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Ramelow: The long-term debate about AfD uses the right-wing populists
“If the only question is, ‘What do you think of the AfD?’ I think we are experiencing a dangerous depoliticization,” warns Thuringia’s Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (left). photo
© Martin Schutt/dpa
For weeks, the AfD has been at the poll high – in Germany, even more so in East Germany. Thuringia’s Prime Minister complains of alarmism in the political debate, from which the AfD in particular benefits.
Thuringia’s Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow holds the long-term debate on the AfD in Germany for endangering democracy.
“I just think it’s wrong that only the AfD is being talked about, broadcast and written. In the meantime, there seems to be hardly any substantive politics,” said the left-wing politician at the German Press Agency in Erfurt. “If it’s just a matter of, ‘How do you feel about the AfD?’ In my opinion, we are experiencing a dangerous depoliticization.” This is also a problem with a view to the three state elections in 2024 in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg.
High approval ratings
In the eastern German states, the AfD, which is classified and observed nationwide by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a suspected case of right-wing extremism, reaches values of up to 30 percent in surveys. In Thuringia, where the party with its state chairman Björn Höcke is classified as a proven right-wing extremist, it was 34 percent for the MDR in Infratest dimap in July.
The opinion research institute Yougov currently sees approval for the party nationwide at 23 percent. In Thursday’s ARD “Deutschlandtrend” she achieved a new high of 21 percent. In the Thuringian district of Sonneberg, the AfD has had its first district administrator nationwide for a few weeks.
AfD “magically attracts the dissatisfied”
“I just don’t go along with the alarmism about the AfD anymore,” said Ramelow. It means that the party no longer has to make any statements about what they really want.
“No one asks anymore what the Thuringian AfD means when they are striving for a third of the parliamentary seats in order to drive all other parties in the state parliament before them. Or what Mr. Höcke sees as the consequences when he propagates that the European Union must die and ultimately so that the European Economic Area is sealed off for our Thuringian companies and the European solidarity funds for Thuringia are finally lost.”
According to Ramelow, “the AfD magically attracts those who are dissatisfied”. That applies to both West and East Germany. The higher polls in the East also have something to do with “the fact that the material unit was quite successful, but the psychological unit is a disaster.”
Ramelow spoke of the “mental homelessness” of some East Germans who did not see themselves as sufficiently recognized. “With wages that are too low, East German workers have to organize themselves and fight for higher wages in solidarity. Mr. Höcke or the supposed memo about the AfD won’t help.”
Ramelow sees a kind of defiant reaction
Many East Germans are now of the opinion that attention is paid when they do something “that causes outrage in West Germany”. According to Ramelow, high poll values for the AfD are also a kind of defiant reaction, “not a stubborn one, but a permanent one”. They are an expression of being overwhelmed by not understanding or not recognizing what has been achieved in East Germany in the past decades.
Thuringia’s head of government, who wants to stand again in 2024, again warned against blanket judgments about East Germans. That also applies to AfD voters. “Not all are Nazis or fascists, as some think.”