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News and Comment
Fear and Hatred of Muslim Immigrants are Fuelling a Return of Nationalist Politics to Germany
News:
According to Time on the 13th of March, 2016, “The nationalist party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, entered all three legislatures in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt after campaigning against Merkel’s liberal migrant policy.”
Comment:
The success of this party has been built upon fear. Following the arrival in Germany last year of 1.1 million Muslim asylum seekers, the flames of nationalist xenophobia have been fanned by the AfD, which has campaigned upon a promise to reverse Germany’s acceptance of asylum seekers. The AfD was established in 2013 as a platform for opposing the euro currency, and it attracted many Germans by its promise to protect them and their economy against the unsteady southern EU countries that were at risk of debt default. Since then, the massive wave of Muslim immigration driven by the destruction of Syria at the hands of Bashar the butcher has replaced the former ‘euro crisis’ as the biggest popular concern for the people of the whole the European continent from east to west.
For the first time since Hitler’s Nazi party was driven out of Germany, a fascist political agenda has come out from the shadows to become a major force in mainstream politics and it joins the ranks of other anti-immigrant movements and parties in France and throughout Europe. The anti-immigrant agenda is a typical agenda for extreme nationalist parties that are starved of the oxygen of fear in the absence of the perceived threat of ‘other’ non-national groupings taking over the nation. Built upon fear, such political movements rise to power in times of crisis and sell cheap and easy solutions that are popular with the majority.
Democracy has no safeguard against such movements, and the normal course of democracy is to lurch from crisis to crisis with experimental solutions offered by opposing parties. The greater the fear, the more extreme are the solutions. Hitler, brought the murderous so-called final solution last time Germany feared that the purity of the German blood-line was under threat, and the immigration issue promises to be fertile ground for more of this type of nationalist democracy. Indeed, the AfD has already suggested that “police may have to shoot at migrants to stop them from entering the country,” according to a German news outlet: The Local de.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Dr. Abdullah Robin