Impending Political Turmoil Looms Over Germany with Rumbling Economy, Failing Infrastructure, and Shocking Refugee Incident: AfD’s Rising Influence Examined by ROBERT HARDMAN

The hideous news breaks as I am walking through the snow in the small town of Furstenwalde in what used to be East Germany. 

Yet another asylum seeker has just launched a deranged attack out of nowhere on innocent members of the public.

The latest horror has struck Munich, as 28 individuals have suffered injuries, with some in critical condition, after a car collided with a small trade union protest close to the main station.

Mercifully, no one has been killed outright but a small child is among those in a critical condition, having sustained life-changing injuries.

In next to no time, it emerges that the driver was a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, already well-known to the police. 

In essence, the events of Thursday highlight yet another troubling breakdown in Germany’s ability to manage its increasing population of refugees and migrants.

Yet what I find so striking here in Furstenwalde is the lack of shock. There is visceral anger.

But no one seems unduly surprised. As in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the response is not so much ‘How on earth?’ as ‘Not again?’

Right now, the only thing which will actually shock the people I have met in Germany this week is if there is not a thumping, record-breaking surge towards the Hard-Right in next Sunday’s German general election.

‘You see – it has happened again,’ says Florian Wiese, pointing to the breaking news on the television in his insurance office on the main road running through Furstenwalde. 

It only reinforces his view that the hard-Right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party will sweep the board in this part of Germany come polling day.

No one expects them to end up in government (not this time, at least) with the centre-Right Christian Democrats (CDU) as favourites to lead some sort of coalition. 

But it’s highly likely that they will come a comfortable second and they have their sights fixed on the election after that (even if they are not singing ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ quite yet).

Florian’s colleague, Guido Hornig, offers one explanation of sorts: ‘We used to have a lovely country. But now people won’t walk through the centre of this town after 8pm because they feel it is too dangerous.’

Furstenwalde has a five-storey block of flats on the edge of town which is home to an unspecified number of asylum seekers. 

Half a mile away, an existing accommodation centre is being renovated and will soon house 750 more.

Each fluchtlingsheim (refugee home) has fences and cameras to monitor those going in and out (media are not allowed). However, the asylum seekers come and go freely, mainly in the evenings.

Every local offers a story of petty crime or noisy gangs gathering round the station. 

Some gangs emanate from neighbouring Petersdorf where a small village of 500 residents has just seen its population double with the addition of a new complex for 200 asylum seekers bolted on to the former East German army barracks housing 300. 

What has enraged the locals has been the tactics of the state and federal authorities. It is not just that residents were not consulted. 

What also rankles is the fact that the contracts for these substantial building projects were handed to outside workers for fear of plans leaking out.

Here in the former East Germany, that stirs up old memories.

‘The state always used to tell you what to think and to be quiet,’ Petersdorf pensioner Margit Wunderich tells me. ‘Well, now this is a democracy and the AfD is the only party that represents us. 

We have criminals we cannot deport and all these people are sending the money they get to Africa. Well, we have an identity too and we are not going to go on feeling guilty about the Second World War.’

Like almost everyone I talk to in these parts, she points to a pivotal moment when she thinks the old Germany began its decline from the confident, solid society of yesteryear to today’s fractious bundle of insecurities: the late summer of 2015 when former chancellor Angela Merkel opened the country to more than a million migrants and refugees poured across Europe’s eastern borders.

Ten years on, that historic humanitarian gesture – for which Merkel was lauded across the West – has set the agenda which will shape the next German government.

The fragile state of Germany’s once-mighty economy is clearly a major factor, too. Having relied for so long on cheap Russian gas and a global appetite for their petrol-powered cars, Germans suddenly find the world has moved on.

Infrastructure is creaking, be it the roads, trains or internet access, while one national obsession remains as healthy as ever: bureaucracy. 

Yet all the opinion polls are clear that immigration is the number-one issue in this election – and that was before Thursday’s outrage in Munich.

This week’s car attack is horribly reminiscent of the carnage five days before Christmas in Magdeburg, where a former Saudi refugee, granted asylum in 2016, drove a Mercedes into a Christmas market, killing six and injuring 300. 

I arrived there hours later to find a town in mourning and, yes, shock – but not total surprise.

Less than a month ago, in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, another (Afghan) asylum seeker wielding a knife attacked a party of children in a park in scenes reminiscent of last summer’s Southport atrocity. 

A child and an adult lay dead, with many injured. The suspect should have been deported months earlier but for a series of bureaucratic blunders.

I visited that shattered town this week to find mounds of candles and flowers at either end of the park – but no answers.

After those murders, the CDU proposed plans to close the borders to new asylum seekers. It passed narrowly but only with help from the votes of AfD MPs. 

Other parties accused the CDU of tearing up the long-standing ‘firewall’, a hallowed convention whereby all parties refuse to work with the AfD on anything. 

Two days later, those other parties, aided by CDU rebels, narrowly defeated the same plans.

At least everyone can agree on one thing. This campaign is breaking the mould. 

A German national election is traditionally a dull, complex and earnest exercise in number-crunching. 

This one is anything but. ‘I have been fighting elections since 1999 and there has never been one like this,’ says Lisa Paus, a Green Party MP and minister for family affairs in the last coalition government. 

‘We are facing huge challenges and that is difficult for the German angst.’ (When Germans talk of ‘angst’, they mean a sense of dread and anxiety).

I meet Ms Paus at a hustings in the capital, Berlin, before a packed conference hall of business people. 

Up on stage, the most interesting thing about this evening is the figure standing on the far right – in every sense. Beatrix von Storch, 53, is a former banker, a lawyer and an aristocrat (a granddaughter of a Grand Duke, she is technically ‘Her Highness’ and is distantly related to the Royal Family). 

Yet for many years, she would find herself shunned in polite society. That is because she has been deputy leader of the AfD for ten years, and one of its MPs for the last eight.

Tonight, she stands alongside six candidates from the other main parties, all of which have sworn to have no dealings with a party still designated a ‘suspected extremist’ organisation by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (which thus has formal powers to monitor its activities, including the use of informants and wire-taps).

For all its slick branding and TikTok appeals to a growing youth base, the AfD is still dogged by charges of anti-Semitism and furtive neo-Nazi inclinations among some members.

Last year, party co-founder Bjorn Hocke was fined for using a favourite Nazi warcry – ‘Everything for Germany!’ – at a public rally, having been fined for the very same thing in 2021.

Yet this audience of business executives treats Mrs von Storch with the same respect which they accord to the rest. 

There is even applause for some of her remarks, such as her accusations that the ‘crazy’ energy policies of the Greens have caused German infrastructure to ‘fall apart’.

‘People might hate us but what is changing is that they know they can’t ignore us,’ she tells me afterwards. ‘It’s step by step. In the beginning, they said we would disappear but we did not. 

It will take a while but, in the end, we will end up like all the other Right-wing populist parties in Europe who also fought back.’

She points to the political landscape in Italy, France and Holland, and observes that this very week her party’s leader, Alice Weidel, has received an official welcome from the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban. 

The most high-profile endorsement has been that of Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s billionaire efficiency tsar, who has declared ‘only the AfD can save Germany’, before appearing on screen at the party’s campaign launch.

However, I cannot help noticing that Mrs von Storch is the only candidate at this debate followed everywhere by two beefy bodyguards with earpieces. 

They are not party heavies but have been assigned to her by the state. ‘It always feels better when they are around,’ she says. It’s a reminder of the simmering tensions running through this election.

Early the next morning, I watch the AfD’s candidate in the Pankow district of Berlin, Ronald Glaser, handing out leaflets to commuters at his local station. 

He tells me that his campaign vehicle was torched in last summer’s European election and that his office only avoided a similar fate because it is next to a fire station. Recently, his windows have been smashed again.

However, he is in a buoyant mood, noting that opinion polls for this seat, a comfortable Green stronghold for years, have him firmly in the lead, propelled by local opposition to yet another migrant complex going up down the road.

‘The interesting change is in schools,’ he says. ‘Students used to be very Left-wing. Now a lot of them ask for our pencils and stickers. 

Maybe they are trying to annoy their teachers!’ Even implicit association with the AfD has risks. The Dresden office of the CDU was attacked following the breach of the ‘firewall’ convention.

That episode is seen as yet another step on the AfD’s long path to some sort of acceptability, even if the CDU insists it is nothing of the sort. ‘We haven’t done anything. 

There was no cooperation with the AfD,’ says MP Dr Marcus Reichel, whose office was attacked. ‘The AfD just approved a good motion from us and that was it.’

Dr Raphael Bosson, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, suspects it is a sign of things to come. 

‘I think you will have a categorical denial from the CDU that there will be any deal but then there will be this constant shadow of the AfD saying: “You can’t stop us voting with you.” And then it becomes normalised.’

I travel to the city of Erfurt, which the AfD actually won in the last regional elections. It is also home to Europe’s oldest synagogue. It is now a museum, while the 800-strong Jewish population meet in a post-war synagogue nearby.

The AfD’s vocal warnings about Islamic fundamentalism and its recent support for Israel in its war with Hamas cut no ice with community leader and Holocaust survivor Professor Reinhard Schramm. 

‘Those who are anti-Muslim today will be anti-Jewish tomorrow,’ he says. ‘The AfD is a danger to society, not just Jews.’

He is also very critical of some on the Far-Left, notably Sahra Wagenknecht, leader of the new BSW party. Formerly of the socialist Die Linke party, she is pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine war, anti-Israel and takes a Corbynite view on the economy. 

Her hard line on immigration, however, sounds a similar tune to that of the AfD.

I drop in on her rally in Erfurt. Trim, smartly dressed and eloquent, she delivers a passionate, note-free denunciation of further military involvement in Ukraine to a packed house, several of them in Palestinian keffiyehs.

A year ago, some wondered whether her anti-immigration stance would dilute the appeal of the AfD. Now, the general sense is that she may struggle to cross the 5 per cent threshold to win any seats in Parliament.

It is the AfD which has the momentum. Beneath the grand cathedral in the former East German city of Halle, I talk to Lena Martini, 27, who is shopping with engineer husband, Jason, and their two small boys. 

She works in recruitment, has lived abroad for years (including a spell studying in Manchester) and speaks perfect English. 

A worldly, educated professional, she should surely be a prime target for the centre-Left SPD or the centre-Right CDU? Her response speaks volumes.

‘I don’t know who to vote for. The price of everything is going crazy and no one is offering much hope,’ she says. ‘I know a lot of people who are picking the AfD and some of their points are cool. It’s rubbish to say they are Nazis.

‘I am not someone who is racist but I have lived in a lot of countries and I just don’t feel safe here now. 

‘Why is it that I don’t feel safe at a Christmas market? But everywhere we find gangs of people who don’t speak German and that makes me uncomfortable.’

Back in Aschaffenburg, amid the candles and teddy bears in memory of that poor murdered two-year-old, support for the AfD may be more muted. 

This is prosperous West Germany, just an hour from Frankfurt’s banking district. ‘I hope the AfD don’t get a majority,’ says pensioner Elfriede Reck. ‘But it’s the politicians who caused this. 

‘Officials knew about that killer before he did it, yet two people had to die before anything happened.’

Now, they are saying exactly the same in Munich this weekend. Germany’s political class has not felt this nervous in living memory.