SONNEBERG, Germany (AP) — Mike Knoth is beyond thrilled that the candidate of a far-right populist party recently won county administration in his hometown in rural eastern Germany for the first time. since the Nazi era.
The gardener despises the established parties of the country, he does not trust the media and he finds that there are too many migrants in the country. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, it hopes will improve whatever is wrong with it in Sonneberg in southeastern Thuringia.
“I think the fact that so many people voted for Alternative for Germany has already given it legitimacy,” Knoth, 50, said in an interview this week as he walked his dog in the main deserted shopping street in the city.
But some Sonneberg residents were unconvinced by the AfD’s nationalist and anti-democratic rhetoric.
Margret Sturm, an optometrist whose family has been selling glasses for nearly 60 years in Sonneberg, expressed concern over the AfD victory in an interview with a state-run television channel.
“I told them that I don’t think it’s right to vote for the AfD. And anyone who votes for the AfD should know that they have the Nazis behind them,” Sturm told The Associated Press in an interview at his outlet.
Sturm can barely fathom what happened after the interview aired last week.
“We got hate mail, threatening phone calls, every minute. We were insulted by people we don’t even know, who don’t know us, who don’t know the job.
The threats were so relentless that Sturm’s husband installed surveillance cameras inside the store.
But Sturm, 60, said she wouldn’t let anyone shut her up.
“People here are afraid to take a stand against the AfD and that worries us even more than anything else.”
She said other residents who oppose the AfD no longer want to voice their criticism openly.
“This is exactly the kind of bullying that essentially results from the machinery of hate and incitement and then unfortunately spreads. And that really worries me,” Stephan Kramer, the head of Thuringia’s national domestic intelligence agency, told the AP at his office in the state capital, Erfurt.
Kramer has warned for years that the Thuringian branch of the AfD was particularly radical and placed it under official scrutiny more than two years ago as a “confirmed far-right” group.
It doesn’t bother Knoth that the AfD is under scrutiny by Thuringia’s national intelligence agency for its close ties to far-right extremists.
“He was democratically elected, and I don’t find anything offensive in that,” he said.
Knoth expects the AfD to take a policing approach, curb immigration and make Germany safe.
Fighting migration or fighting crime are hardly topics that belong in the job description of a local county administrator, but the AfD’s Robert Sesselmann campaign on these themes has proven successful.
The second round of elections in Sonneberg County last month pitted Sesselmann against centre-right rival Jürgen Köpper. Official figures showed Sesselmann won 52.8% to 47.2%.
Sonneberg has a relatively small population of 56,800, but this victory was a symbolic milestone for the AfD.
Unemployed Radoslaw Schneider, 39, also expects things to improve now that Sesselmann is in charge. He said the AfD ‘believes something needs to be done for Germans too’, and that foreigners should no longer get preferential treatment – which will happen now with the AfD in power, he thinks. -he.
Alternative for Germany first entered the national parliament in 2017 following an anti-migrant campaign in response to a massive influx of refugees into Europe.
The decade-old party has reached record highs nationwide with between 18% and 20% support.
Centre-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition with the Green Greens and pro-business Free Democrats, meanwhile, faces strong headwinds over high immigration, a plan to replace millions of home heating systems and a reputation for infighting, while inflation remains high.
AfD leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has taken revisionist views on Germany’s Nazi past. In 2018 he called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame” and called on Germany to take a “180 degree turnaround” in how it remembers its past.
In the early 1930s, Thuringia was one of the first power bases of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party.
These days, the AfD caters particularly to residents of formerly communist and less prosperous eastern states, such as Thuringia.
The coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine and the influx of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees into Germany have also contributed to the AfD’s success, said Katharina König-Preuss, a left-wing party MP in Thuringia, during an interview in the state legislature. in Erfurt.
The party has blamed many problems on immigrants or on the national government, she said.
“I would say that a lot of these racist narratives, which do not correspond to reality at all, have now spread to a larger part of the East German population,” said König-Preuss, who is the one of the strongest critics. of the AfD and received several death threats.
Scholz tried to downplay the recent rise of far-right populists.
“Germany has been a strong democracy for a long time now, since World War II,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin last week after being asked what he was doing to prevent a resurgence of fascism 77 years after the disappearance. of Hitler.
It was Germany’s Nazi regime, which led to the murder of 6 million European Jews and others, and more than 60 million deaths during World War II, that gave Kramer sleepless nights.
“When I look at this development in Germany, the country where industrial mass murder has been brought to perfection, then it’s different from all other countries,” he said.
In autumn 2024 there will be regional elections in Thuringia. The AfD leads in the polls with more than 30%.
If the AfD, which is currently still shunned by all other mainstream parties in Germany, becomes part of the state government, then Kramer, who is Jewish, will leave the country with his family.
“We have already seen in history where this can lead,” he said. “And I must honestly confess that I have no desire to wait for that to happen again.”