Germany's pro-EU stance, the rock on which the Continent was united, is being challenged, writes DEREK SCALLYin Berlin
AMID THE ruined buildings with shattered windows, Storkower Strasse eastern Berlin is an unlikely place for a political revolution.
Yet that is what the men are planning on the fourth floor of the renovated tower block that still smells of East German disinfectant.
Die Freiheit – Freedom – is the name of their political party, which hopes to win disaffected voters uneasy about migration and unsettled by the euro zone crisis.
The moment has been carefully chosen. For six decades, Germany’s staunch, unquestioning pro-EU consensus was the rock on which the continent was united, its people apparently inoculated by history against extremism, populism and intolerance.
The last year has given pause for thought. First there was the runaway bestseller Germany Does Itself In. Ostensibly an analysis of failed integration of minorities, this book goes further, its author, Thilo Sarrazin, linking genetics and intelligence and suggesting the future Germany will be dominated by a slow-witted Muslim majority.
The 1.5 million copies sold indicate a hunger in certain quarters for discussion of these issues. German politicians who protest about Sarrazin risk being dubbed elitist and out of touch.
According to received wisdom, Die Freiheit is the type of populist party that cannot work in Germany. But the party has studied closely Dutchman Geert Wilders, and hopes for a strong result in Berlin’s city-state election in the autumn.
Heading the party’s Berlin campaign is René Stadtkewitz, a former Christian Democrat (CDU) disillusioned by the centrist course the party has taken under Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The mild-mannered 46-year-old has little of Geert Wilders's wild-eyed charisma, but he hopes to win over Thilo Sarrazin readers. Talking to The Irish Times, he quickly conflates Muslim immigrants with Islamist extremists to create an existential threat to German society.
Asked whether he sees parallels between Germans demonising Muslims now and Jews then, he deftly turns the argument around.
“Nobody could imagine back then with the rise of the National Socialists that a handful of crazies could drag an entire country into the abyss,” he says. “But look at Sudan or Turkey and you see . . . a terrible new ideology, and once again we have to defend ourselves.”
Germany must shake off decades of “misunderstood tolerance” and encourage Muslims in Germany to “secularise, to free themselves from the sharia haze . . . of killing people who aren’t believers”.
“Of course we are still talking about a minority,” he says, “but demographic developments suggest in Europe we could soon have a majority. And if we don’t have the strength to tell them now what freedom is, one day we won’t be able to be to.”
Beyond anti-Islamic slogans, his party is critical of the EU and the euro zone rescue effort, saying it will amount to nothing if “the will is not there to admit the construction mistakes at the heart of the euro”.
Dr Kai-Olaf Lang, of Berlin’s SWP think-tank, says considerable hurdles still stand between a populist party such as Die Freiheit and a political breakthrough. No one in Die Freiheit or the neo-Nazi NPD has enough charisma to bewitch voters, he says, nor do these parties have the resources needed to make an impact in Germany’s vast federal state structure.
Crucially, he says, no populist party yet enjoys the favour of the best-selling tabloid Bild.
“We don’t yet see the right constellation,” he says, “though polls suggest the demand from electorate would be there, around 15-20 per cent.”
It's a different story over the border in Austria, where the support of the Kronenzeitung– read by one in four Austrians – helped the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) into power in Vienna a decade ago with the conservative People's Party (ÖVP).
The pressures of office triggered a party meltdown and the charismatic leader, Jörg Haider, left to form a new party. His fatal car crash in 2008 solved that problem and now the FPÖ is surging ahead in polls under Haider’s equally charismatic protege, Heinz-Christian Strache.
With 26 per cent support, the FPÖ is Austria’s second most popular party, tapping traditional Austrian reservations about Islam, migration and the EU and amplifying them into a broad euroscepticism or even xenophobia around tomorrow’s opening of Austria’s labour market to EU neighbours.
To its critics, the FPÖ is a textbook example of how a permanent populist presence reshapes political landscapes, creating me-too copycats and desensitising the public to extreme views. The Austrian interior ministry’s annual reports into political extremism in the country devote considerable attention to animal rights extremists but make no reference to meetings between FPÖ figures and neo-Nazis, filled with Hitler salutes and Nazi symbols.
Hans Öllinger, an Austrian Green Party MP who monitors extremism, says Austria’s major parties no longer risk chastising a party today that might be their coalition partner tomorrow.
“The People’s Party in particular doesn’t want to do anything to upset its government option with the FPÖ,” says Mr Öllinger, “so everything in Austria that might suggest far-right connections is airbrushed out.”
The populist Swiss People’s Party (SVP) has long since abandoned the airbrush. One in four Swiss voters backs the granddaddy of European populism and, these days, when people think of the alpine state they are as likely to think of the SVP’s recent poster campaigns as of Heidi and Toblerone.
There was a failed migration referendum on deporting foreign criminals in 2008 that used a poster of a black sheep being kicked off the Swiss flag by white sheep. A successful 2009 referendum banning minarets on Swiss mosques had SVP posters with missile-like minarets lined up on the Swiss flag.
The party delights in denying the obvious racist undertones of its campaigns but, in doing so, has transformed direct democracy referendums into what one analyst dubs “resentment events”.
“They have freed politics from the bothersome burden of having to be sensible,” writes Swiss analyst Peter Schneider.
“Complaining that populists contribute nothing to solve problems misses the point entirely, just like telling a hooligan that violence doesn’t solve anything.”