Deutschlands anti-extremistische Firewall bricht zusammen

Graeme Wood: “Last week in Munich, Vice President J. D. Vance scolded European dignitaries for their failure to address popular discontent. They had ignored what Vance called the most ‘urgent’ issue of our time: the relentless flow of non-Europeans into Europe. Without naming it, Vance was defending a far-right political party called Alternative for Germany (AfD), best-known for its commitment to deporting as many immigrants as the country’s airports can process. Vance said he ‘happen[s] to agree’ with voters worried about ‘out-of-control migration.’ But he was aghast at the idea that governments would try to silence their citizens, whatever their views. ‘There is no room for firewalls,” he said. “You either uphold the principle of democracy or you do not.’

“Germany’s establishment leaders have long accepted a different binary: Either you put up a ‘firewall’ (*Brandmauer*) against far-right extremists, or you risk losing your democracy to literal Nazis. Accordingly, when the AfD won a plurality in last year’s state-level elections in Thuringia, the other parties cried ‘Nazi’ and stitched together a coalition to keep the AfD out of the government. But this arrangement—even when you win, you lose—has infuriated AfD supporters, and at the party meetings I attended recently, they were in a storm-the-Bastille mood, eager to take down an old regime that they, like Vance, believe is stealing democracy from them in the guise of saving it.

“This may be the year the firewall collapses. The AfD is now polling at about 22 percent nationally and seems destined for a strong showing in Sunday’s federal parliamentary election. No other party will deign to form a coalition with it. But if the AfD performs well enough, it will be impossible to exclude altogether from decision making.

“… The AfD started in 2013 as an anti–European Union party, full of Germans cranky about having their hard-earned taxes go to bail out lazy Mediterranean countries. A decade on, at the Ichstedt meeting [that I attended in January], AfD supporters were still furious that EU membership had added another encrustation of bureaucracy and taxation to an already massive state. But the issue that dominates the party’s platform is immigration, and the chant that animated the Ichstedt crowd most was ‘*Abschieben, abschieben, abschieben*’: ‘Deport, deport, deport!’

“… This was a persistent theme among AfD supporters and politicians: that Germany had become a shithole country, not fit for an engineer from Delhi, and it needed to become worse for newcomers to be livable for anyone. Donald Trump’s first inaugural speech was about ‘American carnage,’ and now the AfD described an equally awful Germany. It is a weird sensation to go to Germany—the center of what Donald Rumsfeld called ‘Old Europe,’ where I once stayed near a corner bakery old enough to have served Martin Luther—and find that it feels like America’s political younger sibling.”

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