AfD and BSW: the hypocrisy of sharing a seat when it suits them

AfD and BSW: two extremes that need each other to divide up power

The fact that the far right of Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the far left of BSW share a seat where it suits them is not a paradox, it is arithmetic. When the prize is a spot on the agenda or a committee post, the program goes in the drawer and the vote gets cast. The headline of this story is not the deal: it is the hypocrisy of spending years claiming they would never make one.

The argument goes that this is textbook parliamentary pragmatism and that it happens across half of Europe. Maybe. But it is worth remembering who pays the bill for that pragmatism: the voter who believed their party was the only one that kept its hands clean.

Why Weidel's bedroom does not dismantle her program

Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, is a lesbian and her partner is a woman from Sri Lanka. That fact has been used to call her a hypocrite for belonging to a party that fights LGBT rights. The argument plays well on talk shows but has very little analytical substance: a politician's private life neither validates nor invalidates their program. What measures a public official is their votes and their alliances, not who they share a bed with.

Some counter that the party has made the traditional family and national identity its banner, and there the contradiction does exist. But it is a personal contradiction, not an electoral argument. Those who bring up someone's private life to discredit them are usually the first to demand respect for their own.

When everything is Nancy, nothing is Nancy

The finger pointing at the contradiction comes from a commentator who has built a career handing out membership cards: Trump is a Nancy because of what his father did, Vox is Nancy, Musk is a fascist, AfD is Nancy, Milei is a psychopath, Osho and Ayn Rand are psychopaths. The inflation of labels has a measurable cost. When the adjective fits everything, it stops pointing at anything: it is the boy who cried wolf, with the label worn out from overuse.

And the historical terrain demands precision, not slogans. The so-called ratlines did exist: Mengele, Eichmann and Pavelić escaped through Genoa and Spain with Red Cross papers. And National Socialism used the Churches as a leash, as shown by the 1933 concordat or the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. But leaping from there to dismissing anyone who disagrees as a Nancy is a jump that does not hold up.

If the German arithmetic keeps tightening, we will see more embraces of convenience between the two extremes. The question is not whether they will strike deals, but how long it will take each of them to tell their electorate that they are doing it for the country and not for the seat.

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