Berlin – Nicki Kämpf watches her daughter cross the sand on a Berlin playground and wonders if she and her 1 1/2-year-old husband should move west, after Alternative for Germany became the first right-wing party to win a national election in Germany after World War II. Kämpf, 29, and his wife discussed backup plans in the wake of Sunday’s election results. former communist and less prosperous eastern countries.
Although they live in the liberal city of Berlin, Kämpf fears that the power of the far right could spread. She is very worried because the paperwork to officially adopt her daughter is still pending – and could be for a year or more.
“I don’t think we will be able to adopt him if we are in power,” Kämpf told The Associated Press on Monday. “I don’t want to bring him up in a hostile environment.”
The couple talked about the possibility of moving to Cologne in the west – “the people there are very open-minded” – but Kämpf refused to take her daughter away from her 91-year-old great-grandmother and other family in Thuringia and the neighbourhood. Saxony.
The AfD won state elections in Thuringia on Sunday according to one of its far-right figures, Björn Höcke. In Saxony, the party finished just behind the conservative Christian Democratic Union, which leads the national opposition.
Dissatisfaction with a national government notorious for conflict, inflation and a weak economy, anti-immigration sentiment and skepticism towards German military aid to Ukraine are among the factors contributing to support for populist parties. A new party founded by a prominent leftist was the second winner on Sunday – and may be needed to form a state government as no one is ready to govern with the AfD.
The AfD is strongest in the east, and domestic intelligence agencies have branches of the party in Saxony and Thuringia under official surveillance as “proven right-wing extremist” groups. Höcke has been accused of deliberately using Nazi slogans at political events, but it attracted attention.
Höcke bristled Sunday when an ARD interviewer mentioned the intelligence agency’s assessment, replying: “Please stop stigmatizing me. We are the No. extremist party.”
Voters head to the polls on the 85th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland at the start of World War II. Several far-left demonstrators demonstrated against the AfD in Hamburg, Dresden and Leipzig.
Lukas Meister said his sons, 6 and 3, are too young to understand the election. But as the 3-year-old played in the sand on Monday, his 38-year-old father wondered how his firstborn would learn about it.
“We don’t talk much about politics until now. He prefers ‘Paw Patrol,'” Meister said. “It’s hard to explain. How can people be proud to vote for a party that’s bad for everyone?”
Old Germans who lived through the Nazi reign of terror were afraid. Many believe that their country has developed an immunity to nationalism and asserted racial superiority after facing the horrors of the past through education and laws to prohibit persecution.
But Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, warned against labeling the AfD’s success an aberration.
“No one should talk about ‘protests’ or find other excuses,” Knobloch said in a statement. “Many voters make conscious decisions, many want to put extremists on the fringes of responsibility.”
Knobloch was 6 years old when he saw a synagogue in Munich burning and watched helplessly as two Nazi officers walked away from his father’s beloved friend on November 9, 1938, or Kristallnacht – “The Night of Broken Glass” – when the Nazis terrorized Jews throughout Germany and Austria.
Gudrun Pfeifer and Ursula Klute, two retirees from the northwestern town of Osnabrueck who visited Berlin this week, said Sunday’s vote also brought back dark memories of their childhood during and after World War II.
“I know what could have happened,” Pfeifer, 83, said Monday as her voice broke, recalling how her family was torn apart during the last war and after. He was stranded in Berlin for over a year.
“The city was destroyed, we were all starving. I was very sick – my sister thought I was going to die,” added Pfeifer.
Thorsten Faas, a political scientist from the Free University of Berlin, called the AfD’s popularity among younger voters “very worrying.” In Thuringia, 38% of people aged between 18-24 gave their vote to a far-right party – compared to 33% overall, according to an analysis of the Tagesschau election by public broadcaster ARD.
“This first voting experience is very formative and you can assume that it will also influence the voting decisions of this generation,” Faas said.
Klute, 78, also said he was distressed by the AfD’s success among the younger population.
“People always forget about history,” he said.