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Courtesy of the Times.
More than half of Germans say they feel like strangers in their own land because of Muslim immigration, according to a study of the country’s rising far-right tendencies. Researchers also found that one in nine people believes the German population is “naturally superior to other peoples” and that one in three thinks the state has been “overwhelmed by foreigners to a dangerous degree”.
“Xenophobia is becoming ever stronger and more widespread across the whole country,” said Oliver Decker, one of the directors of the University of Leipzig report. Right-wing extremists remain a fringe group in Germany, accounting for 8.5 per cent of the population in the east and 5.4 per cent in the west, but illiberal and anti-migrant views appear to be much more widespread. The report estimated that 42 per cent of the public had “authoritarian” leanings, outnumbering the 29 per cent firmly committed to the principles of democracy.
In all, 65 per cent of Germans were judged to show pronounced signs of “authoritarian aggression”, such as the desire to shut out minorities or silence people who did not share their political opinions, and 44 per cent would like a ban on Muslims moving to Germany. Ethnic prejudices and yearnings for a “leader who rules Germany with a strong hand for the good of the people” were most common in the former states of East Germany, which were subject to authoritarian rule and experienced relatively low levels of immigration between 1949 and 1989. Nearly 40 per cent of east Germans agreed to some extent that “under certain circumstances, dictatorship is the best form of government for the national interest”, compared to 23 per cent in the west.
There were also some signs of a decline in far-right opinions, however. Antisemitism is as low as it has been at any point in the project’s 16-year history, and support for a right-wing dictatorship has also fallen. Most measurements of prejudice remain below the peak they hit in 2012. The findings, published in a book called Flight into Illiberalism, are based on a survey of 1,900 people in west Germany and 500 in the east. While East and West Germany were formally reunited in 1990, the two regions remain in many ways distinct from each other. The survey found that 30 per cent of people in the former East German states still felt that they were treated as second-class citizens. Angela Merkel, the chancellor, has welcomed 1.6 million migrants to Germany since 2014. The influx is widely perceived to have doomed her fourth term. After suffering a drubbing in state elections last month she announced that she would step down after 18 years as chancellor in December. Her party, the Christian Democratic Union, suffered its worst result for decades in the regional poll.