AfD has just won 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony, decisively outpacing the CDU, which finished at 17.2 percent. Yet, in the almost automatic language used by much of the European media, the former remains «far right», while the latter continues to be classified simply as a conservative party.
Whatever one may think of AfD, this apparent contradiction deserves closer scrutiny: do these labels objectively describe reality, or are they the product of a subjective judgment that, through endless repetition, we have come to accept as fact?
The distinction is anything but academic. If we borrowed the concept of distribution from statistics, we would define as «extremes» those phenomena found in the tails, numerically farthest from the prevailing share of the population being observed. Politics, of course, is not mathematics, electoral support does not automatically make an idea right or moderate, and a percentage at the ballot box cannot replace a political science category.
But the paradox remains: when a party wins more than four out of ten votes and continues to be described as «extreme», it is at least legitimate to ask what criteria we are using to define it as such. This is where the German case stops being merely about Germany and opens up a much larger question: the increasingly blurred line between objectivity and subjectivity in the way the West describes itself.
Over the past few decades, one part of the Western cultural establishment has gradually acquired the power to determine not only which ideas are right or wrong, but even which ones can be considered acceptable. Mainstream media, universities, NGOs, international organizations, and the cultural industry have produced categories, definitions, and hierarchies that, over time, have taken on the appearance of neutrality. Subjectivity has not disappeared; it has simply stopped presenting itself as such.
Take the expression «far right» itself. When it is used to describe a political party or movement, readers rarely ask what objective criteria were used to assign that label. What are the parameters? Who established them? Why are some positions classified as «extreme», while others, equally ideological and equally radical in the transformation of society they advocate, are simply described as «progressive»?
The answer becomes even more interesting when we consider how dramatically the meaning attached to certain positions has changed in just a few decades. Defending a Nation’s borders, demanding controlled immigration, arguing that those who arrive should integrate by respecting the laws, culture, and values of the society receiving them, regarding the family founded on a man, a woman, and their children as the fundamental unit of society, recognizing the biological differences between the sexes, defending national identity, or maintaining that a government should put the interests of its own citizens first were not, until a few decades ago, a catalog of extremist positions.
Today, embracing even some of these positions can easily be enough to earn the label «radical right».
The point is not to deny that extremist positions exist on the right, just as they exist on the left. That would simply be false. The problem arises when a particular cultural worldview acquires the power to classify all the others, and its own categories become the official language through which reality is described. At that point, a position no longer needs to be challenged on its merits: it is enough to call it «extreme», «radical», «populist», «xenophobic», or «fascist», and the label replaces the debate.
It happened in Italy as well. For years, Fratelli d’Italia was portrayed by part of the international press through the lens of the «far right». Then Italians voted it into government, and Giorgia Meloni became the Prime Minister of the longest-serving government in the history of the Italian Republic. In the United States, Donald Trump, portrayed after 2020 as an anomaly destined to be expelled from American history, returned to the White House. In Germany, AfD continues to grow. Meanwhile, across Europe, parties challenging uncontrolled immigration, globalism, green ideological excesses, woke ideology, and the surrender of national sovereignty are gaining support.
Dismissing all of this as a simultaneous outbreak of extremism is a very convenient explanation, especially for those unwilling to ask why millions of citizens are rejecting the policies of recent decades.
There is another dimension to this issue, made even more important by artificial intelligence: an algorithm does not magically possess a neutral view of reality; it learns from texts, classifications, sources, and systems of knowledge created by human beings. If media organizations, universities, NGOs, encyclopedias, and institutions have gradually incorporated certain cultural categories, artificial intelligence inevitably risks inheriting and reproducing them. With one important aggravating factor: what once came from the pen of a columnist who was clearly recognizable as expressing a particular point of view can now be delivered by a machine with the seemingly dispassionate appearance of objectivity.
This is an enormous issue because it concerns the very construction of knowledge in the twenty-first century. If a subjective judgment is repeated by enough sources regarded as authoritative, it eventually becomes a kind of certified truth; those same sources are then used to train systems tasked with determining which information is reliable. At that point, the loop is complete.
And this is where the extremism scam takes place: not in the existence of extremists, who exist and always will, on both the right and the left, but in presenting as objective a definition that is anything but objective.
43.8 percent is a fact; «far right» is a judgment.
The first can be measured, the second can be debated: confusing the two means passing off propaganda as information.
