By Anjan Roy
Does history, in the sense of collective memory of a community, play a role in a contemporary election? Yes, it does, going by the results of a significant election fight in Germany last Sunday.
An extreme right-wing party, Alternative fur Germany, (AfD) has won a historic victory in a regional state level election in the country, which has sent shock waves throughout European Union, and gleeful reaction in Russia. Its ripples have crossed the Atlantic and US president, Donald Trump, noted the results in his social media account.
Europe is sitting up and wondering whether this is a small beginning in a recrudescence of German nationalism. Maybe, Europe is still in a psychosis over its Nazi experience.
AfD has won a resounding election victory on Sunday, over its newest rival, the conservative Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU), which rules at the federal level with its social democratic party partner —SPD— in a coalition.
The AfD is promoting a view of Germany as the land of Otto von Bismarck, rather than that of Hitler. It is proposing study of nineteenth century Germany and German unification, casting aside any guilt of Hitler regime and national socialism, persecution and war.
Bismarck had unified numerous small principalities and kingdoms into what later became Germany in twentieth century. The party is talking of “more Bismarck and less Hitler.”
Not absolving the Nazi regime of its atrocities, the AfD is representing those born after the Second World War who are professing they have nothing to do with the Nazi period. Today’s Germans need not be laden with a sense of guilt and ashamed of their country.
“National pride is the most normal thing in the world,” and that must come back to Germany, is what the leader of the winning party has said.
The important aspect of the win is that this is the first time that an extreme right-wing party has won which decries and refutes the entire basis of German politics since the Second World War.
All mainline German political parties have unequivocally denounced German history of the nineteen thirties, of Nazi rule and its policies. German mainline politics was dominated by a sense of national guilt, amounting to a rejection of national pride.
AfD denies all that and says national pride is legitimate and an essential part of a nation’s identity. As the BBC quoted a supporter of the party in Saxony-Anhalt, “Germany is a country of thinkers and poets”. Nothing to be laden with shame of the history of Nazi period of pogrom and war.
In practical politics, AfD is proposing a new state policy of “remigration”, along with the theme of Germany for Germans. Politicians are wondering if this means large scale deportation. This is a rejection and reversal of the policies of Angela Merkel, a former chancellor of Germany, who had opened up German borders to admit scores of refugees fleeing war in Syria.
Merkel’s decision was a sort of continuation of German policies for a liberal migration regime since the Second World War. The war had wiped out a majority of German working age population. The governments in the post war days had liberally allowed migration, specially from Turkey, to work as gast-arbiter or guest workers. Many of these guest workers and their children had been integrated in German society.
However, a sharp reaction against migration began coalescing into a political movement as incidents of crime shot up overnight after allowing the Syrian migration. There were numerous incidents of stabbing and violence involving the recent migrants.
These sporadic episodes, as well as, increasing economic difficulties following liberal imports from China, which affected established German businesses, had bred dissatisfaction about presence of foreigners in general. Against this socio-economic background, the drift towards extreme right-wing politics was clearly discernible.
The rise of the AfD was in this socio-economic background and it articulated the anxieties and fears of the common German citizen. The right-wing politics was particularly acute in the eastern part of the country, which had emerged from decades of Communist domination since Second World War. Saxony-Anhalt, which had now given the first taste of massive election victory to the right wing AfD, is in the very heart of eastern Germany.
This correspondent remembers his visit to several regions of East Germany in 1984 as part of a months-long study programme and stay in West Berlin. East Germany of those days, still under Communist occupation from former USSR, definitely looked run-down, poor, a sordid country when compared with the West.
During many subsequent visits to the country, which was now unified, this correspondent found a new reality. Those East Germans, who were constantly looking for an escape to the prosperous and freer western part, were now in a nostalgic state of mind. The former eastern Germans felt as if they were second-class citizens. They were a people remembering the more certain days of East Germany even though much less prosperous.
This correspondent remembers a German friend who was a diplomat in Delhi representing the East German state. While meeting him in his home town in the East, I found him leading an impecunious life. Compared to that he had spacious bungalow in Delhi with a fleet of orderlies and diplomatic car.
Back home, all he could afford was an umbrella to protect against the incessant rain and the U-bahn (underground metro) to move around. A small job in a local company provided his sustenance.
No wonder, former east Germany is electing the AfD party to power. It is the assertion of the ordinary German to his right to job, life and his essential German-ness. (IPA Service)
