Opinion
The AfD youth celebrates the Brandenburg election with a xenophobic deportation song. There is no outrage. The youth are clearly becoming more right-wing – how did it come to this?
“Hey, this is going crazy. We’re deporting them all,” blared from the speakers at the AfD’s election party after the Brandenburg election. Videos showed members of the youth organization “Junge Alternative” chanting and dancing to the music. Xenophobia was the hit of the party – and there was little public astonishment and outrage. Right-wingers do right-wing things – who’s surprised? But isn’t it astonishing that just a few months after the Sylt video, which showed practically the same thing, there isn’t a day-long discussion about the fact that right-wing extremist ideas are back in vogue, especially among young people?
In Brandenburg, more than 30 percent of voters between the ages of 16 and 24 voted for the AfD. And this despite the fact that the regional association, with its leading candidate Hans-Christoph Berndt, is probably one of the most radical in Germany. Why do misanthropic slogans no longer scare young people away? Why do they respond when practically all problems are explained by the fact that there are supposedly too many foreigners in Germany?
Why is right-wing extremism suddenly completely okay for many people?
There is hardly a talk show on this topic where the phrase “discourse shift to the right” is not thrown into the room as a warning. Most experts quickly agree that this shift to the right is really dangerous and that we really have to be careful that the discussions do not get too off track.
The truth is: We are already in the midst of a shift to the right. If an SPD(!) chancellor had been quoted on the cover of “Spiegel” a few years ago with the sentence “We must finally deport people on a large scale,” he would probably have had to resign. Whether it’s Friedrich Merz’s “little pashas” or Alice Weidel’s “supported knifemen” – what you can say again today without fear of consequences is as remarkable as it is shocking. And on Tiktok, young people dance to deportation songs.
What happened to make it so far? Unfortunately, we have to admit that many have fallen into the net of those who have been working for decades to overthrow democracy. What we are currently experiencing resembles a script that ends in a fascist revolution.
The strategy of the New Right reads like a dark prophecy
The discussions, the right-wing influencers, the viral videos and songs like in the Sylt video – all of this was partly conceived decades ago. Of course not exactly as it is happening today, but in the same way. Masterminds of the self-proclaimed intellectual right like Götz Kubitschek and old neo-Nazis of the NPD agreed on one thing: In order to abolish democracy in Germany, three pillars are needed:
The Battle for mindsThe ideology must seep into the mainstream of society. Extreme positions must become more and more normal. They must be repeated so often that there is no outrage. At some point they will be considered legitimate opinions – no matter how misanthropic they may be.
The Fight for the streets Right-wing extremist groups have been leading this since Pegida at the latest. Whether it’s “Merkel must go” demonstrations or “Monday walks” by “concerned citizens”: right-wing groups are omnipresent, even if in most cases there are only a few dozen protesters.
The Battle for the parliaments is of course leading the AfD and has taken a big step with its victories in the state elections in Thuringia and Saxony. Sooner or later, it seems, there will be no getting around the party that wants to form a government.
The strategy of the New Right reads like a dark prophecy today. But where are we at?
Looking at the results of the state elections, we have to admit: We are losing the battle for our children’s minds. Anyone who has ever spent hours on Tiktok, as young people do every day, will quickly stumble across clips that spread right-wing propaganda and the worst horror scenarios: Germany? On the verge of collapse. Foreigners? Full of rapists and welfare parasites. The “old parties”? Either too lazy, too stupid or too ignorant to change anything.
The constant repetition of AfD slogans is the tactic on Tiktok
It is the AfD’s tactic to nail these exact slogans into the minds of young people over and over again. Something will stick. Not with the first video and not with the second, but maybe with the hundredth. The Tiktok success of AfD man Maximilian Krah can be traced back to exactly this trick. At first, most people will have laughed at this doughy man in his late forties who spouts crude theories about what is “masculine” today. But the first victim of habituation is irony. And when the humor evaporates, the step from “what nonsense” to “he has a point there…” is only a very small one.
What is particularly dangerous is that the other parties are not offering any counterbalance to the thousands of videos on Tiktok. The AfD reaches three times more users on the platform than all the others combined. In the Tiktok opinion-making universe, it is, so to speak, the political sole entertainer. Its clips are now just as normal in the feed as cat or holiday videos.
Being right is in youth edgyperhaps a classic counter-movement to the more left-wing consensus of the parents’ generation. But this ideology will not disappear as quickly as it came. If we do not react quickly, part of an entire generation is in danger of slipping into a misanthropic way of thinking.
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
