“Ku Klux Klan Brandenburg” was emblazoned across the black T-shirt on a guy in line behind me at the Total petrol station in Peitz, ninety minutes south of Berlin. I considered asking why he liked the KKK but thought better of it after noting his girth and the grimace he gave me.
Popularity of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland Party and neo-Nazi groups is surging in eastern Germany. The AfD is now the second strongest party in nationwide opinion polls after the opposition Christian Democrats and ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. It is anti-immigrant, pro-Russian, anti-American and demands Germany quit the euro. The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz, says the AfD is “spreading hatred and hate speech against all types of minorities.” The party targets Muslims and Jews with subtle messages skirting German defamation laws. An AfD election poster showing two women in bikinis has the words: “Burqas? We like bikinis.” Earlier this year, the AfD demanded a ban on kosher and halal animal slaughter in Germany.
“In contrast to Le Pen in France, the AfD keeps getting more and more radical,” said the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in a leader.
In three eastern German states that hold regional elections next year, the AfD tops the polls, including in my home state of Brandenburg. Saxony and Thuringia also vote in 2024. AfD candidates are winning direct elections for the first time and no longer slip into parliament via Germany’s proportional voting law that give seats to parties winning at least 5 percent. In June, the AfD won its first directly elected chief administrator, or Landrat, in a small district council in eastern Thuringia. In July, the party won its first directly elected mayor in eastern Saxony-Anhalt state. Both victories strengthen the AfD by showing voters that ballots cast for it aren’t wasted on politicians doomed to opposition.
I recently met the owner of a recycling company with over 600 employees. Within half an hour, he was showing me Nazi memorabilia
Voters are turning to the AfD partly in anger at what they see as an open-door migration policy of Scholz’s SPD-led coalition with the Greens and Free Democrats. This is a continuation of ex-chancellor Angela Merkel’s model in which she revived a then-dying AfD by refusing to close Germany’s border to huge numbers of migrants in 2015. The AfD pivoted from being an anti-euro party to opposing migration and instantly surged in popularity.
Germany’s migration contradiction is that it’s almost impossible for a state with a generous social welfare program to take in large numbers of unskilled migrants without blowing up the system. As former president Joachim Gauck said: “Our heart is large, but our possibilities are finite.” A University of Leipzig poll shows over 40 percent of eastern Germans believe foreigners come to Germany solely to exploit the social welfare system.
Last year, over 244,000 people applied for asylum in Germany — the highest number since 2016 in the wake of Merkel’s refusal to impose border controls. Today, the Scholz government continues this policy by rejecting tougher controls on the Polish and Czech borders despite knowing they’re conduits for both illegal migrants and the drugs trade.
Racism and antisemitism grounded in “neo-Nazi ideology and ethnocentrism” have remained a constant in eastern Germany over the past twenty years, the Leipzig study shows. More than one-third of eastern Germans either openly or latently believe the influence of Jews is “too big.” Almost 30 percent agree with the statement: “The Jews work with evil tricks more than other people to get what they want.”
There are practically no Jews in eastern Germany but I’ve lost track of the number of times people tell me someone negotiating a price is trying to “Jew them down” or lectured me on how Israel’s policy regarding the Palestinians is “like what the Nazis did.” I recently met, for the first time, the owner of a recycling company with over 600 employees. Within half an hour, he was showing me Nazi memorabilia and photos on his cell phone of Adolf Hitler portraits he was planning to buy. There was not only no sense of secrecy or shame but rather an atmosphere that this was entirely normal.
Then there was the guy who organized the hunting at my forest near the village of Bärenklau. After grumbling about Jews and repeatedly telling me that “only a dead Pole is a good Pole,” I finally threw him out. There are no Jews in the village but a big Jewish cemetery is just down the road and Poland’s Neisse River border is eight miles away. So much for coming to terms with the Holocaust and what Germany did to the Poles in World War Two.
Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, says there are three types of antisemitism in Germany: from the right, the left and from Islamists. In an Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper interview, he notes that while rightist antisemitism is the most visible, leftist antisemitism is becoming “socially acceptable” by disguising itself as freedom of the press or artistic freedom and Islamists in Berlin openly collect money for terrorists who kill Jews in Israel.
Eastern German political frustration, however, is often more concrete than crude racial hatred or antisemitism. Chancellor Scholz’s unpopular government fuels a view in the east that normal citizens have no power over what the government does. A staggering 77 percent say this, according to the Leipzig poll. Given the high-handed style of the Scholz government to passing laws, this shouldn’t be a surprise.
A draft energy bill by Green Party economics and climate protection minister Robert Habeck would have fast-tracked a ban on new gas and oil heating systems in new homes. It could also have affected those using wood for fuel in some situations. Among many Germans, this sparked both fear of freezing in the winter and fury over the cost of up to €30,000 ($33,000) for installing electric heat pumps demanded by the government. The law was subsequently changed but the damage was done. After all, Germany has some of the highest electricity costs in the world, so this is a perfect recipe to tip more people into poverty.
Most people in Bärenklau, population 300, still heat with wood and the planned crackdown on new wood heating systems in certain cases (which was later watered down) sparked not merely disbelief but a sense that Scholz’s cabinet is deranged. The government revamped the legislation but the political damage is massive. Completing the debacle, Germany’s constitutional court halted the bill by ruling that Scholz’s government was trying to ram the law through parliament without giving members time to even study it. The legislation now faces a vote in the autumn after politically festering all summer.
Wolves are another reason rural Germans are turning to the AfD
“This is why people vote for the AfD,” said Thomas Fiedler, the Bärenklau village superintendent, who is a non-party independent. “They’re fed up with Green policies that force them to spend money on things they don’t want.’
You may not believe it, but wolves are another reason rural Germans are turning to the AfD. After being eradicated in the nineteenth century, the wolf returned to Germany over the past two decades. The population has exploded and is now estimated at around 2,000. They kill thousands of sheep, calves and other domestic animals each year.
Despite this, successive German leaders, now loudly led by Green-controlled ministries in Scholz’s government, insist on strict protection for wolves and maintaining a ban on hunting them. Kill a wolf and you can go to prison for up to five years in Germany. That the presence of wolves collides with another of the Greens’ priority of fighting industrial farming by keeping livestock grazing in open pastures seems lost on the party.
The AfD has seized on the wolf and crusades for hunting to cut the population. This resonates with rural voters like Bärenklau superintendent Fiedler, who keeps sheep in a fenced pasture 300 yards from my home.
“The wolves have broken in five times since 2016 and killed thirty-six of my sheep,” said Fiedler. Farmers are supposed to be paid state compensation for dead livestock but Fiedler says he’s never received a penny.
“One time they told me I couldn’t prove it was wolves that killed my animals and the next time they said my fence was built wrong,” he said. “There are too many wolves and they have to be reduced – but the parties with their city voters don’t care about us.”
Opposition to arming Ukraine and widespread pro-Russian sentiment in eastern Germany is another vote-winner for the AfD. Eastern Germany is curiously the only part of the former Soviet bloc that serves up pro-Russian, anti-NATO and Putin-the-good-strongman sentiment in a weird cocktail. This despite the fact that the region has benefited from trillions of euros in German and EU aid since the 1990 reunification — far more than any other part of the ex-East Bloc.
“NATO should never have expanded and we should not be helping Ukraine and its Nazis,” says Holger Reichardt, an architect in the eastern city of Gardelegen. City employee Michael Brohmann agrees: “I don’t care about Ukraine. Just reopen all the gas pipelines to Russia.”
Bärenklau superintendent Fiedler is more circumspect: “We shouldn’t be sending all this money to Afghanistan and Ukraine — we need it here.”
The AfD builds on these views by demanding a return to Otto von Bismarck’s nineteenth-century Russia alliance politics. To mark May 9, the date celebrated in Russia as the end of World War Two, AfD chief Tino Chrupalla took part in a ceremony at the Russian embassy in Berlin. Brushing off Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he tweeted that his gift had been a tea-cup adorned with a Prussian eagle “for peace and reconciliation.”
These policies have helped make the AfD the strongest party in most of eastern Germany. As AfD leaders delight in saying, political screw-ups by established parties are active campaign measures boosting AfD support.
The AfD is a dangerous, far-right, populist party
In 2015, it was Christian Democrat chancellor Merkel who saved the AfD from the political ash-heap by refusing to close German borders. Today, it’s a raft of policies being pushed by the Greens — banning conventional heating systems, de-growth, protecting wolves, closing all nuclear power plants and obsession with gender — that’s supercharging AfD support to levels it has never before enjoyed.
Now anchored in Germany’s political system, the AfD isn’t going away despite much wishful thinking. Establishment parties may vow never to form a coalition with the AfD but they still have a massive problem.
The AfD is a dangerous, far-right, populist party. That said, it is still a legal party in Germany and it asks some of the right questions for which German voters are demanding answers.
Yet the response of old-school German politicians is feeble. They mainly try to evade questions instrumentalized by the AfD. Another genius response, that’s sure to win back voters, is insulting those casting ballots for the AfD.
Social Democrat Sawsan Chebli, a left-wing icon, is a prime example. Writing in Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper, she absolves the German government of any role in the rise of the AfD. Instead, she calls AfD voters “destroyers of our democratic society” and demands “hard civil, political and state stop signals” aimed at all those who vote for the party. Exactly what sanctions she has in mind are left unsaid.
In a nutshell: voting rights are fine as long as people vote for the correct parties.
“We had this in communist East Germany,” says Harald Malek, a forester in Gardelegen. “A regime that was always telling us what to think, what to do and, above all, how to vote.”
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
