These people are dangerous

Germany normal? Simson exit at an AfD election campaign event on August 23rd in Quedlinburg

“The most dangerous man in Germany” was the recent headline in the magazine Der Spiegel. Under the headline there was a photo of the AfD's top candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund. The fact that he didn't seem dangerous at all on the cover photo was probably intended to represent a particularly clever text-image scissors. Siegmund, who presents himself as a dream son-in-law close to the people, gratefully accepted the template and repeatedly signed the Spiegel issue in question with a toothpaste smile, true to the motto: “Look, the establishment will not shy away from any attempt, no matter how desperate, to demonize me. I’m totally normal – one of you.”

The AfD slogan “Germany, but normal” is of course to be understood as a threat against everyone who is not normal in the party’s opinion. The slogan sums up the ethnic ideology, according to which disturbing elements such as "foreigners", queers, people with disabilities or simply useless eaters do not belong to the homogeneous, efficient "people" and must be removed. Someone like Siegmund is actually like those who vote for him: jovial in his demeanor, contemptuous to the point of brutality against "enemies of the people."

Someone like Siegmund is actually like those who vote for him: jovial in his demeanor, contemptuous to the point of brutality against "enemies of the people."

A title like that of Spiegel once again clearly shows the failure of the helpless attempts to avoid this realization. The AfD is doing what a good third of the electorate wants. The time is over when bourgeois politics could still pretend that it would ultimately appeal to everyone in Germany. A third of Germans – in some places over half – are already unequivocally opposed to the rest, threatening them with discipline and even extermination.

The task of all those forces that still care about a reasonably free society is not to woo these people, to talk to them or to puzzle over their motives. It is important to make policies and act against this part of the population, i.e. to use all legal means to ensure that they do not gain government power. Where this does happen, progressive forces must limit the influence of the AfD's political personnel as much as possible and support those who fight the party and its representatives on a daily basis in such regions.

Leftists see themselves in the desperate situation that the bourgeois parties do not have this determination and do not even name the rhetorical civil war that is already being waged against them as such. People there are hoping to somehow "win shares of the vote" again and to get the most dangerous people in Germany, namely the part of the electorate that wants to destroy the open society, on their side. But that will not work because, according to the worldview of the ethnic third, parliamentary democracy and its personnel are not “normal” per se.

It seems that leftists are, as always, on their own: they have to forge alliances, wage everyday struggles, defend retreats, preserve knowledge, hold on to songs and dreams that must not fade. Perhaps you can say figuratively that these are the positions in which the left has to entrench itself - and from which a counterattack may occasionally be successful.