The White House is noisily mobilizing the world’s Far Right

THE world’s attention this week has been fixated on Donald Trump's official visit to Britain, with castles and carriages and all the pageantry that delights a leader who views his own presidency as the apotheosis of reality TV. Less noticed, but just as telling, has been a simultaneous visit to Washington by Beatrix von Storch.

- By Andreas Kluth

Beatrix who? You're forgiven for asking. Von Storch is a far-right German parliamentarian and second-row leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). I met her in Berlin in 2013, when she and the then-newly founded AfD seemed zany but harmless — destined, as other far-right parties in postwar Germany had been, for petty infighting and eventual irrelevance.

That assessment turned out to be dead wrong, though not immediately. For two more years, the AfD followed the old pattern, and by the summer of 2015 was down in the polls and close to collapse, with the original founders — conservative economics professors whose single issue was abolishing the euro — distancing themselves from the far-right nationalists whose following increasingly included neo-Nazis.

Then the refugee crisis began. Suddenly the AfD, like populist parties across Europe, found its raison d’etre: a rejection of alien-looking migrants at first, then of everything and anything that seemed elitist or, in the current parlance (even in German), “woke.”

Austria, right next door, had pioneered this right-wing shift decades earlier. France, Scandinavia, and others were well along the way. Hungary, one country over, had already gone all the way, with Viktor Orban ensconced as an authoritarian strongman. So had Turkey and India, where Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Narendra Modi were already in power.

In 2016 the dam broke, first with Brexit, then with Trump’s first electoral victory. A year later, the AfD entered Germany’s federal parliament for the first time, and Von Storch left the European parliament to sit in the Bundestag. In the following years, right-wing populists chalked up successes far and wide, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Georgia Meloni in Italy and Robert Fico in Slovakia.