Yes. But they don't appear to have come to the obvious conclusion.
Flanked by market stalls selling everything from Turkish borëk pastries to bedazzled iPhone cases, Lina, 53, confessed that she was racked with worry about what may lie ahead for her three children once Sunday night’s election is over. She has lived in Germany for decades, carving out a life for herself and her family after moving from Lebanon.“It’s scary,” she said. Worse still, the torrent of anti-migrant rhetoric had seemingly done little to stem the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD), with polls suggesting that the far-right party is poised to vault into an unprecedented second place in Sunday’s election.“They are against Islam, against Arabs,” she added. “Who knows if they will bring in laws against us? It’s really upsetting.”
But why are they against Islam? Why do they revile Arabs? It appears to be a mystery to Lina. And she's not the only one puzzled by the current mood:
“It’s the first time, I would say, that I really feel like a foreigner in my own country,” said Cihan Sinanoğlu, a social scientist who works with the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research. “Racialised people and groups understand that the whole debate about migration is also a debate about us, about what it means to be German and who’s in and who’s out.”Nobody wants to talk about structural problems,” said Sinanoğlu. “So all of the bad things in the world are projected on to this figure of the migrant or asylum seeker; rents, economy systems, poverty. That’s crazy.”
Because having hordes of Third Worlders invade your country has absolutely no effect on those things..?
“I’m super scared and many of my friends are scared,” said one 28-year-old, who asked not to be named. She had arrived in Germany from Syria in 2015, as a wave of “welcome culture” swept across the country, transforming Germany into a safe place for more than a million people fleeing conflict and persecution. Now she wondered how many people she knew were gearing up to embrace a far-right party whose ranks include neo-Nazis. “They are our neighbours, they are parents. And they are daring to again choose fascism,” she said.
How very dare they decide to exercise their right to vote in free and fair elections! My god, no wonder you want to remain anonymous! You've clearly no idea what the word 'fascism' really means.
In September, Germany’s federal anti-discrimination commissioner, Ferda Ataman, linked the rise of the far right to a “discrimination crisis”, citing the more than 20,000 cases that had poured into her office between 2021 and 2023. “Millions of people are afraid for their future,” Ataman said at the time. “In view of the electoral successes of right-wing extremists, it is more important than ever to protect people effectively from hatred and exclusion.”
And that's the exact attitude that's caused this. Shouldn't you be worrying more about protecting people from murderers with cars and knives?
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