For months, the German public has been treated to a media-concocted spectacle of moral panic—manufactured, amplified, and weaponised with surgical precision and malign intent. At its centre stood the now-infamous so-called “Potsdam meeting;” a 2023 gathering in which right-wing figures, including Austrian activist Martin Sellner and figures linked to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, and the Werteunion discussed the topic of remigration. The encounter was elevated overnight from an innocent private event into the affirmed locus of a dark, conspiratorial ‘master plan’ to deport millions of people, including legal citizens of the German state. The only problem with the lurid tale? What the media claims to have been discussed never actually was.
The serious allegations were first popularised by the left-wing media outlet Correctiv in the scary-sounding piece “Secret plan against Germany”. From there, they spread like wildfire across the media ecosystem. They ignited vast protests, saturated headlines, and provided Germany’s imploding political establishment with yet another arsenal of pretexts with which to denounce its adversaries as existential threats to democracy and the country’s constitutional order—a dangerous thing to be accused of in a country where authoritarian liberalism has long been the ideology of the ruling classes and where the largest opposition party, Alternative für Deutschland, has for years been facing calls for its prohibition. However, as so often is the case in our post-truth era, reality proved to be far less dramatic than advertised by the left-wing press.
A ruling by the Berlin Regional Court has now destroyed the central claims of this carefully constructed cabal. The court has explicitly prohibited the repetition of assertions that the Potsdam meeting involved plans to strip German citizens of their nationality or to orchestrate mass deportations of lawful residents of Germany. What that means is that the legal system has now confirmed what should have been evident from the outset: the story that convulsed Germany for weeks was, at best, a grotesque distortion; at worst, a deliberate fabrication designed to mobilise public opinion against the right. While the court’s decision is a major victory for those unfairly accused, the affair still raises questions that cut to the very heart of contemporary European politics. How, indeed, does such a narrative come into being? And, no less importantly, how does it achieve such immediate and uncritical acceptance?
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