Merz Condemns AfD's 'Ethnic Cleansing' Rhetoric as German Far-Right Gains Ground

In Germany, a confrontation between the center-right and the far-right has moved beyond the language of policy disagreement into the language of moral reckoning. CDU leader Friedrich Merz has accused the Alternative for Germany party of advocating ethnic cleansing — a charge that names, plainly and deliberately, what he sees as the destination of the AfD's immigration agenda. The accusation arrives as the AfD consolidates real electoral power across eastern Germany, forcing a question that postwar European democracy has long hoped to defer: what happens when the parties once considered beyond