Jürgen Elsässer
Elsässer in 2015 at a LEGIDA gathering
Born	(1957-01-20) 20 January 1957 (age 67)
Nationality	German
Occupation(s)	Journalist, political activist

Jürgen Elsässer (born 20 January 1957) is a German journalist and political activist of the new right.

Jürgen Elsässer was born in Pforzheim in 1957, the son of a watchmaker and a secretary. He described himself and his two sisters in their youth as typical admirers of left-wing values characterized by the 1968 protest movement some years earlier. His father was a conservative CDU voter. ^[1]

To get a job as a teacher he swore his support of the Liberal democratic basic order, a requirement for employment in the German public sector and a measure to prevent political extremists from holding state funded jobs, whilst a member of communist organisations. ^[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 former 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]