--
This is frankly very concerning. As an EU-foreigner, with a non-German name, living in Germany for 13 years now, this is for example one of the main reasons I'm not buying a house or making bigger investments here, not because I don't like it but because there are certain risks associated with being non-German which German people won't ever understand. It wasn't easy before, but Afd leading will be an existential risk despite the naive attempts to rationalize it.
I've discussed this development with some acquaintances who believe the Afd will be their salvation and suddenly fix the country but most of the rhetoric turns around getting rid of foreigners and feeling safer - as the article illustrates. They tell me "Don't worry" or "but you're almost German! You speak German, you're one of the good _ones_ yada yada", well tough luck, I don't look German and that's what they might not want to admit is an issue.
Why this matters? Take all the online/offline posts from that party and its supporters and run them through a classifier (an LLM if you're so inclined) and you'll see a few bad trends pop up, especially in the narrative they are pushing and who this is catering to. Very violent videos, images made with stable diffusion aimed to cater to and mislead a very specific demographic, crafted with an industrial & methodical approach. Topics like "light" nazism support become "salonfähig" again, meaning it is acceptable in group discussions... Now imagine a party like that, supported by the full weight of the military, police, financial sector. The classifier the Afd and their supporters will use to separate foreigner from non-foreigner will be much, much simpler though and will in essence give anyone a license and justification to chase the foreigners, because they won so they must be right, right?
There are not that many foreigners in Germany, it's just that they might be younger, thus more visible and any actions towards them will be visible: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula..., take those numbers and calculate some correlations like "how much 1 single non EU foreigner (let's be clear, those are who they call foreigners) contributes to the rise in the polls" and you'll see what I mean.
It is also no surprise also, that the "east" is siding with the far-right here, and many supporters/commenters/believers, when not German, have a couple of things in common. In this context, voting far-right doesn't strike me as complaining about the current government but rather looking for scapegoats, someone else to make accountable for the common failures.
The country was never really "safe" in the sense that you could do whatever and be risk-free, it's an illusion biased by the fact that looking back is always better (that image with plan and the red dots should illustrate my point), people who claim that "it was safer in the past" were quite certainly living a sheltered and utopic life and are more and more confronted and aware of the workings of the real world. There were always bandits, thugs, thieves, troublemakers. Perhaps the real issues are an aging population & the economical downturn/contractions we're currently experiencing aka: "the beer gets more expensive"-index to which there isn't really a concrete solution from none of the parties or that nobody really wants to address.
Germany is an amazing country, which is no surprise why many people want to live here compared to other countries in the EU or in the world. The future will show if a far-right party will make it better. Whatever happens and whoever leads, I think we now have the tools to keep anyone forever accountable for their words and actions which will directly contribute to our common future. No more 'we didn't know'. My main hope here is that this doesn't escalate into something extremely ugly, either way, I won't hang around to find out if things materialize.
Jetzt geht's um die Wurst!