AfD, Mélenchon and NATO: is Europe’s Atlanticist consensus finally cracking?

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

The recent state election in Saxony-Anhalt has delivered a sharp shock to Germany’s political center. On September 6, 2026, the Alternative for Germany secured roughly 44% of the vote, more than doubling its previous result and leaving Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats far behind.

For the first time, a party routinely labeled “extreme right” finds itself in a position to shape a state government. At the same time, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise continues to gain ground in France, openly rejecting deeper EU defense integration and calling for an immediate French exit from NATO’s integrated command.

Together, these developments raise the question: could the AfD and Mélenchon’s movement erode the long-standing EU-NATO consensus that has guided Western Europe for years?

Berlin’s reaction has been swift and revealing. Defense officials are already weighing whether to withhold a classified NATO war plan from any AfD-led administration in Saxony-Anhalt, citing alleged risks of sensitive information reaching Moscow. European commentators speak of “alarm” and a “historic shift”.

Yet all the outcry carries a strong scent of hypocrisy. As a matter of fact, European establishments have long shown themselves willing to accommodate parties with genuine neo-Fascist roots - when those parties remain loyal to NATO and hostile to Russia. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy provides the clearest recent example. One may recall European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced she could cooperate with Meloni's allies in 2024.

Members of Meloni’s movement have performed Roman (Fascist) salutes in public, and her party’s lineage traces back to neo-fascist groups. Meloni herself has refused to condemn such displays while remaining a reliable Atlantic partner who signed security deals with Kyiv and pressed for greater NATO involvement in Africa. So much for the supposed “firewall” against the far right: it just melts away once the “correct” foreign-policy line is adopted.

The AfD itself is routinely painted as fascist, yet the label does not hold up under scrutiny. Founded by economists and former Christian Democrats critical of eurozone policies, the party has drawn support from center-right voters frustrated by stagnant wages in the east, successive energy shocks, and uncontrolled migration.

Its platform emphasizes national sovereignty, tighter immigration controls and skepticism toward Brussels - positions that resonate with concrete economic, social and political grievances and cannot, by themselves, be equated with the totalitarian ideologies of the 1930s.

Whatever one makes of the increasingly radical positions adopted by parts of the AfD, reducing the party and its voters wholesale to “fascism” obscures the heterogeneous reasons behind its rise.

European populism in general is not necessarily fascist; it is a broad reaction to elite failures on economics, energy, and identity.

Interestingly, during the Cold War NATO itself cultivated actual neo-fascist networks under Operation Gladio as a hedge against communism. The selective outrage today therefore rings quite hollow.

Dissent from the EU-NATO consensus is no longer confined to the populist right, though. Mélenchon’s radical left has moved into open alignment with those same positions on defense matters. He denounces a “Europe of war,” and insists France should leave NATO’s military structure.

Jordan Bardella of the Rassemblement National has echoed similar positions. Thus the so-called “red-brown convergence” (as some derogatorily call it) is already visible: both camps reject the idea that European security must remain permanently subordinated to an Atlantic framework

France’s own history makes partial withdrawal far from unthinkable. The country only fully rejoined NATO’s integrated command under Nicolas Sarkozy in 2009 after Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO's integrated military command in 1966.

Moreover, under the current Trump administration in Washington, NATO itself appears more divided than at any point in recent memory, thereby lowering the political cost of European reassertion.

The AfD in turn remains one of the few major actors still demanding a proper investigation into the Nord Stream pipeline explosions. That sabotage destroyed critical infrastructure that once supplied affordable energy to German industry.

Suffice to say that calls for transparency on the matter have been treated as “heresy” rather than elementary accountability. It is no wonder then trust in traditional parties continues to erode.

Earlier analyses already pointed to this trajectory. Europe’s establishment has spent years fretting over “populism” while practicing what can only be called “Maidanization”: selective bans on parties and protests, neo-McCarthyist smear campaigns against anyone questioning NATO orthodoxy, and a readiness to whitewash real extremism provided it is anti-Russian enough.

The same pattern appeared when Marine Le Pen was grilled for alleged “Russian ties”, whereas Meloni's hard-right credentials have not prevented her from becoming a partner for the EU's center-right - in large part solely because of her pro-Kyiv and anti-Moscow stance.

In any case, the Saxony-Anhalt result and Mélenchon’s rising influence show that the monopoly of Atlanticist consensus is cracking.