Right book fair in Halle: rights in quotation marks

This weekend, the who's who of the reading right-wing extremist scene gathered in Halle for the second time for the right-wing book fair “Page Change”. Halle is located in Saxony-Anhalt, that perhaps needs to be said again at this point, and therefore in the state that recently boasted the first AfD state parliament president and may even appoint the first right-wing extremist prime minister since 1945 in December.

It is worth keeping an eye on this general weather situation, while one is surprised that the CDU did not sign a joint declaration by the parties represented in Halle's city council against the right-wing book fair. “We don’t want to narrow down spaces of discourse, we want to keep them open,” is how the conservatives explain this on their website, which glows in friendly turquoise. You have to understand that, somehow you have to work together on the right of center in Saxony-Anhalt in the next few years.

The right-wing book fair has expanded in size compared to last year, and according to fair organizer Susanne Dagen, significantly more visitors came, with an increase of 30 percent. As you could read in various media, the exhibitors apparently served up a similar potpourri of unsavory things as last year: right-wing radicals, esotericists and the new right, scene leaders like Benedikt Kaiser or Götz Kubitschek and AfD politicians are all giving each other a hand.

People dare to do more in 2026. As the FAZ reported, the writer Monika Maron, who was “just taking a look” last year, appeared. The opening speech was given by the former Zeit and today's Bild columnist Harald Martenstein, who has impressively demonstrated in recent years that the path from the bourgeois features section to the heart of inflammatory journalism can apparently be shorter than is generally assumed.

The founder of the right-wing blog “The Axis of Good” Henryk M. Broder is also on the program with a panel. Martenstein and Broder are colleagues at Springer, so it's not all that surprising how the world is reporting on the book fair, which is only referred to as "right-wing" in quotation marks.

The global author duo, who otherwise host the podcast “based”, are clearly trying to convey a wide range of opinions to the trade fair. Exhibitors without a political agenda are also represented, and even Marxists are among them, it is said; by which the authors mean the Ahriman publishing house, which mainly sells polemics against refugees that have become books and the writings of the chief ideologist of the right-wing sect Bund gegen Adaptation, Fritz Erik Hoevels.

The fact that there is “cuddling with right-wing radicals” in Halle is not something we want to see confirmed. According to Welt, the trenches “sometimes run deep through the exhibition floor”. Because: “What is lumped together outside the bubble actually only has the rejection of the so-called ‘mainstream’ in common.”

We would like to know who is actually in this bubble and who is only allowed to watch from the outside. Is the big world still the world or is it already part of the “alternative media bubble” that the authors believe has great “power”? After all, as you can see in a video from the “based” creators, they are at the trade fair with a microphone with a clearly visible world logo, which actually does not award any accreditations for journalists. Aren't gaps being closed here rather than alleged ones being pointed out? Things mix happily, soup supp and supp, and not just in Saxony-Anhalt.