The centrist parties want to steal as many votes from the AfD as possible by trying to appear more right-wing than the right itself.
Welcome to the German-Austrian border
A few days ago, I got a call from a friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time. “I’ve been in Germany for a few months. I hope we can meet soon,” he said. Nadeem is in his mid-20s and from Afghanistan. I saw his profile picture on WhatsApp. He looked healthy, fit and rested. I felt relieved because my last meeting with him was almost three years ago and it wasn’t fun at all.
At the time, we were in a metal factory in Istanbul. Nadeem lived there with two other Afghans, usually working 12 to 14 hours a day. A small corner in the cold building provided them with a place to sleep.
We sat on bare mattresses and drank tea while the boys told us their stories. They had been harassed by the police, exploited by their Turkish employers, and stolen from criminal gangs. In Greece, they had suffered rebellion and torture in prison, and back home, the militant Islamist Taliban had briefly taken power again.
The daily life of Nadim and his friends made me depressed and I wondered what would become of them. Turkey has become a cruel guard of the EU and shows little concern for the suffering of its people. Even today, mass deportations to Afghanistan continue and anger towards refugees is widespread in society.
Despite all the dangers, the fact that Nadeem arrived in Germany made me happy at first. But now I worry not only about him, but also about all the others who have found refuge in this country in recent years.
Deportations, border controls, camps. The migration summit has collapsed, the refugee and asylum discourse has become more right-wing than before, and the traffic lights’ rhetoric and proposals are hardly different from those of the AfD. There is Björn Höcke’s racial madness, the Junge Alternative’s immigration fantasies intertwined with Martin Sellner and the Identitarians, Tino Chrupalla’s trivialization of the SS on prime time TV. “Ui” was the response of the presenter Markus Lanz.
I think there are more right-wingers than right-wingers.
For a while, the so-called centrist parties decided to try to steal as many votes from the AfD as possible by mimicking their speeches or even trying to make them look more right-wing than they are. This usually happens at the expense of others.
For example, CDU leader Friedrich Merz made it clear last weekend that immigration is the cause of overload in almost all areas of life. His subsequent relativization, highlighted by many observers, did not change the fact that there are “fantastic” people with immigration histories in Germany, but it did not change the fact that one narrative in particular has once again become dominant: foreigners are to blame for everything.
Responsible politicians also know that this is not true. If there is any kind of “immigrant strike”, Germany will stay silent. What is even more incredible is that they want to criminalize, imprison and monitor millions of people through their investigations. This is what happens when people talk about the terrorist attacks in Solingen or Mannheim, for example.
Most people from Syria and Afghanistan have fled war and terrorism and have nothing in common with the regimes or ideologies of their home countries. They just want to live in peace and, as American actor Ben Affleck put it when he heard comedian Bill Maher’s anti-Muslim stereotypes, “eat sandwiches like you and me.”
Why such a cliche is important is becoming clear again these days. While people are discussing, debating, relativizing and arguing on talk shows and at ‘migration summits’, real people are bearing the consequences. People like my friend Nadeem now know that they will be subject to even closer surveillance, that they will have to wait longer for their asylum application to be processed, or that they may even be deported. I too have noticed how much the people I pass by have changed in the past few weeks. And I will be back at the Bavarian border on my next trip to Austria. racial profiling I already suspect that I will be welcomed.
The Taliban and Their Gender Discrimination Policy
The answer to where all this will lead us is still unclear. If we look at the present, it is dire enough. Viktor Orbán recently personally congratulated Chancellor X on the new migration process of X. After the last deportation flight to Kabul, the head of the Federal Government’s Migration Service officially stated that he is open to talks with the Taliban. By the way, these are the forces that NATO, the US and Germany have been fighting for 20 years until 2021. In the end, they are back in power.
While Berliners talk only about Afghanistan when it comes to deportations, the Taliban enforces gender-based racism, threatens journalists based on Facebook comments, and arrests and tortures critics. Many of them still look to Germany for help. At least the federal admissions program still exists. But it is rarely implemented.
Last year, a journalist friend of mine who frequently reports from Afghanistan speculated on why this might have happened. He said, “I think there are a lot of people who don’t think there are any new immigrants with beards and headscarves.” Now, it’s not just the right wing who think this way, but increasingly, they see themselves as part of the middle of society.
