AfD sets record with racism: Winner of hate speech

Berlin Erfurt | taz | After the election campaign is before the election campaign for the authoritarian-nationalist AfD: Alice Weidel claimed on election night that her hand was outstretched towards the Union. But as so often, she did not answer how she intended to resolve substantive differences with the Union: Would she support a new special fund for the rearmament of the Bundeswehr?

She did not give a long, verbose answer: after radical market ideological explanations of why a state should not take on debt, she quickly returned to "open borders", an alleged "reign of injustice" and a watered-down debt brake, which the SPD would threaten to implement under CDU Chancellor Merz. She, on the other hand, wanted to "sweep through with an iron broom". At the federal press conference the day after the election, at least one thing quickly became clear: fundamental opposition remains.

Even the disappointed question from the far -right-leaning Schwäbische Zeitung about how she was going to keep AfD voters on board without government responsibility was answered by Weidel with media criticism of alleged “left-wing smear campaigns” and the “tax-financed mainstream press”.

And when questions about the allegedly illegal 2.35 million euro donation from the alleged real donor Henning Conle became uncomfortable, Weidel completely avoided the issue and had her co-party leader Tino Chrupalla deny any knowledge of irregularities with platitudes. She also praised the authoritarian restructuring of the US state by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and his alleged "efficiency authority": "We need something like that too!"

Otherwise, the AfD is primarily pushing ahead with its project of "destroying the CDU": the co-spokespersons continued to attack the firewall - one should not ignore "the will of the voters" - while they themselves ignored the fact that in post-election polls, even in the East, a majority of voters fundamentally reject AfD participation in government. Nevertheless, Chrupalla called for the resignation of the heads of government in the East because they had formed "governments against and without the people".

Even though the AfD is still a long way from assuming government responsibility, the party received a significant boost to normalization in the federal election: the vote doubled from 10.4 to 20.8 percent, a record result. A total of 10.3 million Germans voted for the AfD.

The results in the East, where extreme right-wing hegemony already prevails in large parts of the country, are particularly painful for democrats. The AfD's result in Thuringia is 38.6 percent. The AfD received similar results in Saxony (37.3 percent), Saxony-Anhalt (37.1 percent), Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (35 percent) and Brandenburg (32.1 percent).

The AfD has won direct mandates in 46 constituencies. 45 of these are in eastern German states, one in East Berlin. In the 2021 federal election, it won 16 direct mandates. It won all of this despite ongoing radicalization: the patron of the AfD's radicalization, 84-year-old Alexander Gauland, is moving directly into Chemnitz, as is the ultra-radical SS apologist and dictator friend Maximilian Krah in the Chemnitz area.

But the AfD also won constituencies in the west for the first time : in Gelsenkirchen it was just ahead of the SPD with 24.7 percent, and in Kaiserslautern it beat the CDU with 25.9 percent. According to the research group Wahlen, the much-quoted "protest" was only decisive for 29 percent of voters in their decision to vote for the AfD, while 68 percent voted for the AfD because of its content - and with the expulsion euphemism "remigration" this was more radical than ever before in this election campaign.

The party benefited above all from the general uncertainty: the economic crisis, the collapse of the traffic light government, the debate on migration that was disconnected from facts, so that racism in society as a whole became the decisive factor in the election . The AfD was able to benefit most from the mobilization of non-voters, but it also gained from the CDU/CSU, the FDP and the SPD.

The bottom line is that there is a tangible and pan-German crisis of democracy, which is reflected in an extreme right-wing parliamentary group in the Bundestag: in the last legislative period, the AfD members of the Bundestag already employed numerous right-wing extremists.

Now the parliamentary group is growing from 82 to 152 MPs, who will work loudly and obstructively on the authoritarian restructuring of liberal democracy. It is hardly a consolation that the AfD narrowly missed the quorum of 25 percent of Bundestag seats required for investigative committees.