The Bitter End of Germany’s Anti-Fascist Identity
9th July 2026
At the protests against the Alternativ für Deutschland’s (AfD) party conference in Erfurt last weekend, a reporter for Apollo News was chased through the crowd and kicked in the head. He suffered a bloody wound. The next day, representatives of the anti-AfD alliance ‘Widersetzen’ were asked repeatedly if they condemned the attack. Initially they refused. Eventually, one activist replied: “Fascists with a press pass are still fascists.”
This was not any old Antifa gathering. Tens of thousands of people had come to oppose the AfD, with varying degrees of direct and indirect state funding. The German Trade Union Confederation (the DGB) mobilised, alongside a broad network of unions and civil society groups. An official Bundestag response to the event listed more organisations involved in the mobilisation, documenting substantial federal grants to several of them, albeit for other work. For example, MOBIT (Mobile Beratung in Thüringen e.V.)—a prominent German civil society NGO fighting right-wing extremism, racism, and antisemitism—received about €1.1 million across the listed period; NaturFreunde Thüringen more than €2 million across several programmes. The government denies funding Widersetzen’s Erfurt campaign. Nevertheless, the point is not that Berlin paid for a journalist to be kicked in the head; it is that the respectable anti-AfD movement rests on an ecosystem of unions, NGOs, and campaign groups, parts of which are publicly funded.
Political thugs are nothing new. What is new in this case is the social context and justifications of their thuggery. Anti-fascism in Germany has changed from a militant fringe concern into the moral common sense of its educated middle classes. One consequence of this is that the label ‘fascist’ now makes violence less objectionable.