AfD is not the heroic opposition it claims to be

AfD is not the heroic opposition it claims to be

The upcoming German election pits two very similar power camps against each other, with one of them thriving on elite panic
Recently, a middle-aged man on an e-bike was passing me on the sidewalk. Out of nowhere, he swerved, kicked me in the shin, shouted Leftist pig! and sped off. An elderly woman with a walker asked me, visibly shaken, if I knew him. I said no, just as alarmed as she was.
A little later, a woman was handing out SPD balloons between market stalls and a stage in the town center. I listed the cruelties her party in Berlin is currently shoving down the throats of workers. She squeezed out the word constraints, pointed to the CDU, and brushed me off. The DGB trade union federation has also apparently awakened from its coma. A Verdi trade union member was recruiting members and babbling about solidarity. I asked him whether he meant that social partnership between capital and labor that has never actually existed. He looked at me in confusion and said this was all about the AfD. When I replied that the AfD also just wants to enforce capital’s interests through law, just as the SPD does in government, he quickly cut the conversation short. He had no interest in leaving his parallel world.
The closer the state election gets, the more madness spreads in Saxony-Anhalt. The SPD presents itself as a workers’ party while throwing workers’ rights in the trash. The Greens pose as protectors of homosexuals while beating the war drum loudest for war against Russia. The CDU waxes lyrical about tried and tested traditions while implementing one AfD demand after another. The still-governing FDP markets the leftovers of its neoliberal fairy tale about the trickle-down effect. Helplessly, The Left wobbles back and forth because it does not want to miss out on bourgeois respectability – a sorry spectacle.
Panicked democratsThat means the AfD doesn’t have to do much more than counter this madness with a parallel world of its own. Its lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, smiles into many cameras. Before his supporters, he even rhapsodizes about the GDR, which he never experienced himself, while his party constantly accuses The Left of socialism and being the Stasi the moment it so much as utters the word social. Siegmund moves from talk show to talk show, complaining about exclusion, even though right now nothing is more omnipresent than his party.
One could laugh at how the ‘bourgeois center’ and its media keep boosting the AfD with all their fuss. The panic does seem genuine; more than a few public employees probably quite rightly fear that they will soon be cleaned out politically, to borrow the words of one AfD campaigner I met. Better not to mention that under CDU rule this has long been happening quietly already. Only now the circle of those purged could grow, and posts and mandates are at risk of collapsing. Once again, it is mainly about money and status.
In their own reality, the bourgeois center sees itself as the representative of democracy in a struggle against anti-democrats. This is nonsense, of course, because the AfD also wants to pour its system-supporting demands into laws. That is as democratic as things in the Federal Republic have always been. Its mix of nationalism, authoritarianism, chauvinism, neoliberal economic policy, and sanctimonious moralizing is simply distributed a little differently and expressed more bluntly than by the old parties.
CDU in blueNeither mainstream nor alternative media like to talk about how much less the AfD’s program differs from the CDU’s than many assume. One striking example sounds as if copied directly from one of the Christian Democratic parties: the AfD wants to give special support to Christianity – in the very federal state with the lowest proportion of church members, at not even 14%.
Like the CDU, the AfD demands unpaid compulsory work for asylum seekers. But in parts of Saxony-Anhalt, this already exists. Municipal