A Neoliberal Caspar David Friedrich. The AfD’s Ethnoscape

Jacopo Galimberti’s article examines the AfD’s 2025 campaign imagery through a close reading of a short promotional film featuring Alice Weidel. Combining political iconology and Marxist ideology critique, Galimberti argues that the video appropriates the visual legacy of Caspar David Friedrich in order to articulate a hybrid ideological formation, where völkisch mythology, neoliberal anti-statism, political theology, and far-right ecological imaginaries converge. By staging Weidel within a Romantic landscape coded through motifs of forest, seasonal renewal, and sublime contemplation, the film transforms bourgeois-national imagery into a contemporary affective device of identification, rootedness, and exclusion. The article shows how this visual strategy naturalises nationalist politics, obscures the historical dimensions of climate and capitalism, and helps explain the AfD’s attempt to reconcile neoliberal leadership with ethnonationalist fantasy.