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
There are moments on this campaign trail when I wonder if I have just spent the entire day in a beer hall. My trip has overlapped with Oktoberfest, when millions of Bavarians don traditional outfits and sink gallons of the local brew to the sound of an oompah band.
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.
It’s a mish-mash of people complaining about everything from the war in Ukraine to the cost of living.
Some are in Bavarian lederhosen. One man is wearing nothing but a pink thong. The one thing which unites them all is a loathing of the political establishment.
There is nothing new in a disenchanted electorate, of course. But then I chat to Wolfgang, a recently retired insurance manager. He is waving a flag with the CND logo (the international peace symbol). ‘I don’t want any more war and I’m worried about the economy,’ he says.
Just a mile from the happy mayhem of the Oktoberfest showground is an angry demonstration outside Munich’s city hall. The one thing which unites them all is a loathing of the political establishment, writes ROBERT HARDMAN
Polish border guard officers on the Slovakian Polish border. The two countries have reintroduced controls in an attempt to reduce the influx of migrants trying to reach Germany
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.
Yet flag-waving Wolfgang is not some lone oddball. Alongside him, retired software developer, Roland Mayer, says that he is leaning towards the AfD, too. ‘They are the only people who can stop us being in this war,’ he says, pointing to the AfD’s pro‑Putin stance.
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.
The crisis prompted an emergency joint visit by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, underlining the fact that what happens on the EU’s southern borders today will soon work its way through to the rest of the bloc.
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.
Meanwhile, the AfD saw its popularity shoot up.
That is why tomorrow’s elections here in Germany are being watched so closely right across the European Union, and especially in Brussels.
Normally the rest of the world couldn’t care less about two German regional elections — in Hessen and Bavaria.
Both are prosperous parts of former West Germany with a habit of electing centre-Right governments.
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
This time, though, they are seen as a crucial indicator on many levels. For they are the last big polls before next year’s European elections and federal elections a year later.
If the extreme Right do well tomorrow, then that warns of major trouble ahead. For until now, the AfD’s major advances have been in the old East Germany where the electorate has long felt marginalised by the affluent West. If they now start to pick up serious votes in West German local elections, then imagine what might happen in the next national poll.
Let’s be very clear. The AfD is not going to come anywhere near overall victory tomorrow. It remains a pariah. One poster has just been banned for using the Nazi paramilitary slogan ‘Alles fur Deutschland’ (Everything for Germany).
However, here in Bavaria, it is polling at around 15 per cent, well ahead of the Social Democrats who actually lead the current ‘traffic light’ coalition running the nation (so-called because of the red, yellow and green colours of the parties). It is a similar story in Hessen. The AfD could conceivably come second in both states.
It is a foregone conclusion that, after tomorrow’s vote, the largest party here in Bavaria will still be the centre-Right, conservative CSU (the Bavarian equivalent of the federal CDU). Yet it will need coalition partners to command an overall majority.
That will almost certainly involve a fresh deal with another hard-Right (if not far-Right) party called the Free Voters. Its critics call it ‘AfD-lite’, a charge which is robustly denied by its members. However, its leader, Hubert Aiwanger, recently found himself under attack after a newspaper unearthed a leaflet which he wrote as a teenager. In it, he called for German traitors to take a trip ‘through the chimney of Auschwitz’.
Having at first tried to deny it, Aiwanger then tried to get his brother to take the flak, before finally admitting authorship. The result? His party has seen a rise in the polls.
‘We are just a party that gets things done at a community level,’ says parliamentary candidate Hans-Georg Frinder. Of his leader’s teenage pamphlet, he explains: ‘People do silly things when they are young but this is not the real man I know.’
Barbara Becker, a state MP for the ruling CSU, says that many voters resent the system whereby refugees receive cash benefits from the German state which many send straight home.
‘My family have hosted a Ukrainian family who can get ¤2,300 a month. Their housing and heating is paid for so they send that money straight home.
‘Here in Bavaria, we want a system whereby people get credit for what they need.’
The present situation, she says, plays straight into the hands of the AfD. ‘They always complain but they have no solutions.’
I have a coffee with Hans Christian-Lange, a trade unionist and author who once worked in the think tank of Helmut Kohl, the centre-Right Chancellor of West Germany at the time of reunification.
Lange has since moved firmly to the Left and is now working with a fledgling socialist party (it has yet to decide on a name) which hopes to be up and running in time for next year’s European elections.
However, he freely admits that the government’s current policy on welfare for migrants needs tightening. ‘We have a situation where 300,000 people have had their applications for asylum rejected and yet they are still here and still profit from the social system.
‘This causes great resentment among working-class voters. It’s why you get second-generation migrants thinking about voting for the AfD.’
In Bavaria, AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) is polling at 15 per cent, ahead of the Social Democrats who lead the current national coalition
On top of that, Lange says, is mounting anger at the policies of the Greens within the national coalition who want to impose restrictions on old cars (with strong echoes of the anti-ULEZ movement in Greater London).
He describes the Greens as a ‘luxury class’ who are happy to ride around on a €4,000 designer cargo bike worth many times more than an old banger. Left-leaning politicians accept that they have their work cut out.
‘People want simple answers — like those they get from the far Right,’ says Micki Mueller, a senior campaigner for the far-Left Die Linke.
Christiane Gregor, a spokesperson for the centre-Left Social Democrat campaign in Hessen acknowledges that a powerful force in this election is the sense of ‘abstieg’ among the middle classes — a fear of social ‘descent’, caused by rising prices and recession. It is certainly a potent rallying cry for the AfD.
Forty miles from Munich, I attend a rally in the seemingly prosperous town of Meitingen. It is just up the road from Bavaria’s third-largest city, Augsburg, a high-tech hub for the automotive and airline industries.
A noisy demonstration has gathered outside a packed community hall. The audience is not made up of skinheads and elderly malcontents, as once it would have been. Most are middle-aged skilled workers, plus a smattering of students.
They are welcomed by Ulrich Singer, the party’s chairman in the Bavarian state parliament. ‘I am a lawyer, specialising in the rights of the old and the handicapped,’ he tells me as the hall is filling up. ‘People cannot understand why these people struggle to get housing and heating while the state gives the same rights to people from outside with no documents.’
Tonight’s big draw is the party’s deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch. A polished speaker, she laments the demise of ‘how Germany used to be’ — an educated nation of proud exporters in which ‘a postman or a teacher on a single salary could aspire to own a house and a car and go on holiday’. Now, she says, society is ‘broken’.
For the best part of an hour, she attacks the main parties for their obsession with punitive green energy policies. She doesn’t dwell on migration — because she does not need to. Everyone knows that this is the AfD’s DNA.
Hence, the loudest cheer of the night comes when she attacks asylum-seekers who have come to Germany via safe nations: ‘He who comes from a third county has no right to anything.’
Afterwards, the audience queue for selfies. The bourgeois vibe starts to evaporate when I talk to some of them, however. ‘Go to Augsburg,’ says steel worker, Sebastian, 28. ‘Look left and right and all you see is f****** Muslims.’
It is, though, simplistic — and wrong — to say that most of Germany is lurching back to the darkest period in its history.
Two hours south of Munich, a new museum has just opened on the site of Hitler’s old Berghof headquarters in the Bavarian mountains (flattened by the RAF in 1945).
Called the Dokumentation Obersalzberg, it replaces a smaller museum which simply could not cope with demand. Its theme is ‘The Idyll and the Atrocity’ and it pulls no punches in explaining how this Alpine retreat inspired pure evil, from the moment Hitler first started coming here in 1923.
During the war, 6,000 slave labourers were drafted in to build miles of underground bunkers to protect Hitler and his cronies. Some remain open as part of the museum.
It explores in detail how many locals lost their homes and ultimately their lives because they were Jewish — while their former neighbours shamelessly grabbed their possessions.
No one could accuse Germany of trying to bury its past. It explains why the majority of Germans are so deeply troubled by the rise of parties such as the AfD
Tourists of the time would descend in their droves here just to catch a glimpse of Hitler. The exhibition follows the story of local girl, Anna Grassl, who had a hearing impairment for which she was murdered by the Nazis, who then gave her family a fake death certificate and even an urn with fake ashes.
The central section explores all the horrors plotted on this spot, from the concentration camps at Auschwitz to the siege of Leningrad. Most visitors here are German. Those I speak to afterwards emerge profoundly moved or even complaining that it does not go far enough.
The management took the decision not to include photographs of atrocities because they believe that the stories alone are harrowing enough, as indeed they are.
Fittingly, the last words, as you leave the network of bunkers, are the recorded voices of four survivors of the Holocaust.
No one, after seeing this place, could accuse Germany of trying to bury its past. It explains why the majority of Germans are so deeply troubled by the rise of parties such as the AfD.
However, if tomorrow’s elections go the way the polls suggest, then this troubled country will have even more to worry about on Monday morning.
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