Why the Failure To Stem Migration is Driving Even Liberal Germans Into The Arms of the far-Right: As Bavaria goes to the polls tomorrow, ROBERT HARDMAN is dismayed to find Spiralling Resentment - and chilling echoes of history
But I am stone-cold sober, and my eyes are not deceiving me. Just a mile from the happy mayhem of the Oktoberfest showground is an angry demonstration outside Munich’s city hall.
So which way will he vote when Bavaria goes to the polls tomorrow? ‘Well, I’ve voted Green for the last 25 years. But this time, I think I will go with the AfD.’
I am speechless. Here is someone who has been trotting along on the eco-wing of the Left for most of his adult life and now he is going to tick the box for the far-Right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD).
Quite apart from the fact that they are fiercely pro-nuclear, the AfD are considered so beyond the pale that no other party — in a land of coalition politics — will even contemplate doing a deal with them.
Their latest election literature uses overtly Islamophobic language. They blame specific minorities for a spike in German rape statistics. They even have a creepy poster of a man in women’s make-up who appears to be about to grab a small boy, alongside the slogan ‘Leave our children alone’.
One of the party’s most senior figures is facing prosecution for alleged use of Nazi language in a recent speech. And now, the only party further to the Right, the neo-Nazi NPD (newly renamed ‘Die Heimat’ or ‘The Homeland’) has just urged its supporters to vote AfD tomorrow.
I meet several others, from both Left and Right persuasions previously, who tell me that they, too, will be voting AfD tomorrow. They cite multiple reasons for their lurch to the far-Right. Nadine, 35, talks of ‘crazy gender issues’. Yet if you scratch a little deeper, you soon get on to what lies behind this alarming shift in voting patterns: talk of another surge of migrants.
The recent scenes on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where the local population more than doubled in a day as boat after boat of immigrants arrived from North Africa, have resonated strongly here in Germany.
No nation has taken in more refugees than Germany, which was accommodating more than one million asylum-seekers, from across Africa and Asia, before it received a further million Ukrainians.
The memory of those scenes in 2015, when Angela Merkel suddenly opened Germany’s doors to the legion of migrants — arriving via Greece and the Balkans — is still vivid. Though Merkel received international plaudits for her generosity at the time, it nearly proved her undoing as German public opinion rapidly turned against an uncapped flow of migrants.
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In Bavaria, AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) is polling at 15 per cent, ahead of the Social Democrats who lead the current national coalition
ROBERT HARDMAN: I'm stone-cold sober and my eyes are not deceiving me. Just a mile from the happy mayhem of the Oktoberfest showground is an angry demonstration outside Munich's city hall.
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