a WSJ write up on the afd party before the weekend election.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-im...ars-1505986206
Anti-Immigrant AfD Party Draws In More Germans as Vote Nears
By Anton Troianovski
Updated Sept. 21, 2017 5:36 a.m. ET
WISMAR, Germany—Candidate Georg Pazderski of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany spent nearly half his speech in this harbor town earlier this week highlighting the danger of Islamist terrorism. Chancellor Angela Merkel dispatched the topic in roughly 80 seconds in an address here the next day.
As this country’s election campaign reaches its crescendo ahead of Sunday’s vote, its participants appear to be fighting different battles.
Ms. Merkel, looking assured of victory, is engaging her opponents in mainstream parties on pensions, infrastructure, education, and economic policy. The Alternative for Germany is
creeping up in the polls while positioning itself as the only party sounding the alarm about what it says is the existential threat posed by Muslim immigration.
The AfD, as the party is known, is now polling above 10%, less than its peak early this year and well below what other far-right parties elsewhere in Europe have garnered in recent elections. But for Germany, if the polls hold, its impending entry into parliament would mark a turning point in a country where right-wing populism has long been banished from mainstream discussion. And it would show that despite Germany’s thriving economy, an undercurrent of popular distrust and discontent threatens to unsettle a largely stable political system.
The unease is especially apparent here in the former East Germany, where unemployment is higher and the mainstream political parties less deeply anchored than in the more prosperous former West. But AfD is drawing rising support from across the country, polls show.
Interviews with AfD supporters conducted in recent weeks, from the German southwest to here on the Baltic seacoast, yielded one common complaint: Mainstream politicians, the voters said, don’t take their concerns about immigration seriously enough.
The party “clearly discusses problems that all the other parties have been concealing until now,” said civil servant Uwe-Schulz Kopanski, referring to immigration as the biggest one. “These lies, these lies, these lies—people have had enough.”
In the center of Wismar, a Baltic seaport town of about 45,000 people, an outdoor-goods store advertises $7 cans of self-defense spray next to the thermoses and water bottles in its window.
“The demand is very, very high in Wismar because there are many foreigners,” an employee said.
Around the corner in City Hall, Mayor Thomas Beyer said the share of foreigners in town had increased to about 6% from 4% since 2015, in part because of the influx of asylum seekers. The data didn’t show any increase in violent crime as a result, he said. But, he noted, many voters were unsettled by change—and a significant number were supporting the party that has become Germany’s most prominent symbol of protest against the establishment.
“The parties, in part, no longer speak the language of the people,” Mr. Beyer said, counting his own center-left Social Democrats among those guilty of losing touch.
Ms. Merkel came to Wismar on Tuesday and spent the first 20 minutes of her speech on economic issues—the car industry, pensions, agriculture, taxes, and debt. She briefly promised better surveillance of terror suspects and tougher laws allowing the detention of rejected asylum applicants who are considered security risks. She said Germany was now better prepared to respond to the global refugee crisis, meaning that the chaos of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed into the country, would never be repeated.
She closed, however, by warning that isolationism could carry big risks for a country that makes much of its wealth from exports.
“We must understand that we cannot only take care of ourselves,” Ms. Merkel said.
The previous day, leading AfD politicians took a different tack at their own rally here. The mainstream parties have yet to “see reason and finally take care of the security of German citizens,” Mr. Pazderski said. He and deputy party chairwoman Beatrix von Storch both said deportations of rejected asylum seekers were happening too slowly.
“In addition to a heart, we have a brain,” Ms. von Storch said of her party.
The AfD, founded in 2013 with an initial focus on opposing the bailout of cash-starved member states of the eurozone currency union, surged in the polls to around 15%
in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis. Earlier this year it sagged amid infighting at the top, but it has ticked back over 10% in recent weeks, drawing crowds across the country.
In the village of Burghaun-Steinbach in central Germany, local AfD candidate Martin Hohmann brought a worn copy of the Qur’an with him and read aloud passages he said showed Islam to be a religion incompatible with the West. In the southwestern city of Pforzheim, the party filled a hall of more than 1,000 people earlier this month and promised to form a parliamentary opposition so intense “you’ve never seen it before.”
The party’s ratings have risen despite widespread criticism in the German news media of openly xenophobic statements from some of its leaders. Alexander Gauland, who coleads the party ticket, said he wanted to “dispose of” a German-born politician of Turkish heritage by sending her to Turkey and stood by the statement even after Ms. Merkel accused him of racism.
Alexander Gauland of the anti-immigration AfD party at a press conference in Berlin on Monday. Photo: Jens Jeske/Ropi/Zuma Press
“This is a party that’s finally showing protest,” said Martin Schmaltz, a 28-year-old bus driver at the event in Wismar who was considering voting for the AfD. The party, he said, says what “the German citizen has on the tip of his tongue but can’t say out loud.”
If the AfD performs as well as some polls predict and Ms. Merkel forms another so-called grand coalition with the center-left Social Democrats, the party would emerge as the biggest opposition force in German parliament. All other parties have pledged not to work with the AfD in parliament, meaning it will have no direct influence on government policy. But analysts say the party’s success could embolden conservatives in Ms. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, which has moved to the left during her 12-year tenure. And the AfD’s performance, some of them say, could highlight the pitfalls of avoiding divisive topics like immigration in election campaigns.
Mainstream parties “are trying to bracket out these issues, especially refugees and migration, but people care about them,” said Nikolaus Werz, a political scientist at the University of Rostock. “This was perhaps not smart, because the issue was practically ceded to the AfD as a result.”
Write to Anton Troianovski at
anton.troianovski@wsj.com
Appeared in the September 22, 2017, print edition as 'German Populists Redirect Race.'
CDU/CSU 246 34.7%
SPD 153 21.6%
AfD 94 13.3%
FDP 80 11.3%
Die 69 9.7%
Grüne 67 9.4%
