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I'd predict that it will turn into a change of strategy. So far the way of it was to contain the AfD through social engineering to dissuade the electorate from backing them, and political firewalling to prevent them from affecting the running of the country. The social part isn't effective enough, and the political part will cease to work if they should grow any further.
So I expect that the fever will heat up more yet. We may see increasing sabotage, honeypots, agent provocateurs, political violence and other more proactive measures to prevent the AfD from functioning as an organization and to discredit it as not just evil but incompetent. Key actors within the party might be bought off, imprisoned on flimsy evidence, or personally assaulted on a broader scale and with more decisive violence. Perhaps a party meeting will be bombed. Maybe trustworthy intelligence agencies will discover incontrovertible proof that the entire party leadership is a bunch of pedophiles, or something similarly odious that not even right-wingers would tolerate.
This might be further facilitated by funnelling more money into "pro-democracy" NGOs that serve to coordinate activists and provide them with financial and legal support.
"Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?" - Robert Habeck, 2025
Jokes aside, I think you're right that there will be more escalation and use of dirty tricks and institutional malpractice - Romania seems to be the EU's current testing ground for how openly they can get away with an outright, unambiguous coup d'état. It feels very Weimarian in the sense that not even the liberal order really believes in liberalism (separation of powers, due process, free and fair elections) anymore, just maintaining power by increasingly draconian means.
Whether violence will ramp up to the level you predict remains to be seen, I think the liberal establishment can influence these things semi-indirectly by just bombarding the population with alarmism and moral hysteria until some of the more deranged and disaffected listeners decide they need to get on the right side of History by stabbing an AfD politician (this is essentially already happening since a while and seems like the only logical conclusion of the "Nie wieder!" sloganeering anyway) - is the endpoint of all this civil war?
The comparison to Weimar is apt, IMO. Back then democracy showed a failure mode in being young and not having the people's trust so that power players could just run roughshod over it; now it shows another by being old and all the players knowing how to exploit its loopholes while the people have become so accustomed the status quo that the liberal order is taken for granted.
I think the endpoint will probably be constitutional reform that further enshrines progressivism, to such a point that any significantly right-wing platform becomes legally untenable. We can see the first attempts at this in the recent inclusion of "Climate Neutrality By 2045" in the constitution - if that works, then similarly ideologically-charged items can follow, until it becomes impossible to campaign for materially right-wing goals without first campaigning for simply undoing those changes, which wouldn't be attractive to voters.
Whether the road there is cleared by weimarian violence or just another long march probably depends on how rapidly, if at all, the right grows from here on out.
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