Alternative for Germany (AfD) clearly states its views on immigrants in its programme: “The AfD views the ideology of multiculturalism as a serious threat to social peace and the continued existence of the nation as a cultural unit. “
And yet multiculturalism itself does not appear to pose a serious threat to the AfD: Over the past few months, more and more of the far-right’s messages have been targeted at voters in Germany’s many immigrant communities – with some success.
Born in Turkey, 55-year-old Ismet Var has lived in Germany since childhood, has been a German citizen since 1994, and has been a supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) since it was founded in 2013.
War works as a delivery driver in the German capital, and his work was directly affected by rising fuel prices following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now he cannot understand why so much money is being “thrown away”. On economic and military aid to Ukraine. He says his main concerns are lowering taxes and deporting criminal immigrants.
The latter is already happening – the latest figures show that Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left government has increased deportations in the past year. “Now! Now they’re deporting people!” War says over a coffee in Berlin’s international Kreuzberg district. “But he wasn’t used to it.” He believes that the AfD’s intervention in the German political scene is needed in order for the government to take action.
As an Alevite, he also feels that Germany has become too tolerant of what he calls “strict Muslims”. He said, “I have nothing against them when they pray at home, but when they spread propaganda, I am against them.”
War experienced racism as a new arrival in Germany in the 1970s: he remembers a janitor in his building telling him that he and his family would not be there if Hitler was still in power: ” But it didn’t bother me a bit,” he says.
refugee children for afd
Ana Nguyen has also experienced a lot of racism in Germany. Born in 1990 to Vietnamese refugees near Kassel, she is now an AfD representative in the Hesse state parliament. But, she insists, it is not the Germans who are racist towards her – it is mainly people she thinks are Arabs.
“During COVID, there were always people with immigrant backgrounds, maybe Arabs, who would yell ‘Corona, Corona’ behind me and my Chinese friend,” he said. “It is true that I am bombarded with racist comments on the Internet – but from the left, even if they call themselves anti-racists.”
Nguyen insisted that his party, meanwhile, is indifferent to race and is not strategically looking for voters like him. “It’s not about immigrant background,” she says. “It’s about the fact that all sensitive people in this country want to stop this green ideological madness. It’s about: Am I a Can we live a good life? Do we have secure power supply?
Targeting new voters
Voters with immigrant backgrounds are a demographic reality in Germany: official figures for 2023 show that about 12% of German voters have a non-German background – about 7.1 million people. As recently as 2016, about 40% of voters with migrant backgrounds voted for the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), and another 28% for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). But those loyalties appear to have evaporated.
According to the German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), which is releasing a study at the end of January on voting habits among immigrants, there is little difference between voting behavior with and without an immigration background. As of the 2017 general election, 35% of German Turks voted for the SPD, while 0% voted for the AfD. Now, according to DeZIM, immigrant voters do not vote for the AfD any more or less than non-immigrant Germans.
DeZIM’s Jens Jacobsen, who co-authored the upcoming report, said AfD is becoming more attractive to people from different backgrounds. He also pointed out that these voters are German citizens – and see themselves as Germans. “So it’s probably not that big a surprise that these people don’t vote for people who have no immigration history,” he told DW.
In 2023, Robert Lambro, an AfD state MP in Hesse, founded an organization called “With Migration Background to Germany” for immigrant AfD supporters. The organization’s website says it has 137 members from more than 30 countries, and is open to anyone “who professes their belief in German culture as the dominant culture and the nation as a cultural entity.” works for the continued existence of.”
“My experience about the AfD is that it doesn’t matter whether someone has an immigrant background or not,” Lambrou, 55, whose father was Greek, told DW. “I don’t see the party as xenophobic – we want a sensitive migration policy.”
But it’s hard to square this with statements like those from AfD Bundestag member Rene Springer, who said after revelations early last year that AfD politicians were part of a meeting planning a mass “exodus” of immigrants and non-white Germans. , who wrote on Twitter: “We will send foreigners back to their home countries. By the millions. This is not a secret plan. This is a promise.”
Lambrou agreed that some statements are not helpful if they are not properly based on facts or do not convey important nuances. He said, “When we see such statements by party members that we do not like, we try to hold talks within the party.”
No problem with racism?
Still, it appears that over the past few months more and more pro-AfD TikTok videos have been made by non-white people.
Özgür Özvatan, CEO of the political consultancy Transformers and author of a forthcoming book on the political impact of Germans of immigration background, said the AfD has been actively trying to attract the attention of immigrant voters for at least the last year – particularly Such people have Russian and Turkish origins – primarily because those communities are more likely to have voting rights. According to official German statistics, there are more than 2.9 million people of Turkish background in Germany, of whom approximately 1.6 million hold German citizenship. Meanwhile, the post-Soviet diaspora also numbers in the millions, and includes many nationalities and ethnicities, including Germans. Many of these people may feel attracted to the AfD’s pro-Russian stance on the Ukraine war.
Izvatn argues that this is all part of the AfD’s larger strategy to expand its voter base. “Its potential voters in the non-immigrant landscape are certainly limited,” he said. “Their potential vote-share there may be around 20-25% – but if they want to reach 30-35%, they need to expand their portfolio, and that will mean content and promise for immigrant communities. Making policies.”
“People who have immigrated before are not automatically in favor of immigration,” Ozvatan told DW. “They may be immigrants and hold anti-immigration positions.”
Nguyen emphasizes that immigrant voters are not distracted by racism and contradictions “because they know who it means – they are the illegal immigrants, especially since 2015. It is they who are criminalized – and “People from immigrant backgrounds are suffering just as much as anyone else.”
Özvatan believes that many immigrant voters are not aware of racist statements, and even when they hear overt racism, they immediately dismiss it as secondary to their core perception of the AfD. Let’s do it – that’s not what they mean. “The main sentiment is, ‘They’re friendly toward us,'” he said, “and the AfD tries to limit that sentiment.”
Edited by Reena Goldenberg
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