At the start of September, I was travelling through Austria and Germany. Two episodes within half an hour or each other made me think “I’ve never seen quite such open displays of racism in England”. They made the recent electoral gains of the far right more comprehensible. 

The first was on the platform at Frankfurt station. A young African man asked me to point him in the right direction for his train. I hadn’t a clue and suggested he ask the woman in the station staff uniform who was standing a few feet from us. He indicated that he’d tried that and when she noticed we were talking about her she went on a bit of a rant which even with my very poor German I understood to mean something along the lines of “these bloody foreigners coming here not even speaking bloody German”. You don’t need to be fluent in a language to understand an angry racist. It was even more shocking because Frankfurt is a prosperous, multi-cultural city, not some deindustrialised backwater. 

The second was about fifteen minutes later on the train. An affluent looking white man in Pierre Cardin socks shouted at a young black woman, and I mean really shouted, to put in earphones if she wanted to continue having a conversation on her phone. You can never be 100% certain, but I doubt he would have spoken to a white person that aggressively. 

Germany has changed a lot since I used to go there in the late 80s and early 90s and election results were essentially battles between the Christian Democrats and SPD.  The far right was tiny, marginal and assumed to be consigned to history. The Greens were emerging as a significant national party. 

When the Berlin Wall came down I was very much persuaded by the view that “The defiant masses of the GDR are the first German generation largely liberated from nationalism and militarism, deeply addicted to nonviolence, and hating the traditions of the Reich, of fascism, of Prussia.” A friend who had a more pessimistic assessment about an impending capitalist takeover turned out to be more right than Ernest Mandel.  

Brandenburg – a damned close run thing

The German SPD with 30.9% of the vote narrowly beat the neo-fascist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the state of Brandenburg in last weekend’s election. This partly seems to have come at the cost of the obliteration of the Greens, but the AfD’s 29% of the vote combined with 12% for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), an outfit which manages to combine neo-Nazi views on migration with Stalinist economics, does amount to a worrying result. It is a rejection of the existing political class both on the basis of their economics and perceived social liberalism by voters who retain much of the conservatism of the GDR.  

The movement in support of the Palestinians which has helped radicalise people in the US and Britain is being battered off the streets by the German state. With an utter absence of irony, the city hall in Munich is flying a massive Israeli flag alongside a banner proclaiming that the city is a member of the Mayors for Peace scheme. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it.  

Unsurprisingly, conventional opinion advises “reinforcing Europe’s external borders, deporting failed asylum-seekers” which is the same as doing what the AfD want. The party is now polling at about 18% of the national vote and it it now easy to imagine a situation in a few years where the heirs of German fascism emulate the success of their Italian counterparts.