turn back any illegal and any person without papers. And send a clear message to the whole world: Germany’s borders are closed, dear friends. They are closed.”

Weidel is not alone. The man favoured to be the next chancellor, Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union, has already vowed to use a Trumpian style of executive power to deploy police at all of Germany’s borders.

Sofia, and I, and several young and old people, have been able to move across European Union countries, study at institutions of our choice, work, make connections, pay taxes, create lives for ourselves on our terms because the idea of free movement makes the Continent what it is today.

Alice Weidel wants to dismantle the European Union’s core.

“It is becoming normal to hate,” Sofia said. “People are cheering,” Sofia said. “We should ask ourselves if we should give a fascist party so much power, so much influence over policies, over our everyday lives.”

That is the question for Germany: does it want to move forward? Does it want to lead the Europe that has looked up to it for so long – more so now that the United States under Trump has shunned it?

I asked Sofia why she thinks the way she does. How did her school education, her upbringing, her parents shape her political opinions? Germany emphasises its Nazi past heavily in school education, or so it claims.

“I was not politically active in school,” she said. “I think getting older, becoming an adult, getting my conscience together – just makes me understand the importance of it all. You know what I mean.”

I asked what influence her parents had on her.

“Politics in general interests me not because my parents told me about it but because of the values they gave me, the values I grew up with,” Sofia said. “Like sustainability – it was very important for my parents and so it is for me.”

What does her 90-year-old grandmother think about the election and her sexuality?

“She doesn’t like it, but she has sort of accepted me in a strange way,” Sofia said. “Like she would ask me about Marie, how she is, but never ask, ‘How is your girlfriend?’”

It is a mirror of Germany’s own struggle – acknowledging change but refusing to name it outright.

Sofia’s Germany feels exhausting, especially for young people, and not just because the world itself is unravelling. The rise of the far right is not an accident. It is a deliberate choice, made by a portion of the population that has embraced its ideas.

They are mostly men, middle aged and rich. Pundits can dissect the convoluted reasons for this, but that does not change the reality for Sofia and countless others on the margins – those with fewer rights, less dignity and no say in a political future they did not choose.

Germany in 2025 is looping back to its darkest past – with the same slogans, same politics. As Annuk, a 23-year-old care worker, put it: this election was about who could deport more people. The centre-left Social Democrats, the centre-right Christian Democrats, the far-right AfD, the Greens, and the Free Democrats – they all competed on that front. So yes, the CDU won the most votes. But in the end, it was Alice Weidel and the AfD that truly won.

And Germany? Germany lost.

Sofia and I have been robbed of our Germany, trapped instead in Weidel’s.

Pius Fozan is a photojournalist and public policy graduate from the Willy Brandt School and Central European University.