Maryam and her best friend were ambling through Magdeburg toward the railway station, talking over the dramatic events of the previous evening and the surge by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland to a historically high vote in the Saxony-Anhalt elections. The teenagers, from nearby Wolmirstedt, said they were shocked by the AfD’s landslide win. But they felt powerless to do much about it and felt afraid about where it might take their home state.
My dad came to Germany from Syria in 2015. My mum and I joined him two years later.” The first clause of the anti-immigrant AfD’s 100-day programme says that – “from the first moment” of being in power – the party will deport people it deems “irregular migrants”. Maryam believes her family could well face deportation.
We’ve always lived in a state of uncertainty. Now after these election results we face going back to Syria which we don’t think is safe, and I can’t even read or write Arabic.” The AfD won almost 44% of the vote in Sunday’s election, more than even it had hoped for. Doreen, 54, did not immediately admit to having supported the party, but said later in an interview she had put her faith in what she termed “the blues” “out of a sense of desperation”.
When challenged about the human impact the party’s policies could have, for example on immigrant families, she shrugged: “It is what it is.” “If they [refugees] hadn’t turned up here in such large numbers in the first place, they wouldn’t have to go through such heart-breaking situations now,” she said. Doreen, a cleaner, said she hoped the pro-Russia AfD would be able to take power and act on promises to end refugee status for Ukrainians (as well as aid to Kyiv). Born in 1877, he lived on the spot where a glass-fronted fitness club now stands until he was “humiliated, disenfranchised … (and) took flight in death” (a euphemism for suicide).
But she angrily rejected any parallel between the AfD’s rise in popularity and the Weimar era rise of the Nazis. But it soon became clear that they were shattered by the news. Voting data has shown a stark drop-off in support for the far-right party among the over-70s.
The reality of it hasn’t quite kicked in.” The couple said they had voted for the far-left Die Linke. Judith said she was “devastated that a party that has so little regard for refugees” had won, and by such a large margin. Her own life story – she was forced to flee her home in Silesia in 1945 and spent years in temporary accommodation before settling in Magdeburg – has greatly sensitised her to the plight of refugees, she said.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
