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Germany: Who are the AfD's immigrant voters?

30 13
12.01.2025

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) sets out its views on immigrants clearly in its program: "The AfD views the ideology of multiculturalism as a serious threat to social peace and to the continued existence of the nation as a cultural entity."

And yet multiculturalism doesn't appear to be a serious threat to the AfD itself: In the past few months, more and more of the far-right's messaging has been aimed at voters from Germany's many immigrant communities — with some success.

Born in Turkey, 55-year-old Ismet Var has lived in Germany since his childhood, been a German citizen since 1994, and a supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) since it was founded in 2013.

Var works as a delivery driver in the German capital, and his work was directly hit by the rise in fuel prices following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now he can't understand why so much money is being "thrown away" on economic and military aid for Ukraine. His main concerns, he says, are that taxes are lowered and criminal immigrants get deported.

The latter is already happening — latest statistics show that Chancellor Olaf Scholz's center-left government increased deportations in the last year. "Now! Now they're deporting people!" says Var over a coffee in the international Kreuzberg district of Berlin. "But they didn't used to." He believes that it took the AfD's intervention in the German political scene for the government to act.

As an Alevite, he also feels that Germany has become too tolerant of what he calls "strict Muslims." "I've got nothing against them when they pray at home, but when they do propaganda, then I'm against them," he said.

Var experienced racism as a new arrival in Germany in the 1970s: He remembers a janitor in his building telling him that he and his family wouldn't be there if Hitler were still in power: "But it didn't bother me. I was little," he says.

Anna Nguyen has also experienced plenty of racism in........

© Deutsche Welle


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