What the remake of ‘L’amour toujours’ in the extreme-right tells us about young German voters

Brussels – All of Germany is talking about the Italian DJ Gigi D’Agostino and his immortal L’amour toujours, but certainly not because of artistic matters, but because the dance song first released in 1999 – and which, after two decades, is still a hit in discos and stadiums across half of Europe – has been turned into a far-right anthem in Germany with the use of a racist slogan, and has been sung for months by young Germans attracted by the rhetoric and political messages of an increasingly radical right-wing in the country.

Bringing the issue of the use of a catchy song -which not surprisingly is also used as the basis for stadium choruses in Italy as well as in Germany and other European countries – to the attention of the entire German public was the video posted on social media in which a group of young people sing L’amour toujours outside a bar in Sylt (a German island in the North Sea), using the words Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus (“Germany to the Germans, out with the foreigners”), a racist slogan easily traced to neo-Nazi circles. One of the boys holds two fingers under his nose (a gesture that alludes to Adolf Hitler) and raises his right arm – to the beat of the music – in a way that might be reminiscent of the Nazi salute.

Twitter has deleted the old video. Here it is again. pic.twitter.com/m0uFwq2eSt

– Nora Zabel (@norazabel) May 23, 2024

Late last week, the case went national, and the German chancellor Olaf Scholz commented on the video, calling it “disgusting.” Reached by Die Spiegel, the Italian DJ underlined that “my song is about a wonderful, great, and intense feeling that unites people, it’s love,” but did not distance himself further from the extremist and racist use of his most famous song now rampant in Germany. So much so that several festivals, discos, and bars across the country – including Oktoberfest, the world’s largest fair held in Munich – began banning it due to the risk of having to be involved in such incidents later on. But the issue that for months has been disturbing public opinion is behind the transformation of a dance song with no political connotations into a far-right anthem, or better,  the shift of the young German electorate increasingly to the right.

A study recently conducted in the EU member country, at the same time as the wave of events against the radical right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, shows this. Youth in Germany 2024 was conducted by three researchers surveying a sample of two thousand young Germans between the ages of 14 and 29 – interviewed between January and February – that showed a trend of gradual closure toward policies to welcome migrants and adherence to ideals promoted by parties like the AfD. The researchers said they were “surprised” by the study’s findings that 22 percent of respondents would vote for Alternative für Deutschland (more than double the number from just two years ago) due to economic stagnation, inflation, high rents, and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that have eroded a sense of security. Although young voters do not seem to pick up on the anti-Europeanism of the far right (only 13 percent agree that “Germany would be better off without the EU”), the share of those in favor of welcoming migrants has plummeted from 57 percent to 26 percent.

With the June European elections just around the corner (in Germany on June 9), last week, under pressure from the French Rassemblement National, the Presidency of the Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament (the same group to which the League adheres) expelled AfD Germans because of statements made by its leading candidate, Maximilian Krah, on not condemning the past Nazi special forces SS. “I will never say that anyone who had an SS uniform was automatically a criminal,” Krah said, triggering an immediate reaction from the French right: “We will no longer ally ourselves with the AfD in the next legislature,” Thibaut François, the head of international relations in Strasbourg for Rassemblement National, said.