Thousands join anti-far right protest in Berlin last week (Pic: Guy Smallman)
A vicious hatred of migrants is casting a long shadow over Sunday’s general election in Germany.
There is a real danger that the fascist and mainstream right will emerge as the winners.
The far right AfD party is polling around 22 percent, just behind the neoliberal CDU/CSU on 30 percent. Both are a long way ahead of the Labour-like SPD, which has just 17 percent and the Greens on 13 percent.
In the scramble for votes, all the main political parties, including the Greens, have engaged in a bidding war to see who can be more racist.
A TV debate between the CDU and SPD leaders Friedrich Merz and Olaf Scholz last week descended into a war of words over who was “tougher on migrants”. Whichever combination of parties emerges as a governing coalition, another big crackdown on immigration will be the result.
The AfD is jubilant. It spent the election campaign handing out mock tickets, which it said were for migrants to use to travel back to the “safe countries” they had come from. They were date-stamped Sunday 23 February—election day.
The fascists have used a number of knife and car attacks on the public recently to ratchet up tensions. They proclaim that only the AfD is prepared to take the “tough action” necessary to stop them.
After an Afghan asylum seeker ploughed a car into a union demonstration in Munich last week, the party’s leader, Alice Weidel, posted on X, “Is this supposed to go on forever? Migration turnaround now!”
And the leaders of the CDU and SPD followed. Merz said, “Something has to change in Germany,” and Scholz wrote the driver must “be punished, and he must leave the country.”
This demand to “send back foreign criminals” has been central to the right wing’s campaign.
Thankfully, a large number of Germans reject this racist consensus. Last weekend again saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets against racism and the far right. There were massive protests in Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Dusseldorf and other cities. And the anti-racist spirit was alive on last week’s picket lines of striking public sector workers too.
The AfD and CDU are exploiting last week’s Munich attack. Striking nurse Silvia Habekost, told Socialist Worker, “I am furious. Whenever any crime is committed by a refugee, they use this as an excuse to talk about changing migrant legislation. They are using this because of the election. They don’t feel any empathy with the victims. The AfD wants to get rid of worker’s rights, they want to divide society, solidarity is something they have no understanding of.”
Silvia is right. And that’s why, irrespective of the election result, the vast and militant movement against fascism in Germany must stay on the streets.
Racism first developed as a justification for enslavement
