Counter rallies in Kaufbeuren show split between supporters of AfD and locals who acknowledge the Bavarian town’s Nazi past
Soaring church spires, the 1,000-year-old town centre unblemished by second world war bombing or graffiti, snow-capped Alps in the middle distance – Kaufbeuren, in Bavaria, can count many blessings.
Unemployment is in the low single digits, the Luftwaffe backed away from plans to move its training school for Eurofighter and Tornado jet technicians elsewhere and crime is at a historic low.
However, as voters prepare to elect a new European parliament next month, deep-seated fears have gripped a significant share of the electorate in one of the most affluent pockets of Europe’s top economy and delivered it to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
The bond between the party and its voters appears unshaken even by a cascade of recent scandals. The AfD’s lead candidate for the election, Maximilian Krah, was forced by his party leadership on Wednesday to resign from its board and stop campaigning after he told Italy’s La Repubblica that the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force which ran the death camps, were not all criminals and could only be judged on the basis of “individual guilt”.
No. This is the bit that you all make out is what is going on and it isn’t. It’s an outright lie of what people think the issue is.
Good and bad individual immigrants can come from anywhere that much is obvious, no one is ever saying otherwise.
Not as a view as hard data. Governments have collected information on groups of people. They can group people by country so they absolutely have said immigrants from country A as a whole contribute more in taxes than they take out and commit less crime than locals. They also say immigrants from country B take more in taxes than they contribute and commit more crimes than locals.
You can’t deny that.
And this is where people think everyone on the left or fair left is mental for wanting such high levels of immigration from countries that have been shown in unbiased data that they make the country worse (as a whole obviously). It isn’t racist to want more from country A than B.
This says nothing of immigration causing wage suppression and housing price inflation. Of course that’s going to happen its basic supply and demand.
So if you read the article you would know that some don’t want Muslim immigrants from Muslim countries.
I’m not saying you think that, but I’ve seen plenty (like the person in the article), specifically state they don’t want certain races/ethnicities/religions in their country.
This is a tactic I’ve seen with right wing people. They defend something obviously wrong but pretending that the stance has always been sane. Basically presenting a crowd full of people thinking A is actually a crowd of people thinking B with a few As.
Indeed. And you shouldn’t be led astray by that tactic in your own analysis, it should still be purely material.
You can then argue “we need to counter that narrative” and that’s also true, however, countering a narrative in a way that doesn’t make sense to people is also not a good idea, to wit, people having the impression of “the left doesn’t care about the small people”. Don’t allow the right to push you into that trap. That, precisely, would be falling for their tactic.
Like, I’ve seen people on here, mostly from .ml domains, calling Germany’s policy of automatically handing Ukrainian refugees work permits racist because other refugee groups are treated differently. But the reason is simple: Ukrainians don’t exert pressure on the low-wage sector, meaning they’re not taking away jobs from people having trouble getting a job. Individual people from other countries also don’t exert that pressure and also get work permits, on an individual basis. Ukrainians not needing individual work permits is a recognition of the fact that their education system is en-par with that of Greece, far far above other conflict-torn source countries.
The US (which I assume many of those posters are from) does that filtering before people even arrive, try getting a work visa in the US without being sponsored by an employer. Not an option if there’s no ocean between you and whatever country the yanks are destabilising today.