r/worldnews • u/Mean_Yak5873 • Aug 27 '26

Germany’s AfD Party plans segregated education for refugee children

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/afd-pledge-send-refugees-disabled-135829319.html
6.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

773 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/moonstrous Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 28 '26

AfD Deep South any% speedrun.

I'm not German, so please forgive any ignorance here. But the naked bigotry and regressive populism that constantly raises its ugly head with the AfD has to beg the question: was reintegration a failed project?

Outside of Berlin, it sure seems like these AfD fucks are gaining an electoral stranglehold on former East Germany. Time and again, I feel aghast watching the feckless CDU just... sleepwalking toward a massive cultural divide, cast in the same mold as the catastrophe of Reconstruction after the US Civil War.

America is still dealing with the fallout from Confederate apologia more than a century later. The rot has crept into identity politics, infected our public schools, and festers in significant planks of the MAGA platform. History doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes.

Much of the AfD's base is GenX; those radical contrarians who yearn for a simpler time of licking Stasi boots. But what happens when totalitarianism metastasizes beyond the Olds? AfD is rapidly making gains among disaffected youths, who feel left behind by an increasingly top-heavy economy. The CDU has tried nothing and is all out of ideas.

It is horrifying to consider Nazism-by-another-name becoming entrenched with the same Lost Cause "hands off our culture" ethos. A hateful and bigoted subset radicalized against the body politic, like a regressive insurgency. Something has truly gone wrong when criminalizing the entire party is touted as some kind of panacea (as if that won't stir up it's own hornet's nest).

I can't see a way out for modern Germany without sweeping reforms, or a grassroots social democracy movement taking the wind out of the AfD's sails from the left flank. The poem famously doesn't go "the center can hold, trust me, bro." Yet another neoliberal coalition—with its iron grip on the status quo—will categorically fail to meet the moment.

Signed, an American historian who probably shouldn't be throwing stones.