Not white and AfD Victory: Why am I not afraid?

My phone lights up as I get a worried message “Hey, I was thinking about you today”. Huh? I unlock the screen, click on the box. I don't understand anything. Then it clicks. Today there were elections in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD won.

I'm not white, so this might scare me, thinks the person writing to me. At the same time, the Spiegel headlines “What are the enemies of the constitution planning?” and the New York Times “AfD victory in Saxony-Anhalt sends a signal to Europe”. I ask myself: Why am I not afraid? And what signal?

Three people wrote to me that day saying they were thinking of me. They forget that I come from Saxony and not Saxony-Anhalt, but maybe that doesn't matter. I can imagine how the AfD victory in Saxony-Anhalt feels for marginalized groups.

After all, the attention span in the elections in Saxony-Anhalt lasted longer than in the neighboring federal states. This was ensured by the angry articles in which colleagues pointed out that we should take a more differentiated and detailed look at the political situation in the new federal states. And not just shortly before the elections.

The temporality bothered me less. My local patriotism in Leipzig was not strong enough for that. I also didn't think that you first had to understand the complexity of this city or the region in order to be able to analyze in detail how the shift to the right could have happened.

What I thought was more: The shift to the right was inherent in all places in Germany, but its manifestations varied. Maybe he was middle class in East Germany. It was easier for the educated middle class in the old federal states to differentiate themselves from the people with a strong dialect who held their hands in front of the ZDF television crews and said “Take away your Gamera doa!” roared? Were the codes of working-class fascists easier to recognize and deconstruct?

Perhaps the demarcation worked so well that right-wing ideologies, which came in stylish garb, led to acceptance in the political center. But that didn't happen overnight.

The political scientist Armin Pfahl-Traughber describes this as the "plowing of the field of political culture by right-wing extremists". So you can only win over a political majority if you have mentally prepared it for it. The intellectual right, which at first glance seems less threatening, took over the preparations. The debates about "Pallywood" and the "cityscape" certainly did their part to make racism somehow okay again.

And yes, Saxony-Anhalt is contrary to international analyzes and domestic questions about “How brown will Saxony-Anhalt become?” no warning signal. The AfD victory is proof of how normalized and socially acceptable right-wing and racist ideologies are in Germany. And it is part of the European shift to the right, whose member states are more likely to reinforce their fears than calm them down.

So the fact that the place you grew up in grows into the monster you warned about is not particularly frightening. The horror lies more in the lack of reactions over the last ten or twenty years. If the passivity of the majority of society in the face of right-wing threats has already led to mistrust, then it is no longer a surprise if a federal state is now officially brown. So perhaps an appropriate headline would be “What the fuck did we do?”