Anger, fear, nostalgia: Why German voters back far-right AfD

Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - SCHWEDT (Germany), Feb 16 — Two security guards stand watch outside a small castle hosting a campaign event for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the ex-communist east, the party’s heartland.

Around 30 voters have turned up, most of them elderly men, to learn about the health plans of the AfD, which mainly campaigns against immigration, multiculturalism and “woke” policies.

Beers are served with smoked sausages at the event in Schwedt near the Polish border, where the voters speak freely about their hopes and anxieties.

“The whole country is at rock bottom,” said retiree Frank Iffert, 66, from Brandenburg state.

“We were better off with the Deutschmark,” he said, backing the AfD promise to ditch the euro and bring back the currency synonymous with Germany’s post-war prosperity.

On immigration, Iffert said people felt “threatened” by an influx of people, often fleeing war and misery, allowed into Germany under ex-chancellor Angela Merkel and since.

He voiced disdain for those who live on benefits and “don’t want to work”.

He also said that many migrants who came as so-called guest workers in the 1960s now “feel threatened themselves by migrants” and that some support the AfD.

A spate of bloody attacks blamed on asylum seekers has hardened the mood—most recently a car ramming in Munich that killed two and wounded dozens, and saw an Afghan man arrested.

Mourning times gone by

With a week until the election, the AfD is polling at a record 20 percent, in second place.

For now, it has little hope of ending up in government as all other parties have pledged to isolate it behind a “firewall” of non-cooperation.

Nonetheless, the AfD’s spectacular rise, echoing that of anti-establishment parties elsewhere, has ended Germany’s belief that the memory of World War II and the Holocaust has inoculated it against a resurgent extreme right.

Many AfD supporters say they are unsettled by turbulent modern times and yearn for a return to a more stable past.

Small business owner Enrico Schulz, 55, from Wandlitz, Brandenburg, said he wanted “a return to the policies of the era of (chancellor Helmut) Kohl”, who oversaw Germany’s 1990 reunification.

Schulz said he used to vote for Kohl’s conservative CDU but became “very disappointed” with it and turned to the AfD.

Today, Schulz said Germany’s tax system did not reward work and called for “a smaller state”.

Easterners like him “lived through socialism”, he said. “I don’t want it a second time.”

‘Rainbow flags everywhere’

Some AfD supporters at the Schwedt meeting were younger, among them Jenny Luedcke, 34, a telecommunications worker.

“The AfD is the only party that really wants to change something” and address “the unhappiness in the country”, she said, voicing hope it will gain power, “maybe even this year”.

While the AfD’s stronghold is the east, it has made inroads in western Germany, helped by often viral social media campaigns.

Schulz said he “tries to inform himself as broadly as possible”, mostly via WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook news channels.

Manuel Steiof, 38, a pharmaceuticals worker in Frankfurt, Germany’s financial capital, said he supported the AfD and hankered after a return to a more reassuring past.

He remembers a childhood in the Frankfurt suburb of Hoechst where “everything was going well” and he “was allowed out alone” by his parents.

The picturesque former village still boasts timber-frame houses but has lost a business that long provided local jobs, the Hoechst chemicals group which was taken over by Sanofi-Aventis.

As the German economy has flatlined for years, he recalled wistfully the days when workers “on red bikes and in blue overalls” were a common sight.

Bemoaning changing times and social mores, he said these days he sees “rainbow flags everywhere”.

Hate figure Merkel

If there’s one figure who consistently attracts AfD voters’ ire it is Merkel, who decided to phase out nuclear power after Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster and allowed more than one million refugees into Germany in 2015-16.

The AfD’s very name is a reference to her past insistence that many of her policies were “without alternative”.

Schulz lamented that German nuclear plants were “among the safest” in the world, while scoffing at wind and solar power sites.

He charged that Merkel’s “refugee policy here in the EU contributed to the UK leaving it”.

Migration was also a burning issue for retiree Karin Stieff-Kuhn, 78, who lives in an affluent Frankfurt suburb.

She said while today’s refugees were being “taken care of” by the state, no such support was on offer for her family.

Her father fought on the Eastern Front in World War II and then fled his native Silesia when Germany lost the territory after the war.

Stieff-Kuhn voiced impatience with modern debates, especially on “gender nonsense”.

‘Feeling of victimisation’

A diffuse anger with the status quo motivates many AfD voters, said psychologist Tobias Rothmund, an expert on radicalisation at Jena University.

“It’s often not clear where this dissatisfaction comes from,” he said, adding that many AfD voters “feel disadvantaged—culturally, politically, economically”.

“But this is difficult to grasp,” he said as often “it doesn’t correspond to the objective realities of their lives”.

Nevertheless, he said, the “feeling of victimisation” generally means they “focus on their own well-being and are not as motivated by empathy for others”.

He described the archetypal AfD voter as “a man in a rural area who didn’t go to university, is sceptical of public media... and open to alternatives sources of information”.

A hot online subject has been the Ukraine war, where the Moscow-friendly AfD vehemently disagrees with Germany’s support for Kyiv.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “isn’t the only one to blame”, said Luedcke, who accused the EU and NATO of “breaking agreements” with Russia at the end of the Cold War.

Iffert went further and called Ukraine “practically a fascist country”. He voiced his disapproval of Ukrainian refugees who “come here, get their welfare payments and then go back home”.

‘Nazi cudgel’

Germany’s Nazi past is another area in which the AfD and its voters rebel against the prevailing consensus.

Parts of the AfD have been classified as extremist by German security services and last year one of its most prominent leaders, Bjoern Hoecke, was fined twice for using a Nazi-era slogan.

While mainstream parties are committed to a Holocaust “memory culture”, Luedcke argued that “every country committed atrocities in recent centuries”.

“We’re the only country that is still pilloried about this, even though today we can’t do anything about it.”

She added that the “cudgel of being called a Nazi” is routinely deployed to “stifle freedom of speech”.

Steiof said he was drawn to the AfD during the pandemic by the party’s scepticism towards vaccines, but said that when he opposed getting the jab, he was insulted as a “Nazi”.

Rothmund, the researcher, said that this “dynamic of exclusion of AfD voters”, including relative moderates, can in turn lead to their “further radicalisation”. — AFP