Elon Musk calls it the “last spark of hope” for Germany. European elites call it the heir to National Socialism. The debate over Germany’s reviled populist party, the Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD), is worth paying attention to, since it reveals modern Western society’s most fundamental belief structure. That debate is about to heat up further, when Musk holds a live conversation on X with the AfD’s leader. The elites, Musk says, “will lose their minds.”

The Alternative for Germany is a leper in German political life, due to the party’s opposition to Germany’s lax immigration policies. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a domestic intelligence agency, has granted itself authority to surveil the party, which it deems a threat to democracy.

Germany’s other political parties have pledged not to cooperate with the AfD. The resulting “firewall” shuts the party out of governing coalitions, no matter how much popular support it enjoys. The AfD is denied the committee chairmanships in the national parliament in Berlin that its numbers would otherwise entitle it to. German courts have almost uniformly rejected the party’s efforts to remove these legal and extralegal barriers to normal participation in political life. The media keep AfD officials off the airwaves. While other political leaders, including far leftists, are regularly quoted in the press and interviewed, AfD representatives are spectral presences, rarely heard or seen on broadcasts or given space in publications.

The problems motivating the AfD’s rise are not spectral, however. Immigration into Germany increased significantly in 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel famously announced: “Wir schaffen das! [We can handle this!],” in response to the thousands of Syrians then crossing into the country. Twenty-three percent of the German population in 2021 were first- or second-generation immigrants—and that was before the Ukrainian migration. Over 17 percent of the German population are first-generation immigrants, a higher percentage than in the United States, where less than 14 percent of the population were foreign-born in 2022. The burdens on Germany’s social services, criminal-justice system, and housing stock have been enormous. Fifty-five percent of Syrians with at least eight years of German residency were on welfare in 2023, compared with 5 percent of native Germans. More than 60 percent of the people in Germany who depend on government benefits for income are foreign-born or second-generation migrants, according to the Wall Street Journal. The disruption to social cohesion from an unassimilated alien culture is greater still.