Die Regierungsbildungen in Berlin und Mecklenburg-Vorpommern könnten entscheidenden Einfluss auf eine Vorstufe eines AfD-Verbotsverfahrens nehmen. Im Hintergrund formiert sich ein Bundesrats-Antrag für eine länderübergreifende Arbeitsgruppe die Beweise für ein mögliches Verfahren sammeln soll.
Ein politisches Beben erschüttert derweil den Landtag in Sachsen-Anhalt. Bei der Wahl zum Landtagspräsidenten erhielt der AfD-Kandidat Tobias Rausch wohl Stimmen aus der tief gespaltenen CDU-Fraktion. Pauline von Pezold und Frederik Schindler analysieren, warum dieser Tabubruch zum Vorboten für die Ministerpräsidentenwahl im Dezember werden könnte.
Außerdem blickt die Folge hinter die verschlossenen Türen der Deutschen Parlamentarischen Gesellschaft. Dutzende Aufnahmeanträge von AfD-Abgeordneten liegen derzeit auf Eis – auch wegen Berichten über Alkoholexzesse und völkische Gesänge. Zum Schluss entlarvt sich ein Angriff von AfD-Chefin Alice Weidel auf Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz als handfeste Doppelmoral.
„Inside AfD“ ist der POLITICO-Podcast über die umstrittenste Partei des Landes. Trotz Radikalisierung und Beobachtung durch den Verfassungsschutz wächst die AfD weiter. Wie ist das möglich? Was treibt ihre Anhänger, Strategen und Gegner an? Wie funktioniert das Innenleben der Partei? Und was bedeutet ihr Aufstieg für das politische System Deutschlands?
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ATHENS — The U.S. and Greece are launching a new counterterrorism information-sharing program, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday during an official visit to the Greek capital.
In a press conference alongside his Greek counterpart Giorgos Gerapetritis, Rubio said Greece was particularly exposed to threats posed by mass migration, human trafficking and different forms of terror.
“What we do not wish to see under any circumstances is that the birthplace of the West is threatened by bad decisions, by inaction, and by failure to address challenges,” he said, calling Greece a “strong and model NATO ally” and a “source of stability in an unstable world.”
Gerapetritis said Greece was willing to cooperate with the U.S. and provide maritime assistance in the Strait of Hormuz, if a viable peace process exists there.
Later Wednesday, Rubio will deliver a speech from Pnyx Hill, beneath the Acropolis, one of the most important sites of Athenian democracy. Assistant Secretary for Global Public Affairs Dylan Johnson said Rubio would use the opportunity to call for a “renewal of the Western spirit.”
Rubio will describe the shared inheritance of Americans and Europeans as stretching “from Athens and Rome to Christendom to the founding of the American Republic” and warn that Western civilization has forgotten some of its “essential qualities,” Rubio’s aide said.
The foreign policy chief stood by U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle after U.S. senators and Greek opposition parties expressed concerns over reports that she had threatened to use U.S. influence to topple the Greek government.
“Suffice it to say, our embassy here is doing a great job. Our ambassador has been a strong ambassador here,” Rubio said when asked whether Guilfoyle’s conduct is in compliance with State Department ethics.
Romanian President Nicușor Dan faces demands from allies and adversaries alike to call a snap election, the first in the country’s modern history, if his latest attempt to end five months of political paralysis fails.
The key NATO and EU member has lacked a fully functioning government since the coalition collapsed in May, and lawmakers have rejected a succession of Dan’s prime ministerial nominees.
Political parties are now weighing up whether to support Dan’s latest prime ministerial candidate, the diplomat Luca Niculescu, who must win a confidence vote in parliament within the next nine days to be confirmed in the role.
In an interview, Dan’s arch-rival on Romania’s hard right, George Simion, warned that no stable government can form without an election and accused the president of mounting a “blockade” against democracy because he is “afraid of us coming to power.”
Speaking separately to POLITICO, Dan’s most recently defeated candidate for prime minister, Member of the European Parliament Siegfried Mureșan, warned the country was already paying an economic price, with investment decisions being delayed. “Postponing early elections and staying in this stalemate situation would, at some point, also have economic negative consequences,” he said.
Bordering Ukraine, Romania has the sixth-largest population in the EU and plays a critical role in NATO’s defense of the region as home to a major military base and a U.S. missile shield site. The country has been plagued by political instability, corruption and a ballooning budget deficit in recent years, conditions that have fueled a surge in support for hard-right nationalist politics.
Since the coalition fell apart amid infighting over budget cuts in the spring, Romania’s deadlocked parliament has been unable to agree on a new government.
Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) leader Simion, a staunch euroskeptic who has called for a halt to aid for Ukraine, told POLITICO the president must face his duty and give voters a chance to end the stalemate with a fresh election, or face being ousted. His party has been leading Romania’s opinion polls for almost two years.
Simion has been building support in parliament to censure the president, which he believes will gain momentum if Niculescu fails and Dan again refuses to call fresh elections.
“Everybody says, ‘OK, if this won’t pass, we will go to snap elections,’ but they do not know Nicușor Dan as I do,” Simion said. The president is “very stubborn” and could defy calls for elections even if all parties want them, he said. “In that case we will have the numbers of signatures and votes to suspend him at least, if not sack him.”
Dan has refused to contemplate handing AUR a role in government. He defeated Simion for the presidency last year and regards his rival’s politics as a threat to Romania’s pro-Western, pro-European direction. The president says he opposes a snap election because the campaign period would delay budget reforms and healthcare funding.
‘A new Greece’
The Romanian leu has weakened against the euro in the months since the crisis blew up. Simion urged international investors to remain patient and sought to reassure them that AUR would be fiscally responsible if it won power. “Nobody wants a new Greece,” he said. “We will do everything it takes to respect our commitments to our international partners and for them to recover the debts.”
The call for an early election is gaining traction in Bucharest.
So far, the leader of Dan’s former party, the Save Romania Union, has joined politicians from the National Liberal Party, and the leader of the Social Democratic Party and AUR, in suggesting an unprecedented emergency election could be required.
George Simion has been building support in parliament to censure the president. | Robert Ghement/EPA
Dan’s latest plan still has time to work, but political feuding between parties remains a problem. The Liberals say they could support Niculescu as prime minister if the Social Democrats do not get too much influence, while the Social Democrats say they want the PM-designate to take the country in a new direction — away from the austerity policies of the outgoing Liberal premier, Ilie Bolojan.
Mureșan, a pro-EU Liberal and European People’s Party vice-president, said the economic risks of prolonging the crisis were real. He told POLITICO a snap election could be inevitable, though this is not his “preferred” option. “The political uncertainty which exists now in the country can easily transform into economic uncertainty,” Mureșan warned. “We are already now seeing investors holding back on their investments, waiting with major investment decisions before they have more certainty.”
While Mureșan said he wants Dan to succeed, he criticized the delays in resolving the longest-running crisis since the fall of communism in 1989. “Had the president moved fast in appointing a prime minister in May and not delayed the nominations, we might even have had early elections [by] now, and we would be in a situation with a new parliament, and with a stable government with the four-year agenda,” he said.
“So, clearly, the options are narrowing down and are not getting better, following the prolongation of the political crisis.”
As Americans prepared to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday on the morning of July 4, sobering images flashed across their phones and TV screens. Hundreds of masked men marched the streets of Washington carrying flags and chanting “Reclaim America!” It soon became clear from the logos on their identical baseball caps that the marchers were members of Patriot Front, a white nationalist group.
The march ended without incident. Still, it joined the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol – both of which culminated in deadly violence – as recent mass demonstrations with participants who openly embrace white nationalism. Members of a loosely organized movement that usually operates out of public view, white nationalists hold that shifting demographics pose an existential threat to the white race, which they view as culturally superior and deserving of power over other groups in the U.S.
Combined with the spread of white nationalist ideology from obscure corners of the internet into mainstream politics, these events have led many Americans to wonder: How extensive is white nationalism’s appeal among the broader public, and who is drawn to this extremist ideology?
We are political scientists who study political behavior, identity and social media. In recently published research in the scientific journal Nature, we offer some answers to these questions using national surveys we conducted with nearly 8,000 non-Hispanic white Americans from 2021 to 2025.
Asking Americans about white nationalism
We expected many Americans would be unfamiliar with the term “white nationalism,” so we defined it for survey respondents with a brief statement covering the movement’s major tenets: the purported need to maintain a white majority in the U.S., claims about the superiority of white culture, and calls for white people to hold more political and economic power than other groups. We measured endorsement of the movement’s ideology, not participation in the movement itself or approval of its tactics.
We randomly varied whether respondents saw the description before or after we asked whether they supported the white nationalist movement. Overall, nearly 5% of white adults – about 1 in 20 – said they did.
Those asked the question before seeing the description were less likely to express support at first, but their reported support rose after they read it. Along with several tests for possible response bias, this suggests that 5% is a reasonable lower-bound estimate of the true level of support.
Whether 1 in 20 white adults is a high or low number is a matter of interpretation. For context, it’s roughly the same as the share of American adults who identify as vegetarian or vegan.
Young white men
A number that jumped out to us was the share of white men under age 30 who support white nationalism: just over 13%, or about 1 in 7. This was more than twice the level of support for white nationalism among women in this age group: 6%. Endorsement of white nationalism among men significantly declined by age: Only 2% of white men age 65 and over registered support.
Our discovery that white men born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act were more likely to reject white nationalism than those coming of age today may come as a surprise, as younger white Americans typically hold more tolerant views on racial matters than their elders. But young men have long been overrepresented in extremist groups, and white nationalism’s grievance narrative may resonate for young white men today as they fall behind previous generations of men on key indicators like finishing college, starting careers and forming families, as well as on their overall health.
Online life
Another key predictor of support: online social life that crowds out offline relationships. We asked respondents to call to mind their three best friends and then to tell us whether each friend was known only offline, only online or both.
We found that the more best friends known only online, the stronger one’s support for white nationalism. The internet and particularly social media are channels through which people may be exposed to white nationalist content. They are also places where alienated people may turn for the human connections they lack offline.
Interestingly, we did not find a general relationship between more social media use and more support for white nationalism. So while online life appears to be related to support for white nationalism, what matters in our findings is not how much people use social media, but whether their closest friends are known only online.
Individual and social strain
Strain, whether defined as undergoing personal difficulties or being exposed to wider social distress, is also a strong predictor of support for white nationalism. We asked respondents whether they had suffered from specific hardships over the past year, including the death of a loved one, losing a job, being the victim of a crime or getting divorced. Respondents experiencing more of these adversities were more likely to endorse white nationalism.
Social strain in the counties where respondents live – such as poverty, unemployment and population loss – emerged as another strong predictor of support for white nationalism, as did countywide rates of “deaths of despair,” which include suicide and deaths associated with drug and alcohol use. In other words, support for white nationalism was higher among people living in more distressed or economically depressed places.
We found in our research that white Democrats and liberals are significantly less likely to endorse white nationalism than white Republicans and conservatives. However, we also found high levels of support among those who were unsure of their ideology or partisanship, suggesting a potential untapped reservoir of political support for white nationalist ideas.
In our view, those who seek to understand and address this critical development in American public life must reckon with the broad structural shifts that have reshaped Americans’ identities, social relations and sense of economic security and that undergird white nationalism’s appeal to the broader public.
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