The ordinary Germans turning to the far-Right

It was overwhelmingly young people who voted for the controversial AfD party in Thuringia, but what attracted them? What does a Nazi look like in 2024? Is it the slender waitress with the nose piercing? The dapper pensioner in his checked shirt and neatly pressed chinos? Those students sitting on that bench beneath the benign gaze of the Goethe-Schiller monument? “Calling us Nazis is just a cheap slur. There is nothing wrong about wanting our country back – Germany for the Germans,” says Harald, the pensioner (and, to a greater or lesser degree, the waitress and the students). “We have too many foreigners. We need to send them all home and become more self-reliant,” he adds. A week ago, the results of local state elections in Thuringia, in the Eastern part of the country, sent shockwaves across Europe and beyond, with a far-Right party winning a German state election for the first time since the Second World War. The extreme right wing AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) party captured nearly 33 per cent of the vote, and came second in the nearby state of Saxony with almost 31 per cent. What terrified Berlin most was that these were not disillusioned old people hankering back to their totalitarian DDR past, but overwhelmingly young people, demanding a future free of multiculturalism and an immediate end to military support for Ukraine.  A staggering 37 per cent of young voters in Thuringia voted for the pro-Russia AfD. In Saxony, it was 31 per cent. Yet, such a vote did not come from nowhere; in the European parliamentary elections in June, the AfD beat all three parties of Olaf Scholz’s coalition in the 16-24 vote, coming second with 16 per cent – just one percentage point behind the conservatives. “Our country cannot and must not get used to this,” Scholz said earlier this week when the count ended. “The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation.” And so I have come to Thuringia, to see for myself just who voted for a party that is routinely compared to the National Socialists and to ask why they are so in the thrall of its local firebrand – a man likened by many to Adolf Hitler.

via telegraph: The ordinary Germans turning to the far-Right