PUNDITS are saying that the right-wing Alternative fur Deutschland party (AfD) began as an anti-EU party but has now morphed into an anti-Islamic party. This is sheer nonsense. From the outset the AfD was stained with Islamophobia. At its party conference it has just voted to adopt a policy of banning minarets on mosques, the call to prayer and the wearing of the full-face veil. Party leaders say openly now that Islam is not part of Germany.
Just as the Nazi party played upon long-standing wariness about the Jews of Mitteleuropa, so the AfD is playing upon the concerns of ordinary Germans at the surge of largely Muslim immigrants who have been welcomed into the country by the far-sighted, humane and generous instincts of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The trick for the Nazis and now for the AfD is to convert that anxiety into the visceral hatred of all things Islamic which has always motivated the core of the party leadership. To his credit, one of the party’s founders, Bernd Lucke quit last year because he saw that anti-EU rhetoric had been hijacked by racist bigots. The AfD, he said, had become a refuge for xenophobes and people steeped in racial hatred. But Lucke’s principled action had little effect on the bulk of the party, few of whose members followed him in resigning.
So now the flag of naked prejudice and Islamophobia has been raised high and all nascent neo-fascists have found a new rallying point. Given Germany’s truly woeful history this is extremely alarming. The first attempt at a neo-Nazi revival in the 1960s was headed by Adolf von Thadden.
This Pomeranian Junker, a former Nazi-party member, founded the National Democratic Party. Glorying in the first name that he shared with Hitler, von Thadden built up the NDP particularly in Bavaria. He was notable for giving rabble-rousing speeches from inside a bulletproof glass cage. But the NDP folded in 1975 largely because the memory of the brutal Nazi regime was too recent and too raw. Germans were trying to forget the war, their defeat and their humiliation.
But times have changed. The EU has been seriously weakened by its contradictions, its weakness, its corruption and its inability to recognize that citizens in most of its 28 member countries are resistant to increasing intrusive government from an unaccountable Eurocracy in Brussels.
Germans are fed up with footing the bill for the EU’s failures. In this respect, there is a disturbing similarity with the rise of the Nazis. Hitler capitalized on the huge reparations that Germany was forced to pay after its defeat in World War I. Now the AfD is peddling a similar message of outrage while blaming the Muslims in its midst for adding to the country’s alleged misery.
No German politician of repute has yet had the gumption to point out the country’s post-war economic miracle could not have been achieved without the substantial help of Turkish guest workers, every one of them Muslim. This is surely the message that Merkel and all other reasonable German politicians from all moderate, mainstream parties should be seeking to drive home. The demented racists of the AfD are not only trying to turn back the pages of history, but, in seeking to blame Islam for Germany’s ills, they are plain wrong.
