Germany cannot erase its Nazi past: the incredible electoral prediction if voting were held today

When Sabine Thonke joined a recent demonstration in Berlin against Germany’s far-right party, it was the first time in years that she felt full of hope that could be stopped the growing power of extremists in his country.

Thonke, 59, had followed the rise of Alternative for Germany (AfD). But when she discovered a plan to do so deport millions of people, He felt called to action.

“I would never have thought of such inhumane ideas would gain popularity again in Germany. “I thought we had learned the lessons of our past,” Thonke said.

Many Germans believed that their country he had developed an immunity to nationalism and to claims of racial superiority after facing the horrors of his Nazi past education and laws which prohibited persecution.

They were wrong.

If elections were held today, The AfD would be the second most voted partyaccording to polls.

But national polls camouflage an important division: AfD has disproportionate support in the former communist and less prosperous states of East Germany.

After the fall of communism in 1989 and the reunification of East and West Germany a year later, many inhabitants of the five Eastern states lost not only their jobs, but also their collective past, which they left them disoriented and defenseless in the capitalist system.

The rise of the AfD was fueled by anger over inflation and especially, the increase in immigration. The EU received 1.1 million asylum applications in 2023, the highest number since 2015. Germany received the largest number of applications – more than 300,000 –, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Turkey. The country also welcomed more than one million Ukrainian refugeeshe is displaced due to the Russian invasion.

Voters in Germany and across Europe are increasingly giving far-right nationalist parties more power than they promise limit immigration and, in some cases, limit democratic freedoms of religion, expression and the right to protest. These forces have emerged France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria.

The lessons of the Second World War

After 1945, the West Germans They grew up with the guiding principle that “never again” should there be a dictatorship on German soil. West German leader They visited Israel and apologized to Nazi-occupied countries as he took schoolchildren to see concentration camps or Holocaust memorials.

But in the East, a self-declared anti-fascist society, young people were taught that they were alone descendants of Nazi victims.

Thonke, who works at the Berlin water company, grew up in Bavaria, which was part of western Germany before reunification in 1990. He says he didn’t talk much to his grandparents. -the Nazi generation- about what happened during the Third Reich, but that at school he learned about Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the Holocaust.

The current far right use similar tacticshe said, exploiting people’s fears to gain their trust and their votes.

“I understand that many people are exhausted by all these crises – the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the many immigrants, the inflation – and are afraid that things will get worse,” Thonke said. “But the solutions offered by the AfD They won’t solve any of these problems.“.

Polls show that the AfD is the most voted party the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, with about 35% support in each. Both states will hold elections this autumn, along with the eastern state of Brandenburg, where the AfD is also expected achieve strong victories.

Young and male voters

The AfD’s appeal is above all strong among men -about two thirds of its voters are men- and, increasingly, among younger voters. In the latest regional elections held in Hesse and Bavaria in October, the AfD achieved important victories among voters 24 years or younger.

The match he is much more familiar with the Internet of his rivals and uses social networks to get his message to young people. At the same time, the leaders of the AfD They tend to avoid talking to journalists by mainstream media and sometimes they don’t accredit journalists who they consider too critical of their party.

The party benefited from voters’ deep frustration with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. His government came to power more than two years ago with a progressive and modernizing agenda, but many now consider it dysfunctional and incompetent.

The Thuringian section of the AfD he is particularly radicalized and four years ago it was placed under official surveillance by the national secret services “proven far right” group.

The leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Bjoern Hoecke, hugged each other several times revisionist views of Germany’s Nazi past. In 2018 you named the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame” and asked that Germany has made a “180-degree turn” in how he remembers his past.

“The AfD is a nationalist party, and the nationalists they want to be proud of their historyand anyone who wants to be very proud of German history must, of course, downplaying, downplaying or even denying the shame of Nazi crimes to tell the story of national greatness,” said Jens-Christian Wagner, historian and director of the Memorial Buchenwalda former concentration camp in Thuringia, where The Nazis killed more than 56,000 people.

Attacks against the former concentration camp have intensified massively in recent months: Wagner claims this is due to “revisionist, anti-Semitic and racist slogans” promoted by the AfD.

A call to attention

A wave of protests against the far right has spread across Germany since January, triggered by a report Right-wing extremists met to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrantsincluding some with German citizenship.

Members of the AfD were present at the meeting, along with Martin Sellner, a convincing young Austrian with neo-Nazi ties and convictions for violent extremism.

The meeting, held in November, bore an uncanny resemblance to the Wannsee conference, when the Nazis They agreed on the so-called “final solution”, the systematic raids that led to the killing of 6 million Jews.

Just as in the winter of 1942, when senior Nazi officials met secretly in a lakeside villa outside Berlin, the recent meeting also took place secretly in a villa not far from the German capital.

Leader of the AfD party They tried to distance themselves from the meetingstating that the party had no organizational or financial connection to the event, that it was not responsible for what was discussed there and that members who attended did so in a purely personal capacity.

The AfD’s head in parliament, Bernd Baumann, complained that his party was facing a “devious campaign from politicians and journalists of the bankrupt green-left class”.

“They are becoming little private debating clubs secret meetings that pose a danger to the public,” he said.

Yet, week after week, millions of Germans took to the streets to protest, taking part in events with slogans such as “Never again is now”“Against hatred” and “Let’s defend democracy”.

Demonstrations in cities such as Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Düsseldorf brought together hundreds of thousands of participants at a time, so many that authorities had to end some marches early for safety reasons due to overcrowding on the streets.

People have also protested in smaller cities and even held weekly vigils in their neighborhoods to express their frustration with growing support at the polls for far-right populism.

More than So far 2.4 million people have joined the anti-AFD protests, which began in mid-January, according to the German Interior Ministry. Organizers of the demonstrations estimate that more than 3.6 million people participated.

Among them was Thonke, who attended two pro-democracy rallies in Berlin, relieved that the country was, as she puts it, “waking up.”

“I no longer have that feeling of helplessness that I had in recent years as I watched the rise and success of the AfD,” he said, adding that the government must do more.

“The government must find solutions to the migration crisis, otherwise the AfD will continue to exploit the issue for its own purposes and become even more powerful,” he said.

Previous waves of protests against the anti-Islam, anti-immigration PEGIDA movement eventually petered out, although they were not as massive as the anti-AfD movement that is forming.

However, the AfD is going from strength to strength. December marked another milestone, when for the first time its candidate won the mayoral election in a medium-sized city: Pirna in Saxony.

Now the party is aiming for the European Parliament elections in June. If Thonke and his comrades want to push back against the far right, they will have to convince their fellow countrymen not only to protest, but to go to the polls en masse.