The mainstream media classifies sixty percent of AfD voters as protest voters. The classification as “protest voters” is explained by the main reason these voters give for voting for the far-right political party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland); they are disappointed with the political decisions or performance of the parties in power. This explanation depicts the typical cosmetic retouching, sweetening, and diluting of ugly facts in German society.
On the surface, German society appears to be tolerant, friendly, and welcoming. This is due to the capability of Germans to show a well-controlled, dehumanized, and tactically engineered emotion just to achieve a superficial conducive environment. However, it is wrong to be all-inclusive and generalize that Germany is a racist country. It is also definitely not true that all Germans are racists. But the dilemma of differentiating between racists and non-racists should not discourage exposing the daily racism and discrimination foreigners encounter in Germany. In this writing, the author focuses on racists and their quiet supporters or latent racists who have kept low profiles until they find an opportunity to express their inhibited racist views through the far-right political party, AfD. These so-called “protest voters” are mostly racists on the borderline who are now boldly exploiting the refugee and terrorism issues to gain synergy for their political goal. The resentment of foreigners is deeply ingrained in racists and has existed long before the recent refugee crisis. Unfortunately, the digital magnification of the refugee and terrorism disasters has helped boost the fear campaign of the neo-Nazi significantly. This phenomenon is a major contribution to the political success of the AfD.
The foreigners who have been living in Germany for decades will attest to the steady surge of racist attacks and open discrimination over the years. In trains, streetcars, and buses, foreigners experience different forms of assaults, including physical and psychological terror that leave the victims feeling helpless and depressed. In many of the few instances where law enforcement officials were called in, the perpetrators go free without any offense charges, and the final result of the investigation is usually the inclusion of the incident in the statistics. The majority of racial attacks and discriminatory attitudes in public service centers, educational institutions, as well as in all aspects of social life, do not appear in the official statistics.
The reality of the daily experience of foreigners, or to use the popular term that is often used in the German media, “citizens with migration background,” is not sensational enough to attract millions of viewers. The insults and abuses of thousands of citizens with a migration background experience should not be taken seriously and can be neglected. The condemnable terror act and extremist radicalization are sensational and attract a substantial number of viewers, which generates advertisement revenues/public revenue shares. Analyzing the fundamental drivers of extremism and developing effective countermeasures are not on the political agenda. From the perspective of politicians, formulating and implementing strategies that genetically destroy the seeds of radicalism would be time-consuming and would not bring back the protest voters quickly enough.
According to their defenders, these protest voters are not racist. The protest voters only want to stop the influx of foreigners into Germany. They are afraid they will lose their German identity in a diverse cultural environment. They demand that citizens with migration backgrounds living in Germany should integrate perfectly into the German system; they should accept Germans as their masters and be ready to accept unqualified jobs even if they are highly qualified. In particular, people from the developing /third-world countries should be prepared to take up below-poverty paid jobs that Germans decline, even if they are University graduates. The protest voters are afraid of highly qualified foreigners, who they perceive as threats. They are afraid to lose their attained social status; it is unbearable for them to be in the same social class as professionals with migration backgrounds. These protest voters do not have anything against foreigners, but are not prepared to rent out an apartment to a foreigner because the neighbors do not want a foreigner in the neighborhood. Naturally, these are unwritten and unspoken demands that are forged into implicit rules; these protest voters do not want to be labeled “racists”, but they are! They are Neo-Nazis, and the “AfD” acronym has been rebranded as “Assholes for Disaster.”
afritopic®