In online forums members discussed their fantasies. These were about how they would kick all the foreigners out of Germany. They euphemistically called it a “remigration” master plan and it really reminded everybody of – you guessed it – the Nazis.
That’s why almost every weekend since late January there have been huge demonstrations. Close to 1.4 million people attended the first round. The streets of Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and others were alive with the sound of slogans such as “we hate Nazis” and “no tolerance for intolerance”.
The shouting was accompanied by the dull thunder of millions of Germans patting themselves on the back. The AfD is still the second-most-popular party in the land but it is looking a little worse in the latest surveys. Locals here feel like they’ve saved democracy, everything is fine, and they can now go back to recycling plastic and wearing socks with Birkenstocks.
But there’s a problem. The cynical among us might argue that big demonstrations are, by their very nature, stupid. After all, everyone gathers under one banner and that can never cover the ever-changing ebb and flow of opinions and attitudes flushing through the shuffling human throng.
So you may get some folk at a protest who will say – as one German software billionaire recently did – that, oh yes, they’re very concerned about the rise of far-right racists but oh, also really worried about all the Arabs in Berlin. And without a trace of irony.
Some people seem to believe they need only point out the bad guys in the other corner to win a pro-democracy medal. But, as Will Shakespeare might say, those fools protesting the far right doth think they are wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool, and that, at the wrong place and the wrong time, he, too, is just as capable of prejudice as the next idiot.
In fact, many of the politicians speechifying at the demonstrations have been as guilty of biased rhetoric as the wannabe fascists they despise. Green party co-leader and vice-chancellor of Germany Robert Habeck recently said that if German Muslims didn’t behave the way he wanted, “the state” might not be able to offer them protection if things got rough.
Whenever there’s a problem – not enough doctors, too many criminals – the leader of the Christian Democrats, Friedrich Merz, likes to bring up deportation. “Just deport them all,” he regularly suggests, without pausing to ask if the people making trouble might actually be German. The junior party in Germany’s coalition government is currently blocking the modernisation of the country’s anti-discrimination laws. The neoliberal Free Democrats think the changes are too “woke” for the country’s own good. But as a coalition of civil society groups wrote in an open letter in mid-February, referring to political grandstanding at the pro-democracy protests, “making speeches on Sunday is not enough”.
Recently, the newspaper Die Zeit tried to explain why the anti-AfD protests have been so big and impactful. It’s the shock, wrote Nils Boeing, co-founder of a network of organisations opposed to far-right ideologies.
Germans “were on guard against classic fascists”, he argued. “That’s why the shock is so deep … most people were looking in the wrong direction.”
Yes, it is delightful that so many people here see far-right fascism as the threat it clearly is. But, at the risk of repeating the past, there’s also another direction they should be looking into a little more, and that’s the mirror.
