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Well done!

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Said Elon Musk last night as Saxony Anhalt voted in its first fascist government since the 1940s.

Brown people, disabled people, Ukrainian people, gay and trans people etc – are now in the firing line.

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  5. Doubtless voted in by the ‘left behind’, as per Trump.

    I was in Frankfurt on German reunification night in October 1990. It felt like a historic occasion, so I and a couple of other publishers on the loose took ourselves to an oompah bar for a night of revelry.

    But no…apart from a perfunctory performance of Deutschland Uber Alles by a lederhosened quartet, which – as always – felt like the wrong song for the occasion, revelry was conspicuous by its absence. I asked a bloke why people weren’t more excited. Why should they be? came the reply. No good will come of it, you’ll see. It’ll cost a fortune and will spoil everything.

    Admittedly Frankfurt isn’t the best place to look for sympathy for the downtrodden masses, but still, I was surprised. It felt to me like WW2 had ended at last. But apparently 86% of former East Germans still feel they’ve had a raw deal compared with West Germans, so I suppose we can expect more results like this.

    • A German ex-colleague’s grandparents were left behind in East Germany. When The Wall came down they were despondent . “We live in a nice house with a tiny rent, free healthcare and an amazing sense of community. That will all soon disappear.”
      They were right.

      • Indeed. Famously, the FRG had to build a wall, landmine its perimeter and shoot people to prevent them escaping the hell of West Germany to the utopia of the Eastern side of the city.

          • Good grief, I’m not saying East Germany was anything other than a horribly repressive communist country – but for one generation at least it provided cheap housing and free healthcare. The analogy between that and, say, car-workers in Luton who think “Where’s my job gone, I’m voting Farage” is surely blindingly obvious?

            • I was only teasing.

              For what it’s worth, I don’t think the people voting for Reform are doing so because they feel they’ve been failed by capitalism. They’re not voting to the left, they’re voting to the right: they want the existing system, with less immigration, less taxes, less benefits and less tolerance.

              The only similarity I can see with Luton is that Luton also has a land mined wall around it and they also shoot you if you try to escape. 🤷‍♂️

                • Hitler seemed like a dream to people at first after the absolute shitshow of the 1920s. The Nazis revitalised industry, built autobahns, got VW up and running, got the trains running on time, flooded the market with cheap consumer goods, everyone had jobs and with the Nazi social infrastructure, a sense of purpose and forward motion. The sense of abject defeat after the war, having to give up valuable territories, having to shoulder crippling reparations, having to basically beg for support and forgiveness – well no more!

                  And then it came – and by that point, people went along with it, all in the name of making Germany great again. I see on the cobblestones here every day in Berlin, the ‘stolpersteine’ – memorial stones outside buildings, marking where Jewish people were dragged out and bundled into carts and taken to the trains, while their neighbours watched and pursed their lips and shook their heads and went back to cooking lunch. And made excuses, rationalised it, pretended it wasn’t happening, or the Jews somehow deserved it. No matter how horrific it got, even at critical junctures such as Kristallnacht – well, as Isherwood wrote, there was a sense of quiet glee amongst many Germans, by now flourishing as an economy and utterly brainwashed with loathing for Jews. The years of blame, led to oppression, led to persecution, and led to elimination.

                  I can see the normalising of similar rhetoric at work now across Germany and it is horrifying.

                  • We have Stolpersteine in the Altstadt of Bonn as well. I cycle over them every day. Sachsen-Anhalt seems a long way away from the liberal shores of the Rhine and the far sleepy outreaches of Schleswig Holstein where a good friend spent some of his summer, but it isn’t really.

                    As the dark forces of intolerance and fear gather and spread and grow, whether in eastern Germany or in southern English seaports, I hope that the majority who are not included in their numbers will stand up and be counted, resisting the malign influence and spread of pernicious rabble rousers.

              • Things are often a bit more nuanced. For example, lots of South Asian origin and a few Black people in Luton voted for Brexit, largely because they didn’t like the influx of Eastern Europeans.

                There is, of course, no wall around Luton, else the White British and Irish population wouldn’t have declined from 85% in 1981 to 72% in 2001 to an estimated 30 to35% now. ( In terms of actual numbers, that’s 150,000 to around 75,000 in 2025)

                • Yes of course. I know this only too well, coming from an immigrant Asian family, how bigoted people of any ethnicity can be. We have racist uncles too. Just look at Priti Patel, Suella Braverman or Zia Yusuf to see how self-hating and bitter Brits of south Asian origin can be towards new migrants.

    • Not sure one bar in one city proved anything. I was living next door in Switzerland and I felt a great wave of optimism. However it seems to me that there is a tradition of extreme right support in Eastern Europe that was possibly held in check by communism

  8. I’m not sure the ‘patriots’ formally of my acquaintance vote.
    What they seem to want is…
    No brown people.
    More beer.
    Ingerlund to win the World Cup.
    A fight.
    Some coke.
    Another fight.
    A shag.

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