‘Voting right-wing is so 1933’ has become a favourite campaign slogan for German left-wingers. It appears on election posters, protest banners and stickers, even t-shirts and socks. Evoking the year Adolf Hitler became German chancellor is thought of as a powerful weapon against the buoyant anti-immigration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The trouble is that it usually backfires.

Calling political opponents Nazis is the ultimate way of telling voters that their choice is morally wrong. It’s not a strategy unique to Germany, but it has a different intensity in the land from which Hitler inflicted so much death and misery upon Europe. It is supposed to trigger collective emotions of guilt, shame and trauma. The message is: vote AfD, and you will be responsible for a repeat of the darkest chapter in human history.

There undoubtedly are similarities between modern Germany and the early 1930s: economic decline, political fracturing, and a sense that the status quo is untenable. All these factors posed existential threats to the interwar republic, and we see similar developments today, albeit in lesser form. But three key ingredients that fuelled extremism in the 1920s and 1930s are missing today: contempt for democracy, intense revanchism, and a high tolerance for violence. Crucially, Germany’s first full democracy did not die at the ballot box in 1933.

When the First World War was over, Germany’s monarchy was abolished and replaced by one of the purest forms of democracy in modern history. It was, however, a system born of defeat and plagued by instability from the start. It was regarded by many as a system of losers. Plenty of voters soon flocked to parties that wanted to replace it with something else. Monarchy, socialism, communism and right-wing dictatorships were all offered on the ballot paper.

Today, polling suggests that the vast majority of Germans think democracy is the best form of government, and that includes AfD voters. However, when asked whether they are happy with the way democracy is currently working, dissatisfaction increases the further right you go on the spectrum. It is the voters most desperate for change that are turning to the fringes, but that’s a very different thing from resenting democracy itself.

The second factor that is missing today is the intense revanchism that plagued German politics a century ago. Much has been written about the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles, but the enormous suffering that almost all Germans had undergone during the war, only for it to end in humiliation, was just as important.

Compared to 1914, the Germany of 1919 was diminished in size, wealth, people and self-respect. Rightly or wrongly, the psychological appeal of revenge and restoration was huge. Many Germans were appalled by the way mainstream politicians appeared to accept the new status quo regardless of the fact that they didn’t have much choice. Today, few Germans seriously demand parts of Poland or France back, and they don’t vote on that basis.

By far the most destabilising factor of 1920s politics, and an element without which Hitler could not have seized power in the way he did, was the brutalisation of society. This was a direct result of the First World War, in which millions of men had used firearms to kill and wound. Those who survived the horrors of the trenches returned changed. Weapons were widely available and the reluctance to use them had been worn thin by four years of war.

Parties had paramilitary wings and thought nothing of it. Even the Social Democrats had the ‘Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold’ with around three million members by 1932. In the first four years of the infant republic there were at least 376 political assassinations, the vast majority perpetrated by right-wing paramilitaries. Among the most prominent victims were Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau and Matthias Erzberger, who had been finance minister.

This atmosphere of brutality allowed Hitler to build an army of over four million stormtroopers (SA), who became a crucial component of his rise to power by intimidating and eliminating political opponents. The Nazis never achieved a majority in parliament and relied on violence to pass the infamous Enabling Act of 1933, which gave democracy its final blow.

Some AfD politicians openly align themselves with that history. Björn Höcke, the leader of the Thuringian AfD chapter, has been fined twice for using the SA slogan ‘Everything for Germany’, or ‘Alles für Deutschland.’ When party leader Alice Weidel was nominated as a candidate for chancellor, supporters were holding up signs that read ‘Alice für Deutschland’. But this is hollow provocation. The AfD has no army of thugs and neither does it operate in a social climate where the population would find that acceptable. Its voters, thankfully, grew up in peace.

None of this is to say that the political disaffection in Germany hasn’t reached dangerous levels. Surveys show an alarming increase of non-voters ahead of the election on 23 February. The AfD polls in second place with a fifth of the vote. The centre-right Union and the centre-left Social Democrats, who once shared over 80 per cent of the West German vote between them, now struggle to convince half of the electorate.

There is no doubt that more people are drawn to the political fringes, but the reasons for that lie in the present, not the past. A survey taken in 2021, when Angela Merkel left office after 16 years at the helm, showed that only a small minority wanted politics to stay the same. ‘The majority wants real change,’ concluded an analyst then. That ‘real change’ never happened, particularly on immigration, the economy, energy, and the rising cost of living. AfD support has doubled since.

Friedrich Merz, the conservative leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the man most likely to lead the next German government, joined the chorus of his left-wing competitors when he said last week that ‘one ‘33 was enough for Germany’. The quote dominated the press coverage of his speech on policy change, drowning out any concrete suggestions he may have made about what he would do differently.

German voters face different problems today than they did a century ago, and they want to see politicians come up with solutions to those here and now. One surefire way to lose their trust is to offer them more dubious history lessons instead.