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“Fourth Reich”, Usage to indicate German influence in the European Union:

Some commentators in Europe have used the term “Fourth Reich” to point at the influence that they believe Germany exerts within the European Union.[2][11][12]

For example, Simon Heffer wrote in the Daily Mail that Germany’s economic power, further boosted by the European financial crisis, is the “economic colonisation of Europe by stealth”, whereby Berlin is using economic pressure rather than armies to “topple the leadership of a European nation”. This, he says, constitutes the “rise of the Fourth Reich.”[13]

Likewise, Simon Jenkins of The Guardian wrote that it is “a massive irony that old Europe’s last gasp should be to seek ... German supremacy”.[13] According to Richard J. Evans of the New Statesman, this kind of language had not been heard since German reunification which sparked a wave of Germanophobic commentary.[13] In a counterbalancing perspective, the “Charlemagne” columnist at The Economist reports that the German hegemony perspective does not match reality.[14]

In August 2012, the Italian newspaper Il Giornale had as headline the phrase “Fourth Reich” (Quarto Reich) as a protest against German hegemony.[15]

This perspective gained particular traction in the United Kingdom in the run up to 2016 EU referendum and the subsequent negotiations.[16]

In December 2021, against the background of the 2015–present Polish constitutional crisis, Jarosław Kaczyński, Polish deputy Prime Minister and head of Poland’s ruling party, told the far-right Polish newspaper GPC that “Germany is trying to turn the EU into a federal ‘German fourth Reich’”.[17] He explained that he was referring to the connection with the first Reich (the Holy Roman Empire), not the third one (Nazi Germany), and there was nothing negative about the comparison. But he criticized the vision of greater federalism, as displayed by Olaf Scholz and his coalition, as “utopian and therefore dangerous”. Kaczynski remarked that, “if we Poles agreed to such a modern submission we would be degraded in many ways”.[18]

Usage to describe the rise of right-wing populism:
The term has come to be used by commentators on the left, seeing the rise of right-wing populism as akin to the emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In a 1973 interview, black American writer James Baldwin said of Richard Nixon’s reelection, “To keep the nigger in his place, they brought into office law and order, but I call it the Fourth Reich.”[3]

In 2019, a professor of history at Fairfield University named Gavriel D. Rosenfeld remarked that “Too many hyperbolic comparisons – for example, between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler – dulls the power of historical analogies and risks crying wolf. Too little willingness to see past dangers lurking in the present risks underestimating the latter and ignoring the former.”[3]

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