Jürgen Elsässer

Jürgen Elsässer was born in 1957, the son of a watchmaker and a secretary. His two sisters and he were "typically left-wing late 68s", said Elsässer about his youth. His father was a conservative CDU-voter.[1]

Elsässer became a teacher. Even if he was in communist groups, he swore on the Liberal democratic basic order of the German state to become a Beamter as teacher.[1] He worked as a teacher in a vocational school in Baden-Württemberg, Germany for 14 years before beginning his career as journalist for left-wing magazines in 1994. Elsässer published his first works in the newspaper Arbeiterkampf (Workers' Struggle), a magazine which was tied to the Kommunistischer Bund (communist league), an organisation of which he was a member for years.[2] In 1990 he was a sharp critic of the German reunification, because he was afraid of the possible dawn of a Viertes Reich (Fourth Reich).

Elsässer was one of the political creators of the Anti-Germans movement. In 1994, he was editor of the leftist Junge Welt (Young world). He was also co-editor of the largest left-wing monthly magazine konkret until he was dismissed.

Elsässer switched to the right.[3] In 2010, he founded Compact magazine,[4] of which he was also the editor.

In 2011, Elsässer expressed his admiration for Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević.[1] During the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, Elsässer was an outspoken supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin and received much criticism from the German media for his position.[5]

Elsässer's current political position is commonly considered as right-wing populist[1][6] and he is a sharp critic of the migration policy of the German chancellor Angela Merkel.[7][1]

Melanie Amann of Der Spiegel wrote about Elsässer, his appearance is "a mixture of evangelical preacher and teleshopping moderator" and this would "work independently of his message."[1] Similar to this Dietmar Koschmieder, editor in chief of junge Welt said 2018 in Der Spiegel: "If you ask me, [Elsässer] has no convictions at all... He is an expert in emotionalization who adapts his message to the respective target and audience."[1]

The rapper Danger Dan called Jürgen Elsässer an “anti-Semite” in his song "Das ist alles von der Kunstfreiheit gedeckt" ("This is all covered by artistic freedom", referring to article 5 of German Basic Law) in 2021.[8]