Writing in Die Welt, Harald Martenstein Explains 'Why Citizens Are Voting AfD Now'
Signs and Wonders, German Legacy Media Edition, Pt. 2: Die Welt, again, Publishes Useful Stuff to Further Our Understanding
And now this happened: long-time columnist Harald Martenstein just published an op-ed in, again, Die Welt, pondering, with a rather open mind, the lingering question as to ‘why Trump’, so to speak.
Entitled, ‘The Real Reason Why Citizens Are Voting for the AfD Now’, appeared yesterday (29 May 2023), and in it, Mr Martenstein displays a level of journalistic-essayistic acumen rarely seen—and even rarer published—these days.
This isn’t to say that what he says is something that I’d consider ‘earth-shaking’ or the like, but what Mr. Martenstein is saying is—something approximating the real reasons for the political breakdown we’re witnessing virtually everywhere in (what used to be called) ‘the Western world’.
One last comment as regards the state of German legacy media: Die Welt appears to be one of the last outlets whose editors allow (somewhat) dissenting views, as we could see last week when Jakob Hayner discussed how the left went bonkers:
As always, the translation is of the below piece is mine, as are the [added comments in squared parentheses], the emphases, and the bottom lines.
Note that Martenstein’s piece is behind a paywall, so do drop me a line or two via email if you’d like to access the PDF copy of mine.
The Real Reason Why Citizens Are Voting for the AfD Now
By Harald Martenstein, Die Welt, 29 May 2023
The AfD’s surge in the polls has little or nothing to do with Nazi nostalgia or the new party supporters’ love for Putin. These people are afraid of what is happening in Germany right now. And they don't think the CDU/CSU [Germany’s mainstream, i.e., conservative-in-name-only, right-of-centre party] is courageous enough to oppose this development.
Last week, it was reported that only 54% of Germans could not imagine voting for the AfD at some point. That is, voting for a party that is hardly ever mentioned in the public media and many newspapers, unless someone from its ranks is involved in a scandal, about whose programme little is known, a party whose representatives are almost never interviewed, at least less often than the people from the much-shrunk Left Party, a party that is the only one ignored when offices are allocated in most parliaments, in a word: an un-party.
But it has done no good to render the AfD an un-party. It is about to overtake the Greens in the polls [according to state broadcaster ZDF’s recent—26 May 2023—poll, the AfD has surpassed the Greens]. In the East [former GDR], if thcurrent trends continues, the AfD will soon be the strongest party. I think absolute majorities are now also conceivable there, at least at the local level.
I know a few people who vote for the AfD or are about to do so. Surprisingly, none of them find this party particularly attractive or its personnel politically appealing. But they think what is happening in Germany right now is some kind of woke cultural revolution, directed against people like them and coupled with irrational, self-destructive climate panic. This perspective is such a horror for them that they grasp at any straw, and if the straw is the AfD.
For them, the rise of the AfD has little or nothing to do with Nazi nostalgia, which many leftists claim this as a matter of course. For them, it also has nothing to do with an infatuation with Putin.
Many turn to the AfD precisely because of anti-totalitarian motives. They have the impression that their country is developing into a historically new type of dictatorship, a country in which freedom and civil rights count for little, where privacy and dissent are no longer a matter of course, where informants are courted but Western civilisation and its way of life are demonised, and where an economically and socially downright suicidal climate and migration policy must be seen as having no alternative.
Voters are seeking protection from this, one could say desperately. But these voters no longer trust the CDU/CSU to display the courage that is needed today to defend the interests of the majority even against vocal minorities.
Two Views of the World and of Humanity, One of Which Is Unrealistic
In left-wing Berlin, the CDU succeeded with an election campaign almost reminiscent of the days of the old champion Helmut Kohl; in left-wing Bremen, it presented itself as a lighter version of the Greens and failed, unsurprisingly, given the current mood. But is it still possible at-all to carry out bourgeois-liberal politics?
New Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) recently called it ‘unacceptable’ when ‘people are hit on by dealers in parks’. He also said that more trash cans should be installed in parks. The Kreuzberg Greens, on the other hand, want to solve the garbage problem by simply removing all bins, claiming that people would then take their garbage home with them. [Good one; this is very much taught in kindergartens and schools all over Norway, and its effects are, well, let’s be kind and call them ‘aspirational’, at best; I’m sure it’ll works wonders in Berlin-Kreuzberg, though…/sarcasm]
There, as if under a microscope, one can detect two fundamentally different views of the world and of humanity. One of them is unrealistic.
A Berlin Green acknowledged Wegner’s remarks with the sentence: ‘The culture war is starting from the right. So trash cans are right-wing. And drug dealing is left-wing.’
It’s true, there really is a culture war [Kulturkrieg, even though I think Mr Martenstein is too soft on this one, for what is going on is a Cultural Revolution] going on, one in which the left has been travelling on the winning track for years. In the meantime, for example, many publishing houses now have ‘sensitivity readers’ who are supposed to prevent a wrong word or a wrong thought from appearing. The question is whether this development will continue unchecked forever or whether someone will put up a stop sign at some point.
In this struggle, the left’s most important weapon is to defame as ‘right-wing’ any criticism of them and any, even the tiniest, political alternative, such as a trash bin completely innocent of colonialism and patriarchy. And ‘right-wing’ always means ‘extreme right-wing’, i.e., ‘Evil’. With ‘extreme left’, on the other hand, no one thinks of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot any more.
So fewer and fewer people are falling for this increasingly worn-out trick of preventing democracy. The smartest thing would be for the CDU/CSU to use the word ‘right’ as offensively as the homosexuals have successfully done with the former swear word ‘gay’.
But do they have the courage to do so?
One thing is certain, however: if you don’t fight, you’ve already lost.
Bottom Lines
As I’ve written in my essay on the use of allegations of right-wing extremism a year ago,
More often than they are not, allegations of far right-wing extremism are tantamount to a strawman argument, by which is meant that guilt by association—presumed, factual, or both—is deployed at-will to discredit any argument or individual. As such, the powers that be in politics and legacy media will (ab)use such allegations in cases where it protects and serves pre-established narratives about any given topic. In other words: accusations of (typically) far right-wing extremism are part and parcel of the political and propagandistic toolkit of those who wield political power and their fellow-travellers in Western mainstream media.
Mr Martenstein is correct.
Lacking the courage of their (former?) convictions, I think the mainstream right-of-centre parties should move towards unashamed bourgeois-liberal policies again. They’d also need a credible frontman or -woman to do so, and I suppose that Ms Thatcher’s success stemmed in (no) small part from simply being a woman in a field dominated by lying and dishonest men.
That said, a ‘new’ face, perhaps ‘white’ and ‘male’, competent and with a ‘normal’ family would be insidiously perfect—to trigger the woke mob into submission.
I mean, look at what soon will come to be called ‘former Western European' democracies: from Ms Le Pen in France to the AfD in Germany to Austria’s FPÖ to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, people are voting with their feet in terms of anti-establishment. One could, arguably, throw Donald Trump in 2016 into the mix, which was, apparently, considered ‘the lesser evil’, relative to Hillary Clinton (oh, what is this world coming to…but it’s true).
Over in Austria, the FPÖ is consistently polling around 30%, there are again rumours about a snap election about a year before the next regular parliamentary elections would be scheduled (of course, these were denied by the ÖVP), which seems to prove Mr Martenstein’s point:
Why vote for any of these traditional right-of-centre parties when they prove to be merely one faction of a seemingly rainbow-coloured Uniparty?
So, people will vote more and more for these alleged ‘right-wing extremists’, irrespective of whether they like them, their program, or know anything about it. What Mr Martenstein wrote about Germany—
I know a few people who vote for the AfD or are about to do so. Surprisingly, none of them find this party particularly attractive or its personnel politically appealing. But they think what is happening in Germany right now is some kind of woke cultural revolution, directed against people like them and coupled with irrational, self-destructive climate panic. This perspective is such a horror for them that they grasp at any straw, and if the straw is the AfD…
Many turn to the AfD precisely because of anti-totalitarian motives. They have the impression that their country is developing into a historically new type of dictatorship, a country in which freedom and civil rights count for little, where privacy and dissent are no longer a matter of course, where informants are courted but Western civilisation and its way of life are demonised, and where an economically and socially downright suicidal climate and migration policy must be seen as having no alternative.
Voters are seeking protection from this, one could say desperately. But these voters no longer trust the CDU/CSU to display the courage that is needed today to defend the interests of the majority even against vocal minorities.
—is true, as far as I can tell, also about many people in my circles in Austria.
Here in Norway, by the way, the picture is about the same: Labour and their partners ‘won’ the general election in 2021, but about 1.5 years ago, the Conservatives (Høyre) overtook the left-wing; by now, the Right polls consistently above 30%, with Labour struggling to reach 20%.
So, what about the AfD, Le Pen, the FPÖ—shouldn’t we, in a democracy, accept that people are voting this or that way? And, if they don’t deliver, people will vote them out of office again, right?
Yet, that’s not what the Woko Haram are about: for them it’s censorship, defamation, and pushing the majority around.
As the proverb goes, ‘the pitcher goes so often to the well that it is broken at last’ (apologies for the bumpy translation from German), here’s hoping people will remember who did the breaking and hold them accountable.
Writing in Die Welt, Harald Martenstein Explains 'Why Citizens Are Voting AfD Now'
Thanks for reporting on this! I have often considered subscribing to WELT, but then along comes the next nonsense (WELT might be doing this on purpose, as a rather clever way of sailing the shitstormy waters), and I refrain.
When Martenstein loses his column in ZEIT Magazine, I will cancel my ZEIT subscription.
A while ago, I was asked about my opinion on AfD and such, and I responded thus:
https://cm27874.substack.com/p/raising-the-baseline/comments
Interesting and nice to read. Txs Prof!
As you might know Meloni coalition won the majority of the last weekend local elections.
She's now thinking to change the Constitution to a Premier direct election to have even more powers.
But I'm sorry to say, our extreme right neo fascist Meloni and her right-center coalition are all but not for Putin at all. And they're not against any trash can or drug dealer. They're winning just because they are destroying more than what "leftist" have already destroyed of our State Institution and laws. They are lowering taxes for the richest, and I mean rich as the enriched medium class by tax evasion and avoidance, a class that has no culture, no skills and lately enriched by huge state helicopter money in the building sector.
They are more pro criminal Democrat Biden Administration than anybody else, with the exception of Mr. Berlusconi that loves Putin and Russian girls... XD
So I wouldn't put them as AFD or your FPO, but at the exact opposite.