Anti-mosque demonstrators in Cologne in 2007

FOR MONTHS IN THIS SPACE I have been writing about the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment and “respectable” far-right parties in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. While such feelings and parties come and go and have rarely amounted to much since 1945, a new report being presented in Berlin today shows that right wing ideas are becoming increasingly acceptable in Germany and have, in fact, moved into “the center of society.”

The Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s new 180-page report The Center in Crisis: Far Right Attitudes in Germany in 2010 finds that “in 2010 there was a significant increase in anti-democratic and racist attitudes.” The survey of 2,411 representative citizens of German ethnic background and of all social classes between the ages of fourteen and ninety conducted last spring found among other things that 34.3 percent of the population believe there are too many foreigners in the country and that they should be sent home in times of high unemployment. They agreed wholeheartedly with the statement “the foreigners only come here to exploit our welfare system.” 31.4 percent partially agree with the statement, while just 34 percent reject it altogether. Broken down by region, 47.6 percent of the surveyed persons in the former East Germany agree that immigrants are trouble, while just 30.8 of West Germans feel that way.

 
Turkish döner kebap chef in Berlin

35.6 percent of respondents feel that “Germany is dangerously overrun with foreigners,” making them feel like strangers in their own country. Muslim immigrants fare especially poorly in the study. 58 percent of Germans want to see Muslim religious practices “considerably restricted,” if not banned outright. Between 3.8 and 4.3 million Muslims currently reside in this country of 82 million.

Germany's 100,000 Jews do better, but are still not exactly a popular group. And yet they have more friends in the former East Germany than in the West: 11.9 percent of East Germans agree with the statement that “Jews, more than other people, use dirty tricks to achieve their ends,” while 15.6 percent of West Germans see Jews as a problem. Overall, 15.1 percent of Germans believe that “Jews still have too much influence,” and 16.4 percent believe that “the Jews have something unique and peculiar about them and don’t fit in with us.”

There is some good news: 93 percent of those surveyed view democracy as the preferred form of government, and three quarters approve of the ideals expressed in the German constitution. And yet only 46 percent believe that German democracy is on the right track, and a whopping 90 percent think that the government has become so unresponsive that there is no point in getting politically involved.

So if democracy is a washout, what then? Back in September, a different survey found that nearly a quarter of the population was eager to vote for a potential new right-wing party under the leadership of the anti-Muslim economist Thilo Sarrazin. The report mirrors these findings. It discovered that 23.6 percent of the respondents (and 27.4 percent of those living in the former East Germany) agree with the openly fascist statement: “What Germany needs is a single strong party that embodies the Volksgemeinschaft [national community, a Nazi term for the racist state] as a whole.” But when asked specifically whether they believed a dictatorship (a loaded term in Germany) would be better, only 8.8 said yes. But then again, 16.1 agree with the statement: “We need a Führer [leader] who would lead Germany with a strong hand for the good of all.” It all depends on how you phrase the question.

The Leipzig-based team of researchers under the leadership of psychology professor Elmar Brähler has been conducting these surveys since 2002. While the figures vary from year to year depending on economic and social developments in the country, Brähler and his staff believe that, thanks to economic woes and massive structural dislocations over the past years, far-right ideas are becoming more acceptable and have firmly implanted themselves in the center of society, among all social groups, “and not just among [extreme right-wing] people in the East.”

 
Ralph Giordano, a declared enemy of "flat-rate huggers,
one-eyed xenophiles, social romantics, professional do-gooders,
and appeasement apostles" - not to mention Muslims...

Brähler's report matches a study that criminologist Christian Pfeiffer released earlier this week, showing that particularly young Germans reject Turks, placing them at the very bottom of their list of foreigners. 38 percent said they "didn't want to live next door to Turks." In the meantime, Germany's most prominent Muslim-basher, the neocon journalist and Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano, poured ice water on President Köhler's statement during his Unification Day address last weekend that not only Christianity and Judaism but also "Islam belongs to Germany." In a widely discussed open letter, Giordano blasted Köhler's "xenophile" sentiment and helpfully proclaimed that "immigration isn't the problem, Islam is the problem."

Giordano and the other Muslim-haters make good points when it comes to fundamentalist Islam's attitudes towards human rights and gender equality. They're a bit like those people who see worlds of distance between "anti-Semitism," "anti-Zionism," and "anti-Judaism." The trouble is that a political movement seeking to draw upon this anti-foreign potential is not likely to make such fine distinctions but will instead seek to ride hatred of Islam and foreignness in general to political victory. Today's report is just another warning shot in Europe's rush rightward. Nora Langenbacher, a spokeswoman for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is one of Germany’s premiere institutions for political education, called the report’s findings “an alarm signal for politics and society.”