“We will chase them away, and we will take back our land and our nation.” You might be forgiven for thinking this is a line from a speech by ISIS leader Abu-Mohammad Al-Adnani. Rather, it was said by Alexander Gauland, the leader of the German far-Right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), in his famous 2017 speech after winning sufficient votes to enter the German Parliament for the first time.
Polarizing populist discourses often focus on a narrative about a historic land where people with certain characteristics lived, a land that has changed with the arrival of people who ‘do not have the right to it’.
This nostalgia for bygone days is present in both AfD and ISIS discourses. For both, everything is either black or white, everyone either an enemy or a friend, a partner or a foreigner. Such longing for the past resembles the way an adult longs for childhood; it presents a simplified picture of a world far away from complexities – a childhood free from knowing more than one wishes to.
