This is an essay to describe an a path that non-existent party took in the fall of 2012....and six years later....has become a problem for traditional German political parties and shaken the general strategy of political 'building'.
In the beginning....this was an idea to create a party to talk about the EU banking problems, the Euro itself, and the direction of German financial stability. When you think about it....at least in 2012, all were connected and the heavy weight of the 2008 financial collapse was the core issue. Three guys sat down....wrote the basic strategy, and one emerged as the political leader of this one-issue political party (we can laugh about this one small detail today). That first chief? Bernd Lucke.
As things go.....2013 was a great year for the AfD. They showed up in all sixteen German states, and took 4.7-percent of the national vote. However, the mandate to earn seats in Berlin? You need five-percent or more....so that was not the big thrill you'd think. Adding to this.....there's a general belief that more than half of the voters they took.....were disenchanted CDU-type voters (Merkel's party).
On the stage for asylum, immigration and refugees? 2013? Almost nothing. For well over twenty years, the yearly average was 250,000 per year and the bulk of Germans....probably well over 95-percent....would say there was no refugee problem in Germany. The system was fairly stable, and most applied from their home-country, before arriving in Germany. Other than the Balkan and Yugoslav war years....the numbers rarely went above 250,000.
The ISIS civil war deal in Iraq and Syria? It was just beginning to start up in 2013, and only a couple thousand refugees found the route totally open. It was simple....you pay some Turkish fishing vessel to take you twenty miles over to a Greek isle....then board a freighter to Athens. No one checked visas, IDs or passports. You'd board a train or bus to Skopje, then either walk a fair piece or take another train. You'd eventually get into Serbia, then onto Hungary, then reach the train station in Vienna where you'd board the last train effort to Munich, Germany. At best, you'd only have to walk half the distance.
By the end of 2013, I doubt if the German news folks had mentioned this route or the numbers coming more than a dozen times for prime-time news.
2014. Things shifted in 2014. The numbers by the end of the year? Close to 450,000 immigrants or refugees. It's now front-page news with public TV in Germany almost nightly. By the end of the year, you can divide the country into three groups.
The first is totally opposed to immigrants in mass number or this CDU-SPD vision of refugees. At best, they number maybe around 10-percent around the nation (more so in the east, than the west). The second group are the pro-asylum folks, and probably number closer to 50-percent. The third and final group? The folks asking questions....how much does this cost....how do you deport those who fail....is crime escalating because of this....who actually is running the asylum program? The question-folks probably number forty-percent. They aren't anti-asylum but they'd like to understand how this all works. Their problem is skeptical nature of the political machine in Germany, and politicians are avoiding conversations about the questions.
AfD in 2014? They are concentrating on state elections, and picking up 5-percent or more wins in various states. They are still a one-topic political party.
2015. The migration route from Athens to Munich is now front-page news, and will draw 950,000 to 1.1-million folks (there is still today an argument over the official number). The higher number? Some now suggest that corrupted entry practices (by the Germans fat-fingering the names in) caused a fake number to exist.....so the 950,000 is generally believed to be correct.
Among the Iraq and Syrians in this march from Athens....Afghans, Eritreans, Pakistanis, Tunisians, Moroccans, etc. It's not openly discussed, but the visa-approval system is geared to give extra points (approval) to the Syrians and Iraqis ONLY. So a great number of the others, are not going to be approved. Their deportation situation? A problem, because they refuse to go, and often....their countries refuse to accept them back. The fact that the bulk of the non-Iraqis and non-Syrians are young males? Well....yeah, just about everyone came to grasp this by the end of the year.
AfD in 2015? The party meeting for June of 2015 is cancelled because of the threat by new members....to flip the party into a anti-asylum party. Lucke doesn't care for this type of topic....he wants only anti-Euro. The meeting in July of 2015 goes badly, and Lucke is tossed out by a vote of members. The AfD is now on a new path....anti-immigration and demanding changes to the Merkel vision.
For the last three months of 2015, I sat and watched strong rhetoric by the public TV system (ARD and ZDF) to support the pro-asylum position. In some ways, the journalists invited criticism of public TV news and the TV tax. The 18-Euro a month TV-media tax started to get dragged out in public.
By the end of 2015, the general public trend could be laid out in three groups: the pro-asylum group was still managing around 40-percent of the public support. The anti-asylum folks were in the 10-to-12 percent range. The rest....at a growing pace...were the question-crowd (nearly 50-percent of the public).
2016. 31 December 2015 in Koln became this turning point. Germans traditionally celebrate this evening with partying, legal use of fire-works, and a midnight 'send-off'. A large collection of North African migrants gathered in Koln that night, with marginal police patrols in the standard high density areas, and chaos reigned. Twenty-four hours later, a thousand police reports would be submitted (women complaining of groping, sexual assault, deadly use of fire-works, etc). With local newspapers covering this on the 2nd (the first chance to print a paper), this became front-page news in the entire region. ARD/ZDF (the two public national networks)? Nothing.....for roughly four days. A vast amount of hostility brewed as social media carried video of the evening and the bad behavior from the mostly male migrant 'bad-boys'. By the 5th day, the ARD/ZDF teams began to arrive and now had to tell the story.
About a hundred days into 2016, it was a sharp drop in pro-asylum attitudes. A number of women's groups came out and started to address various issues (no respect for female teachers with older male migrants became a major topic). At this point, I would say the pro-asylum crowd was now around 30-percent of the nation, with the anti-migrant/asylum trend going still at 10 percent, and the bulk (60-percent) asking intense questions over the future of asylum and immigration.
The flow of refugees in 2016 into Germany? It drifted down to roughly 250,000. Chief reason? Because of a threat from Bavaria in early 2015 about building a border fence.....most every single country in this Athens to Munich route suddenly got fearful. If Bavaria built the fence, that would lock the migrant flow into their countries, and they really didn't desire that. So they built fences and literally cut of the flow in a major way. Turkey? They were offered this amazing deal, in the range of two to three billion Euro by the EU....to hold back the flow. They took the money and squeezed the smugglers in a major way.
2017. Chancellor Merkel, the CDU Party, the CSU Party of Bavaria, and the SPD Party.....all had to worry because September's national election had this AfD mixture. End result? 12.6 percent of the vote went AfD.....the bulk of this became a frustration vote being sent to the Chancellor, and the other parties.
Lets be honest....a one-single topic party can't sustain itself or build votes, unless you give them the topic to chat about. The Merkel agenda, for better or worse, wasn't looking that great anymore. Too many questions. To make the voters believe they were listening.....10,000 more police positions were created out of thin-air....to be split among sixteen states. Recruitment? Don't even bring up the recruitment issues and ongoing problems in getting another extra 10,000 folks signed up to be cops. On one hand, the government had to admit some problem existed....while signing onto massive funding for more cops....but then amusingly enough, they denied that the migrant flow had any real effect on German crime statistics. If the second were true, then why waste finding billions in the tax revenue bucket for more cops?
The refugee and migrant flow in 2017 in Germany? Figured to be near 250,000 in number. But the new problem was the immigrants on boats coming out of Libya and being 'rescued'. The rescued folks got pushed into Italian camps and Italy desperately needed them moved out.....to other locations. So the new Merkel-trend was that the immigrant program across all of the EU was broke, and they needed a EU-standard (a single directive) to fix the problem. They basically wanted a general number split-up....where you (a country within the EU) had to accept X-number of refugees each year from the EU. Poland, Czech and Hungary? They laughed because they would not accept this. To be honest, if you went to a hundred immigrants trying to enter Europe....the bulk were aiming at only two countries.....the UK and Germany. No one was aiming for Poland, Spain or Portugal (probably fifteen countries in the zero-interest category).
2018. In December of 2017....the Berlin Christmas market attack occurred (no weapons, just a truck). As the smoke cleared in 2018, a lot of the story over this one single Tunisian guy began to anger the general German public. He was a serious dope-dealer. He had various aliases and was clearing refugee 'free-cash' by doping the Germans into believing he was really a dozen-odd characters (fourteen aliases were stated at one point). He died in Italy a month later....when confronted by the cops there.
AfD in 2018? Most all of the support they are getting is frustration-related. None of the Bundestag parties (CDU, CSU, SPD, Linke, FDP, Greens) can move much out of the pro-asylum umbrella. They can talk about deportation occurring quicker....but in actual actions of deportation, a dozen things can occur to hamper every single deportation. This year, the crowd in charge of deportations screwed up on a couple of times.....deporting guys who were still on the appeals process.
The appeals line? Once you get your deportation letter....if you just raise your hand....the appeals process will start up but the system is using the normal German court system. It was never built to handle this massive number of cases. So there's a back-log. You could be waiting two to three years before the appeal is finalized. Some appeals cases are going in favor of the immigrants....but the bulk are still in favor of the original deportation notice.
Attitude by immigrants? I've probably had twenty-odd conversations (folks from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ghania, Morocco, etc). There are three central themes to their attitudes after two years in Germany:
1. It's way more complicated and complex than they thought. Germans make every single detail difficult to grasp and understand. Getting your Syrian license accepted? You might as well forget about that. Your educational level from the old country? Rarely if ever accepted. I talked to one Syrian journalist (young 20s, college), and he figured he'd have to do two years of German language training, to get even into a beginning position with a German paper.
2. Cost of living is ridiculous. Just about every single migrant/immigrant you bump into....will have a two-minute story to tell over cost. Most will tell you that the welfare supplement money that Germany hands out.....barely covers essentials and they desperately want a real job to climb out of this marginal pit of survival. I talked at length with one Ghanaian guy who had a terrific grocery contract offered to him (full-time job, decent pay), with just one big issue.....he had to finish the language class, pass the test (B1 level) and then pass the integration class. He figured he was still four months away, and grumbling every step of the way because he'd only get the real contract if he accomplished the tests.
3. Long term acceptance of this migration deal? Just about everyone I bumped into that is over the age of 40....prefers to go back to Syria/Iraq if the 'war' ever stops. Those under thirty? Just about every single one of them prefers to stay in Germany, period. The younger crowd sees no future in returning to the home-land.
So as we close out 2018....the landscape? The AfD isn't going away because various problems remain on the table, and the government coalition of the CDU and SPD can't really resolve the problems (other than throwing money at the issue or dragging the EU into it). Social media played some role in getting negative attention on the migration topic, but when the obvious problems were displayed....the political system is so corrupted, that it can't resolve the issues.
The most amusing issue I've seen in recent months...there's a school group in a neighboring region where they had an enormous number of Muslims move into the local area, and their kids have taken up a great deal of the capacity of the local elementary school. Well....the school authorities made up a rule at the beginning of the school-year....no pork products to be served or consumed in the school (to ensure kids don't share). German kids in the school? Most all Germans consume pork....Muslims don't. So there's some heartburn going on and some worries that this is merely the start of various problems. Again, this challenges the question-crowd in asking....how did this policy come up and ow far will it go in the future?
This is what the AfD Party gain and quick-to-fall gimmick is all about. Six years ago....they were non-existent. Today, they should be non-existent. But in order to send a message and get some change in government policy....people get stuck into a lousy choice situation.
2019? Unknown. There's a EU representative election in June, and the AfD folks or similar parties across Europe might be able to get 20-percent of the votes....based on a single topic political chat. There's three German state elections....all in eastern Germany. The AfD might actually get 15-to-20 percent of polling in each election. All of this hinged to frustration....which the opposition parties can't seem to deal with.
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