Frauke Petry of AfD leaves a press conference unexpectedly announcing that she won't become a member of the AfD in the Bundestag on the day after the elections, September 25, 2017. NurPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved.It’s been a funny day in
Düsseldorf. The day after an election always feels odd, but this was something
different. After Brexit happened, and again after Trump, the city woke up in
shock. Last year, on the mornings of June 9 and November 9, everybody at the
tram stop was glued to their phones. In fact, public transport on those days
was eerily quiet throughout – as though the inhabitants of this prosperous,
cosmopolitain city forty minutes down the motorway from Holland and a four hour
train-ride from Paris had reached an unspoken decision to tread gently, aware
that the ground underneath their feet might not be as solid as they’d always
supposed.
I’d been expecting September
25 2017 to have a similar hushed quality, but the inner-city rail-link I use to
get my protesting toddlers to nursery was buzzing. Nobody seemed to be looking
at their phones and nobody – thank goodness – seemed to pay any attention to
the aforementioned toddlers. Instead, snatches of feverish conversations – some
anxious, some excited – kept spilling over the seats with one word raw and ugly
amongst them: AfD.
Germany’s far-right
immigration party only (only!) got eight percent of the vote in Düsseldorf –
five percent below the national average. The local paper, The Rheinische Post,
is even claiming that when its reporter showed up to the party’s modest after
party, only a dozen or so supporters were there. Contrast that with those
ecstatic scenes from Saxony, where the AfD scooped up nearly thirty percent of
the vote, and you could forgive Düsseldorf for thinking it had got off lightly.
Still, everybody knows that something has changed – even here.
You can’t seriously spend
eight weeks of your life shopping, working and socialising under posters and
giant roadside billboards demanding “more safety for our wives and daughters!”
without realising that even Düsseldorf – a city where, until recently, a
digital clock counted down the days since it went “debt free” – is not going to
be unscathed by the wave of fear and resentment which is unfurling over the
country, the continent, and the world.
Does that sound melodramatic?
Well, I’ve been living under those posters too. One of them is a picture of a
typical working-class tenement block with a “no-go” sign in the foreground.
Underneath, the words: “if you see this sign, it’s already too late.” Another
is a soft-focus shot of young black men doing nothing-very-much, with the words
“end asylum cheating now!” in big, bold letters across the middle. I could go
on.
I finally get the toddlers to
their nursery. It’s a wonderful place, as I gushingly tell the bemused-looking
nursery teachers when I hand my sticky little treasures over to them. It’s a
city-funded institution, one of many set up in recent years as part of
Germany’s great “nursery expansion” scheme. The friendly-looking building with
the multi-lingual “welcome” signs on the door is hidden away at the end of a cul-de-sac
dominated by a sprawling, graffiti-covered warehouse. This is one of
Düsseldorf’s poorest boroughs – solidly working class with a high immigrant
population. At the last count, there were seventeen different nationalities
represented in the nursery including a not-inconsiderable number of children
from Syrian refugee families. Everyone gets along brilliantly.
At 3 and 18 months
respectively, my kids can look forward to several more years of this utopic
little social microcosm. At 6, they’ll enter primary school where, at the age
of ten, their teacher will then decide whether or not to recommend them for a
grammar school where they’ll be able to do the equivalent of A-levels, or one
of two types of vocational schools where they won’t. Unsurprisingly, this
highly subjective system leads to de-facto social segregation, with grammar
schools overwhelmingly populated by the children of white, middle-class
Germans.
I once heard the Münster-based
sociologist Andreas Kemper give a talk in which he described this process as a
“systematic weeding out of the working class” and the key factor in the growth
of the AfD. Indeed, Sunday’s election data confirms that education is a more
reliable predictor of AfD support than income, with the immigrant-baiting party
netting 17 percent of votes amongst people who left school with the equivalent
of GCSEs, but only 7 percent amongst voters with university degrees.
On the way back from the
nursery, I pass forlorn-looking SPD posters. The owl-like face of Martin Schulz
beams down from them, promising “the time is now”. It was no-doubt conceived in
a spirit of hope back in the days (as recent as this spring) when that slogan
sounded like a realistic promise of a Labour-led government rather than – at
best – hollow mockery and – at worst – sinister menace. It occurs to me that I
know the SPD organiser who probably put them up: he’s a father at the nursery.
I bite back the urge to ring him there and then and demand an immediate
Corbyn-style reboot of the German Labour Party, starting right here, right now,
this minute.
To be fair, it may yet be that
Martin Schulz himself is thinking along those lines (although I doubt he’ll
choose Düsseldorf as his launchpad). He is, at least, determined to lead the party into opposition
rather than risk a further hollowing out of politics via another “big
coalition” with Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Had he done that, the AfD’s 94
freshly-minted MPs would have found themselves leaders of the opposition and
that, in this of all parliaments, is a terrifying thought.
"It’s a matter of the calendar, not heroism.”
By the time I get home again,
the AfD’s telegenic leader, Frauke Petry, has announced that she will be
leaving the AfD caucus, which, she implies, has become too rightwing for her.
The German and international
media are relieved: 2017 – so the reasoning now goes – was the AfD’s
Austerlitz: a high-point from which, with a bit of economic luck, it may never
recover. It’s true that a split between the AfD’s extreme right and the
bourgeois neoliberal wing headed by Petry and her partner Markus Pretzell seems
inevitable. But splitting is what cells do before they mutate, and we’ve seen
the AfD mutate before. Ironically, it was Petry herself who oversaw the first
mutation: transforming what was basically a small-time anti-Euro party into a populist
anti-immigration party capable of entering into one regional parliament after
another, like a stack of dominoes. Even before the 2017 election, however,
Petry had been sidelined, with the Holocaust-relativising lawyer Alexander
Garland and the climate change-denying tax exile Alice Weidel heading the
national nominations list.
In the wings wait an even more
unsavoury cast of ghouls, from Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, who moved his Halle
office into the building which houses the headquarters of the white-supremecist
Identitarian movement to the 77 year old Wilhelm von Gottberg, who described
the Holocaust as a “myth” used to oppress Germany with a “Jewish truth” about
the past.
The one who really frightens
me though is Björn Höcke, the former history teacher who made headlines back in
January when he called for a 180 degree u-turn in the way in which the
Holocaust is remembered. Höcke’s known to be quick to reach for his lawyers,
but to date he’s still made no attempt to sue sociologist Andreas Kemper, who’s
made a compelling case linking him to the pseudonym “Landolf Ladig”, under
which he is thought to written openly fascist opinion pieces in
neo-Nazi publications. “Höcke, Höcke, Höcke” they shout at AfD rallies… and
sometimes even “Heil, Höcke”.
So yes, as German political
heavy-weight Sigmar Gabriel put it, for the first time since 1945, Nazis are
entering the German parliament. Worse than that, they’re entering it as the
third strongest party. And yes, we should all be very scared.
Scared, but not
paralysed. That’s why – on balance – I think I’d take Monday’s feverish buzz of
unsettling conversations over the eery quiet of post-Brexit/Trump travel.
There’s an Eric Kästner quotation doing the rounds on German social media at
the moment: “the events of 1933 to 1945 should have been fought by 1928 at the
latest. After that, it was too late. You mustn’t wait until the fight for
freedom has become treason. You mustn’t wait until the snowball has become an
avalanche…. it’s a matter of the calendar, not heroism.”