DIETER STEIN, the editor of Junge Freiheit (“Young Freedom”), a newspaper, represents the German right wing’s thoughtful side, rather than its demagogues. In his office, a poster of Frederick the Great, a Prussian monarch beloved by conservatives, hangs on one wall. Another has a picture of Dresden’s Church of Our Lady—destroyed by the Allied firebombing of 1945, fully rebuilt only in 2005, and today iconic for German nationalists. Above his desk hangs a portrait of Count Claus von Stauffenberg, an army officer executed after trying to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Mr Stein considers him a conservative patriot, part of a “positive tradition” that Germans can be proud of. He thereby draws a hard line between his newspaper and the neo-Nazi right.

Yet for most of the three decades since Mr Stein founded Junge Freiheit—first as a student newspaper and, since 1994, as a general weekly—the label “right” condemned him to the margins of Germany’s media landscape. In German usage, the term does not include the centre-right. For instance Bild, the largest tabloid, opposes tax rises, eurozone bail-outs and uncontrolled immigration. But its pro-American and pro-Israeli stances keep it well within the postwar political consensus. “Right”, by contrast, implies a step outside the mainstream and, given Germany’s Nazi history, into the danger zone. The constitutional protection office, founded after the second world war to stifle totalitarian tendencies, placed Junge Freiheit “under observation” until Mr Stein won a court case against it in 2005. Advertisers and interview partners used to shun the paper.

That began to change in 2013, when a populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), was founded. Newspaper and party are officially unaffiliated, but they overlap much as Fox News does with America’s Republicans. Like the AfD, Junge Freiheit extols the traditional family and disdains feminism and sexual adventurism. It yearns for law and order, and is remarkably empathetic towards Russia. And, of course, it is aghast at the alleged threat to German culture posed by Muslim immigrants. Readership soared after September 4, 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to refugees in what the newspaper sardonically calls a “welcome putsch”. Circulation was 28,246 in the second quarter of 2016, up 18% over that period in 2013.

That is modest compared with right-wing media in the Netherlands or France. But for Germany it represents the first counterweight to the mass media’s leftist tilt. A study in 2005 found that 62% of German journalists sympathise with centre-left parties. Accusations that political correctness prevails on public television and radio have a kernel of truth. Supporters of the AfD are rebelling against this mainstream fare at least as much as they oppose immigrants or euro-zone bail-outs. Lügenpresse (“liars’ press”), a loaded term once used by the Nazis, is a common chant at party rallies. According to a poll in 2015, 44% of all Germans share the sentiment behind the word.

Mr Stein does not use the word Lügenpresse, nor does he term himself a man of the “right”. He considers both words contaminated by German history. Instead he criticises what he calls “nanny journalism”. He knows that his will always be a minority view in Germany; even in his own family, his four siblings are all leftists. One new poll gives the AfD 15% of the vote. Whether that share grows or shrinks, the presence of a right-wing voice in Germany’s media landscape is part of the country’s path to political normality.