When Sabina Tonke joined the recent demonstrations in Berlin against Germany's far-right party, it was the first time she had hoped that the rise of extremist power in her country could be stopped.
Tonke, 59, watched the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) with unease. But when she heard about the plan to deport millions of people, she saw it as a call to action.
"I never thought that such inhumane ideas could become popular again in Germany. I thought we had learned the lessons of the past," she told the Associated Press.
Many Germans believe their country has become immune to nationalism and claims of racial superiority after confronting the horrors of the Nazi past through education and anti-persecution laws. However, they are wrong.
If the elections were held today, the AfD would be the second largest party in that country, according to the AP agency, referring to public opinion surveys. But the polls camouflage an important divide: AfD has disproportionate support in former communist and less-progressive German states.
After the fall of communism in 1989 and the unification of East and West Germany a year later, many in the five eastern provinces lost not only their jobs but also their collective past, leaving them disoriented and helpless in the capitalist system.
AfD's success is due to anger over inflation and, above all, the growth of immigration. As AP reminds, the European Union received 1,1 million asylum applications in 2023, which is the highest number since 2015. Germany received by far the largest number of applications - over 300 - mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Turkey. The country also received over a million Ukrainian refugees displaced by the Russian invasion.
Lessons from the Second World War
After 1945, West Germans grew up with the motto that "never again" should there be a dictatorship on German soil. West German leaders visited Israel and apologized to the countries occupied by the Nazis, while school children toured concentration camps and Holocaust memorial centers.
However, in the east, a self-proclaimed anti-fascist society, young people also went to concentration camps, but the focus of the lesson was not guilt. Instead, the lessons emphasized that they were descendants of Nazi victims.
Tonke, who works at the Berlin waterworks, grew up in Bavaria, which was part of West Germany before reunification in 1990. She told the AP that she didn't talk much with her grandparents — the Nazi generation — about what happened during the Third Reich. but that at school she learned about Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the Holocaust.
Today, the far right uses similar tactics, using people's fears to gain their trust and votes, she said. "I understand that many people are exhausted by all these crises - the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, numerous migrants, inflation - and that they are afraid that it will get worse," said Tonke. "However, the solutions offered by the AfD will not solve any of these problems".
According to surveys, the AfD is the leading party in the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, with around 35 percent support in each. Both of these states are holding elections this fall, along with the eastern state of Brandenburg where the AfD is also expected to do well.
The AfD is particularly attractive to men - around two-thirds of their voters are men - and increasingly to young voters. In the most recent regional elections in Hesse and Bavaria in October, the AfD made significant gains among voters aged 24 and under.
This party uses the Internet and social networks much more skillfully than its rivals to send its message to young people. At the same time, AfD officials often avoid talking to mainstream media reporters and sometimes do not issue credentials to journalists they deem too critical for their party conventions.
That party benefited from voters' deep dissatisfaction with Chancellor Olaf Solca. His government came to power more than two years ago with a progressive, modern agenda, but is now seen by many as dysfunctional and incompetent.
The AfD branch in Thuringia is particularly radical, and the domestic intelligence service placed it under official surveillance four years ago as a "proven right-wing extremist" group.
AfD leader in Thuringia, Bjern Huke, has repeatedly expressed revisionist views on Germany's Nazi past. He called the 2018 Holocaust memorial in Berlin a "monument of shame" and called on Germany to make a "180-degree" turn in the way it remembers its past.
"AfD is a nationalist party, and nationalists want to be proud of their history. And anyone who wants to be proud of German history must of course minimize and even deny the shame of Nazi crimes in order to be able to tell the story of national greatness," he said. is for the American agency Jens-Christian Wagner, historian and director of the Buchenwald Memorial Center, a former concentration camp in Thuringia, where the Nazis killed over 56 people.
In recent months, there has been a significant increase in attacks on the former concentration camp. Wagner says the reason for this is the "revisionist, anti-Semitic and racist slogans" promoted by the AfD.
A wake-up call
Since January, a wave of far-right protests has swept Germany, sparked by reports that far-right extremists have met to discuss deporting millions of immigrants, including those with German citizenship.
AfD members attended the meeting, along with Martin Sellner, a convicted extremist from Austria who received donations and communicated with Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarant before the two mass murders he committed in 2019.
The meeting, held in November, bore an eerie resemblance to the Wannsee Conference, when the Nazis agreed on the so-called the "final solution" - which led to the murder of 6 million Jews.
Just as in the winter of 1942, when senior Nazi officials met secretly in a lakeside villa outside Berlin, this more recent meeting was also held in secret in a villa not far from the German capital.
AfD leaders tried to distance themselves from the meeting, saying the party had no organizational or financial ties to the event, was not responsible for what was discussed there and that the members who attended there were solely on their own behalf.
The head of the AFD's parliamentary committee, Bernd Bauman, complained that his party was facing a "sinister campaign by politicians and journalists from the failed left-green class". "Small private debating clubs have been exaggerated into secret meetings that represent a general danger," he said.
Reacting to reports of the meeting, millions of Germans took to the streets to protest, attend events with slogans such as "Never again is now", "Against hatred" and "Defending democracy".
Demonstrations in cities such as Berlin, Munich, Hamburg or Dusseldorf attracted hundreds of thousands of participants - so much so that the authorities had to stop some marches early due to security fears due to crowded streets.
People also protested in smaller towns and even organized weekly vigils in their neighborhoods to express their displeasure at the growing support for far-right populism in the election.
More than 2,4 million people have so far attended anti-AfD protests that began in mid-January, Germany's interior ministry said. The organizers of the demonstration estimate that 3,6 million people participated.
Among them was Tonke, who went to two pro-democracy rallies in Berlin, relieved that, as she says, "the country is waking up." "I no longer have the feeling of powerlessness that I had in the past years when I watched the rise and success of the AfD," she said, adding that the government must do more. "The government must find a solution to the migration crisis, otherwise the AfD will continue to exploit the issue for its own purposes and become even more powerful," she said.
Earlier waves of protests against anti-Islamism and the anti-migration movement Pegida eventually ran out of energy, although they were not as large as the movement against the AfD.
Still, the AfD remains popular. In December, it marked another milestone when, for the first time, their candidate won the mayoral election in a medium-sized city: Pirna in Saxony.
Now that party has its eyes on the elections for the European Parliament in June. If Tonke and other protesters want to suppress the growth of the extreme right, they will have to convince their compatriots not only to protest, but to vote in large numbers, concludes AP.
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