Although Özoğuz was born in Hamburg in 1967 and grew up in Germany, she did not acquire German citizenship until 1989, a function of Germany’s then extremely strict jus sanguinis citizenship laws that for decades granted nationality only to those with German blood. She is not the only famous person in her family. Her cousins are the leaders of the Istanbul-based punk band Athena, and her two brothers run a notoriously pro-Hezbollah and pro-Iranian website that has been under surveillance by the German intelligence agencies for years; she has publicly dissociated herself from her brothers’ work and political views.48
Despite all the criticism of Merkel’s policy, Özoğuz insists, “I think we did quite well. They were knocking on our doors. The alternative would have been to tell them to just go away.” Germany didn’t have the luxury of ignoring them. “We have a humanitarian policy; we have to live this.”
And she doesn’t see refugees as the greatest threat to Germany’s social fabric. She believes that the emergence of far-right populist parties could pose a much greater to the fabric of society than the refugees. “I think it’s quite dangerous” when a party publicly suggests that all Muslims might be a threat as the AfD has done. “On social networks, they say every Muslim is kind of an extremist.” In much the same way as the Charlie Hebdo editorial implied that a bakery selling only halal croissants and a veiled woman walking down the street were somehow part of the problem, this leads to a sense that perfectly peaceful Muslim citizens are some sort of fifth column. “It is alarming,” says Özoğuz. “I am a Muslim, I was born in Hamburg, I grew up in this country—am I a part of this country or not?”
She admits that the refugee crisis is straining the fabric of the European Union, but she remains optimistic. Where she does agree with Lengsfeld and Spahn is that the refugee issue should be strictly humanitarian and not be touted as some sort of economic panacea or subjected to cost-benefit analysis. “We shouldn’t look with this eye of economic interest,” even if, she adds, helping them may also help the economy one day.49
Integration is a less fraught topic in Germany than in Holland or France. While France and others remain fixated on the nineteenth-century German concept of a kulturnation, Germany has largely moved on. Given its history, nationalist nostalgia simply doesn’t sell in the same way.
Many German Turks still do not have citizenship, but Germany’s immigrants and their families are not as socially marginalized and geographically isolated as many minority communities in France or Holland. Kreuzberg, the heart of Turkish Berlin, also happens to be the epicentre of hipster Berlin and the neighborhood of choice for many young people visiting or living in the city.
German politicians who opposed Merkel’s policies in 2015, like Lengsfeld and Spahn, are fully aware that many of those who came are there to stay and that integration will be a major issue in the years to come. Unlike Le Pen and many on the French right, they do not insist on absolute and immediate assimilation. The key, for them, is numbers and focusing on truly humanitarian cases rather than anyone arriving seeking a better life.
“They are in the country now. We have to deal with it,” Spahn says frustratedly. Many are low skilled and will need a lot of training. Integrating asylum-seekers through the labour market will, he thinks, take far longer than most people think. Lengsfeld insists that Germany needs to talk about quotas to limit the number of asylum-seekers coming into the country and ensure that they are not economic migrants. “The Germans are not used to this type of differentiation; that maybe has something to do with the past,” he adds, pausing, because “we also selected in Auschwitz.” But that historical discomfort must not be allowed to drive current policy, because selective immigration policy can’t in any way be equated with the murderous Nazi regime. And being strict is essential, he maintains, because not everyone is a true war refugee.
The far-right politicians refusing to take any Muslims are, in his view, just as misguided as the leftists who insisted that everyone crossing the border was by definition a refugee. That said, it is harder to integrate people with doctrinaire religious views. “If you don’t accept a female teacher, female managers, female policemen, if you don’t accept that your daughters and wives are working in and interacting with the community, you have an issue,” he argues. Unlike some politicians further to his right, he notes that the Muslim community is not monolithic, and fundamentalists are a problem for moderate Muslims, too. “Do you think that a young Turkish-origin woman in Germany is happy,” he asks, “if some Afghan village people are coming with their medieval view on life and trying to implement this in modern Germany?”50
For Spahn and Lengsfeld, spending money on integration is not even a question. The alternative is doing nothing and then waiting to see what happens. That, they maintain, will be much more expensive in the long run if integration fails. “We are a democracy. We have the rule of law. We have procedures for everything,” says Spahn. “So you just can’t say, ‘Go.’”51
But by 2016, increasing numbers of voters were arguing just that.
Germany’s populist backlash came much later than most. Given its history, the country has long shunned anything resembling the far right. Looking back fondly to the first half of the twentieth century is simply off limits. Until 2006, when Germany hosted the World Cup, it was unusual to even see the national flag flown at sporting events. Many Germans thought that they, unlike other European nations, were immune from the far right. For decades, conservatives had tried in vain to start a moderate right-wing party. The only thing that existed to the right of the CDU was the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD). Some smaller new parties had made it into local parliaments only to collapse and disappear. Then came the AfD.
Much as the French establishment has for decades tried to place the Front National behind a cordon sanitaire, Germany has long sought to sideline the far right. But according to Die Welt’s Robin Alexander, attempting to cordon off the AfD doesn’t work and won’t dent their popularity. “They even tried to stop the TV stations inviting AfD politicians to discussions,” he recalls. “That old strategy of keeping them outside collapsed.”52 The party is here to stay.
The impulse to marginalize a growing force on the far right is understandable in Germany, but it could be driving even more people into the arms of the AfD. They were called “aggressive mob people,” Lengsfeld says, referring to supporters of PEGIDA. “I think this is dangerous.” There has been a change in what Germans fear, and this, he argues, leads to dismissive political responses. Germans are accustomed to the standard bogeymen of the left. “I’m more used to all this left-wing fear about nuclear energy, climate change, and all the rest of it. Now we also have right-wing fear, Islamophobia, and so forth,” he explains. If voters say they are afraid of Islam, politicians can’t just tell them that discussion is off limits. “That makes no sense,” says Lengsfeld. “We need to approach this openly, but fairly.”53
Shutting down discussion or pretending that there is no problem either drives the opposition underground or, as the CDU and others on the right have learned the hard way, into the arms of new political parties seeking to profit from the growing anger of certain voters.
Christian Schmidt was part of the AfD before anyone had heard of it. He helped set up the party when it was an anti-EU movement and nothing more. Frauke Petry, the leader at the helm for the party’s major victories in 2016, wasn’t yet involved. The key players were Bernd Lucke, an economics professor, the disgruntled CDU politician Alexander Gauland, and Konrad Adam, a conservative journalist. As Schmidt explains, “At this point, immigration was not an issue at all.”54
The party was pro-sovereignty and focused on law and order. It argued that Germany shouldn’t be providing social security for the rest of Europe by bailing out countries like Greece. The message resonated at a time when the Greek crisis was very much in the headlines. The AfD took a little under 5 percent of the vote in the 2013 elections, just shy of the threshold needed to enter parliament, but they won seven
seats in the EU parliament in 2014. The press labeled them as being to the right of the CDU, a characterization that suited them just fine. It was the first time in thirty years that a new party had done so well in Germany.
But no sooner had the AfD celebrated its first victories, than it began to change. All the voters for the failed right-wing parties of years past—and some who supported even more extreme movements—“were still around,” says Schmidt. “Those who didn’t make it in other parties saw it as another chance … and they used our structure of the AfD to hijack it from within.”
All of a sudden, “more lunatics and weirdos and people with strange ideas and conspiracy theorists joined our ranks,” he tells me. One of them was Björn Höcke, the AfD leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, who has called the Berlin Holocaust Memorial a “monument of shame.” “When I hear Höcke,” Schmidt says, “I think it’s 1937 again. Like Goebbels in the Reichstag.”55
At the same time, as Schmidt puts it delicately, “more reasonable people started to leave the party.” He estimates that about six thousand members who shared his views left and about ten thousand with more extreme views, especially on immigration, joined the AfD. “People joined who were no longer tolerable. I left mentally in mid-2014,” says Schmidt wistfully. “I physically left at the end of 2014.”56
Robin Alexander sums up the AfD’s early program as “Let it be 1985 again,” but they were also tapping into something deeper. “I think more Germans had right-wing views than dared to express them … because the right-wing parties were always super horrible, and you have to be an absolute asshole to vote for the NPD,” says Alexander. But if you felt uncomfortable, now you had an address to turn to. “Bernd Lucke wasn’t a Nazi. He was a conservative professor. He was okay. He was not saying, ‘Invade Poland.’” But then once you had this respectable new force, argues Alexander, “all the right-wingers, all the madmen, they filled their ranks.”57
Frauke Petry emerged as a key figure in 2015 and was, as Schmidt recalls, more moderate at the beginning. But she quickly saw her chance and “like a chameleon” adopted a strident anti-immigration position. Others also reinforced the right flank of the party, and in a showdown in mid-2015, before the refugee crisis arrived on Germany’s borders, they defeated Lucke 62 percent to 38 percent at a party congress. The founder of the party was forced to leave.58
The AfD has performed the best in the east. Schmidt believes that the party has special appeal in places like Dresden, where many people feel they have been on the losing end of Germany’s boom. “People who were party officials in East Germany are sitting at home twiddling their thumbs. They’re easy prey,” says Schmidt. Also, Dresden is famous for being cut off from all Western media during the Cold War, since television and radio signals didn’t reach the city. It became known as the “valley of the ignorant,” which was one explanation for its staunch support for the DDR—the old East Germany—until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The city that was once the epicentre of true believers in the DDR is now the home of PEGIDA. It’s the states with the fewest refugees where the fear is greatest, says Schmidt. “Because you don’t know anybody, you’re more fearful,” he argues.
Schmidt himself is no cheerleader for Merkel’s refugee policy. Like Spahn and Lengsfeld, he mocks the “national euphoria of the business community,” which subsided quickly, and he worries about Germans being crowded out of affordable housing or having their wages undercut by new arrivals. Still, he thinks the AfD is selling a false bill of goods. “It’s like Trump—build a wall. It’s simplistic.” They have called for closing mosques and using live ammunition at the border if masses of people try to cross again. “They know very well that they’ll never get it, but it’s popular to say so,” he argues. “And by that, you fuel hatred toward foreigners.”59
As Schmidt and others from the party’s early days jumped ship, Alexander Gauland stayed on board as the party swung right and he became its deputy leader—and one of its top two candidates in the 2017 election. The AfD’s rise “started with the opening of the border by Angela Merkel, and the total uncontrolled influx of totally different people who didn’t belong to the European culture, who didn’t belong to the Christian faith,” says Gauland, a bald seventy-six-year-old who peppers his answers with an encyclopedic knowledge of postwar German politics and occasional references to Bismarck.
He was a loyal member of the CDU for forty years. Merkel, he says angrily, has moved the party steadily toward the centre to the point where “the party has no longer a conservative wing, it has no real liberal wing, it has nothing.” The final straw for Gauland was the government’s 2010 decision “to rescue Greece, and to keep the euro, whatever it costs.” He left the party after the first Greek bailout agreement and began to form the AfD with Schmidt, Lucke, and others.
By September 2015, many voters seemed to be following him, and they were fleeing parties across the political spectrum. “They are coming from CDU, from the Left Party, from formerly nonvoters. A lot of protest voters, and we have a lot of voters from the Social Democratic Party,” he says, clearly satisfied that some on the left who share the Islamophobic Social Democrat Thilo Sarrazin’s views are now voting for the AfD. “It’s all around.”60
As Gauland tells it, they are people who feel that the CDU’s move to the centre has left them without a voice in parliament. As the willkommenskultur of late 2015 reached its pinnacle, there was, he says, a large group of people who wanted nothing to do with it. “We took up the refugee crisis … because all other parties said refugees welcome, and let’s say half of the German people said, ‘No, we don’t welcome refugees.’”
Some of them joined PEGIDA marches; others kept their views to themselves or around the dinner table—people who no longer feel anyone in parliament speaks for them, because, according to Gauland, “all parties have the same policy.” With the only genuine opposition to Merkel’s policy coming from within her own party and from the CSU in Bavaria, there wasn’t a genuine public debate. “That’s the real problem of German democracy. There is no real opposition,” he complains. “The left and the Greens have the same idea about securing Europe with much German money and a refugees-welcome policy.”61
Gauland is adamant that Germany isn’t learning the lessons of the 1970s. He argues that the country “wanted a workforce, and suddenly we had a new society.” Now there is a massive new influx at a time when the country still hasn’t solved the problems of the last wave, he says, “and now you bring in a lot of new immigrants. Often these are young Muslim men, and it is very difficult to integrate them in society.” He is dismissive of the economic arguments made in favor of welcoming refugees. If there is a labour shortage, he says, why not find native Germans who speak the language to fill the jobs?
Gauland makes it clear that he believes Germany is not destined to become a melting pot like America, and he hasn’t been shy about expressing his antiquated and politically incorrect views. He famously declared in an interview that most Germans wouldn’t want to live next door to Jérôme Boateng, a half-Ghanaian soccer player who is a star of the beloved German national team. The next day, lawmakers from other parties showed up in the chamber wearing Boateng jerseys.62
“The United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, they are immigration societies. Germany is not an immigration society,” declares Gauland. “We have immigration, but the majority of the German people is not interested in this immigration. They get used to it, yes, but they would prefer otherwise if they could choose.” He also insists that Muslims pose a unique challenge compared to other immigrants, a problem he attributes to Islam never having undergone a reformation as Christianity did. “It is only the Muslims that can’t separate the state and the religion, or they don’t do it.” He concedes that Christianity once had the same problem but credits Martin Luther with solving it.
As for becoming the face of the far right, a concept that evokes greater fears in Germany than elsewhere, Gauland is adamant that his party ha
sn’t been infiltrated by neo-Nazis and skinheads. He stresses that the AfD is “not the parliamentary arm of PEGIDA,” although he does acknowledge that “a lot of people who march with PEGIDA in Dresden are people who could be members, or friends, or voters of the AfD.”63
What is clear is that no matter how well the AfD performs in the 2017 election—with the traditionalist Gauland and the lesbian Weidel as the joint leaders of the party’s list—it will not seek to govern in a coalition. Maybe in ten or twenty years, the AfD could join a coalition, but doing so now, Gauland explains, “would be disastrous, because the people would call it treason.” He points to the record of small parties in West Germany who joined coalitions. “All these parties have been destroyed by the CDU. They have been sucked up …forgotten.” For a small party, it’s far better to remain in opposition, he insists.
As in Denmark and Holland, winning power is not necessarily the prime objective. The far right doesn’t want to take the reins of government, lest it be blamed for failure. Shouting from the sidelines without taking political responsibility is a far less risky proposition.
The immediate goal is to influence and drive debate. Gauland clearly derives great satisfaction from the way that his party has changed the national discourse about refugees. He proudly cites a Green Party mayor in the town of Tübingen who broke with party orthodoxy and called for tougher border security. “It has totally changed; the discussion has totally changed. This is what we have done.”64
16
CAMP OF THE SAINTS AT THE WHITE HOUSE
In the heart of bucolic Languedoc wine country in southwest France, the Front National has a sympathizer in City Hall. Mayor Robert Ménard is an eager rabble-rouser. From his perch at the Béziers town hall festooned with tricolours, he holds forth on the failures of the French left and explains why he went from being a Trotskyist radical to the country’s best-known right-wing mayor.
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