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2023-10-07 Europe
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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
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[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] 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.
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.
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Posted by Skidmark 2023-10-07 09:38||
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File under: Migrants/Illegal Immigrants
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Posted by Procopius2k 2023-10-07 12:06||
2023-10-07 12:06||
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