Mike Knoth is more than thrilled that a far-right populist party’s candidate recently won the county administration in his hometown in rural eastern Germany for the first time since the Nazi era.
The gardener despises the country’s established parties, he doesn’t trust the media and he feels there are too many migrants in the country. The far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, he hopes, will improve everything that’s not going well in his eyes in Sonneberg, which is in the southeastern state of Thuringia.
“People here are afraid to take a stand against the AfD and that makes us even more worried than anything else.”Advertisement It doesn’t bother Knoth that the AfD is under surveillance by Thuringia’s domestic state intelligence agency for its close ties to far-right extremists.Knoth expects the AfD to take a law-and-order approach, curb immigration and make Germany safe.
The party, a decade old, has been polling at record levels nationally with between 18% and 20% of support. Nowadays, the AfD appeals especially to people in the formerly communist and less prosperous eastern states, such as Thuringia. “I would say that a great deal of these racist narratives, which don’t match reality at all, have now caught on with a larger part of the East German population,” said König-Preuss, who is one of the most outspoken critics of the AfD and has received several death threats.“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’s doing to prevent a resurgence of fascism 77 years since Hitler’s demise.
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