Germany – AfD party

Mainstream parties are increasingly allowing the far right to set the agenda, researchers in Germany have found, describing it as a shortcoming that had unwittingly helped the far right by legitimising their ideas and disseminating them more widely.

The findings, published in the European Journal of Political Research, were based on an automated text analysis of 520,408 articles from six German newspapers over the span of more than two decades.

The Berlin-based researchers found that as the far right moved from fringe issues in the late 1990s to topics such as integration and migration, mainstream parties had increasingly reshaped their communications to respond, boosting the spread of these ideas and signalling to voters that these ideas and stances were legitimate.

Someone inform the Guardian the AfD is the mainstream.

The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has crossed the 40% mark in a regional poll for the first time—an unprecedented result that signals a major political shift.

According to a survey conducted by the INSA for the news portal Nius, the AfD would achieve 40% if state elections in Saxony-Anhalt were held this Sunday. This represents a ten-point increase since June and the highest level ever recorded for the party in any German state. The governing CDU follows at a distant 26%, losing eight points, while the Left Party stagnates at 11%. The SPD and the left-wing nationalist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) stand at 6% each. The Greens and the liberal FDP would fail to enter parliament with only 3%.

On Sunday, around 13.7 million people went to the polls in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. The results were losses for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and a bitter blow for the environmentalist Greens.

The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) saw a respectable showing, but it was the partly right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) that made the strongest gains.

At stake in the local elections were around 20,000 parliamentary seats in almost 400 towns and municipalities, as well as mayorships in larger cities.

With a roaring noise, the yellow excavator razes the last remains of another derelict property in the Bismarck district of Gelsenkirchen to the ground. An entire street with seven houses is being flattened to make way for new houses and a kindergarten.

The dilapidated properties and piles of rubbish in the street were not only a huge nuisance for local residents, but also a big campaign issue for the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD)which linked it to labor migration from Southeast Europe.

Six candidates of hated party die just before local elections In German state. Coincidence?

What is the likelihood that four candidates and two reserve candidates of the same political party, in the same region, would drop dead suddenly, within 13 days of each other—and just before local elections? It happened in North Rhine-Westphalia to Alternative for Germany (AfD) candidates on the September 14 ballot.

The four candidates were Ralph Lange, 66; Wolfgang Klinger, 71; Stefan Berendes, 59; and Wolfgang Seitz, also 59. All were running for local offices in the northwest German state, where voters will go to the polls in less than two weeks. German election officials have invalidated previous mail ballots due to the deaths.

In Cologne, a bizarre conspiracy of silence has settled. Only it’s not happening behind closed doors. All of the political parties involved in upcoming local elections, except the anti-immigration AfD, have openly agreed to avoid negative commentary on immigration during their campaigns.

Everyone, from the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to the far-Left Die Linke, has signed a “Fairness Agreement”, pledging not to talk about migrants in connection with “negative social developments such as unemployment or threats to domestic security”. This is likely to backfire spectacularly.

Nicole Blair, a 36-year-old YouTuber who once worked actively as a refugee helper, has explained why she now votes for Germany’s right-wing opposition party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

In 2015, during the height of the migration crisis, she spent time in Budapest, where she saw families camping without food or shelter.

Back in Germany, she threw herself into volunteer work—donating blankets, teaching children, arranging housing, and supporting newcomers. “I was totally passionate. I wanted to be a good person,” she told the Schwäbische Zeitung.

Activists and journalists will debate how to “fight the far right” in a government-backed cultural event.

At a time when Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has emerged as the most popular political force in the country, overtaking even the traditional parties that have governed for decades, Germany’s state apparatus—together with allied cultural and media organisations—is intensifying efforts to isolate and discredit it.

Germany’s main ruling party, the Christian Democratic CDU, has been dropping in the polls for the fourth consecutive week while the right-wing opposition AfD keeps rising, as the latest polling data shows them being neck and neck for the second time since the February election.

Germans reject a ban on the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) by a majority of 52% to 27% in favour, according to a new representative survey published by the Allensbach Institute polling organization on Saturday.

The proportion opposed to a ban rises to 65% in the east of the country, according to the poll published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily newspaper, while it falls to 49% in the western states. The AfD enjoys widespread support in the formerly communist eastern states.

The pollsters found a range of reasons for rejecting a ban on the party, which is monitored as a far-right extremist organization by the domestic intelligence agencies.

The main reason was that respondents were familiar with AfD supporters, with 67% of west Germans and 88% of east Germans having AfD supporters in their circle of acquaintances. These acquaintances were seen in a much more sympathetic light than the party itself.

In other words Germans know who the real NAZIS are. h/t DS