Right successes: doers and winners

The most beautiful, true and at the same time funny sentence was spoken by the Edeka market operator Peter Simmel in February of this year: “Through the exchange with our customers, I have learned that many more people identify with the word Nazi than I thought.” It was a mixture of obsequious business psychology and customer flattery jargon (“I learned from interacting with our customers”) and a clumsy attempt to disguise the fact that many of Simmel’s customers are neo-Nazis (“People who use the word “Identify Nazi”), which made the sentence almost glow, turning it into involuntary poetry.

Simmel runs a regional Edeka store chain with more than 20 branches in Saxony, Thuringia and Bavaria and around 1,000 employees. At the beginning of the year he advertised his supermarkets with the slogan “For Democracy – Against Nazis” until there were protests and calls for a boycott from numerous customers who were apparently bothered by the slogan. Anti-fascism or not: Simmel, businessman that he is, listened to the voice of the people, distanced himself from the slogan (which basically describes nothing other than the minimal consensus of halfway civilized people) and publicly apologized to his customers who were their Nazis -Attitude wanted to continue to wear with pride.

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The entire episode can be seen as a demonstration of the spirit prevailing throughout the region and as evidence that the right-wing extremist strategy of “national liberated zones” devised after the so-called German reunification has proven extremely successful. This meant that the perpetrators of Hoyerswerda and Rostock-Lichtenhagen, who grew up during the “baseball bat years” and are now around 50 years old, were able to raise their offspring undisturbed at NPD village festivals, while grandma and grandpa were able to reflect on their own provincialism and hostility towards everything urban and modern , progressives acted out on the Internet as xenophobic angry citizens or amateur conspiracy ideologists.

If you analyze the most recent state election results (including non-voters), it quickly becomes apparent that at least 50 percent of 16 to 30 year olds in Thuringia have a fairly solid right-wing extremist worldview. Any company that settles in Thuringia or Saxony in the future under these conditions is making a political statement – whether consciously or not.

But unfortunately we are dealing with the media’s permanent and stubborn unwillingness and inability to take note of all these facts, to assess them appropriately and to monitor them critically. Because on the evening of the day on which state elections took place in Saxony and Thuringia, if you had the nerve, you could witness the catastrophic performance of the journalistic staff and the moderators of ARD for the umpteenth time in the past 20 to 25 years and ZDF (not to mention the private broadcasters): While the day before, the AfD had stopped unhindered reporting from their election party and simply uninvited all journalists (probably so that the mood there and the inevitably associated side effects remained hidden from a larger public). , the officials of the right-wing extremist party were allowed to spread their propaganda and agitation unhindered and cheerfully on ARD and ZDF on election evening.

Meanwhile, the journalists stood next to them, smiling non-committally and in a friendly manner, holding their microphones in front of their mouths. The political staff of the so-called democratic parties also stood, as always, in harmony next to their neo-Nazi colleagues during the obligatory nonsense interviews in which the standard zero rates were rattled off, shaking hands and saying the same nonsense as usual: “We would like to thank our voters,” “We ran a good election campaign,” “The deliberations in the committees will show this,” “We did not succeed in communicating our successful policy” and “We have a mediation problem.” As with all election broadcasts in recent years.

During the short conversations with AfD politicians, there were neither critical questions nor objections from media representatives, who willingly gave the right-wing extremists airtime. For example, almost all media outlets not only adopted the pathetic AfD phrases about the supposed “historic moment” and the “historic success” that had been achieved in the elections. Even the stupidest self-marketing slogans (“the blue wave”) and the simplest self-motivation slogans without any informational value (“Overall, of course, it has to be about us becoming the strongest force at the federal level at some point”) were quoted by newspapers the next day and remained largely uncommented on.

The Saxon “Free Press” also euphemistically called the neo-Nazis “the Blues” and adopted the AfD advertising slogan from the “blue wave”. Press photos show AfD personnel in front of giant AfD logos. And the “Handelsblatt” described the fascist Höcke as the “strong man of the AfD”: This serves to mythologize and, above all, consolidates the image desired by the right-wing extremists as makers and winners who determine the course of history.

It has been shown once again that many journalists have neither a minimum level of political analysis and criticism nor knowledge of political theory, let alone minimal knowledge of language and ideology criticism. Rather, they always ask the same banal questions during interviews and make it clear that they are not familiar with the ideas and ideas of the fascists. What appears again and again in the statements of AfD politicians – hidden Nazi jargon, aggressive historical revisionism, bold lies, implicit threats to democratic institutions, rhetorical diversionary maneuvers – is often neither recognized nor counteracted.

Instead of clearly naming the neo-Nazis’ election successes, many TV journalists resorted to empty phrases that served primarily to obscure and whitewash the election results (“the German party landscape is in motion”). The bars used in the election graphics, which are intended to show the results of the AfD, are colored in blue, which is the party’s advertising color, instead of brown. As before, journalists – contrary to all empirical studies – labeled the AfD as a “protest party,” thereby simultaneously depoliticizing and mythifying it. The party is happy about this, because it serves the long-known and excellently successful strategy of self-trivialization, which has been practiced by trained officials for years.

Election year East

Illustration: Stephanie Schoell

The election year 2024 is not an arbitrary one. The future of the left has not been so uncertain for a long time, never in the history of the Federal Republic have the political landscape and the electorate been so polarized, never since the Nazi era has a right-wing extremist, partly fascist party been so close to power. We look specifically at developments and decisions in the East that are important for all of Germany. All texts at dasnd.de/wahljahrost.

As with previous election reporting, anyone who read the comments from the various media outlets on election night or the next morning continually came across the same long-disproven myths and excuse strategies that turned AfD voters into confused or worried citizens and ignorant sheep for the hundredth time be lied to. For example, Bettina Schausten, editor-in-chief of ZDF, described the BSW and the AfD as “protest offers” in her commentary and wrote: “More than 30 percent of voters in Thuringia and Saxony voted for right-wing extremists. For the most part, they are not neo-Nazis.” And Gabor Halasz from ARD said in his commentary apodictically: “AfD voters are not Nazis.”

How do Schausten and Halasz come up with this? How do you know that? Were you at all AfD voters’ homes and spoke to them? Is it such a far-fetched and bizarre idea that the voters of far-right parties are right-wing extremists?

The satirist Wiglaf Droste stated over 30 years ago: »No one votes for Nazis or becomes one because they are mistaken about their goals – the opposite is the case; Nazis are Nazis because they want to be Nazis. One of the most unpleasant German characteristics, the dripping pity for oneself and one’s own compatriots, turns such aberrations of evolution into poor seduced people, essentially good, just a little unstable.