Like many here in Germany, my home country, I have been following the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland obsessively, expecting it to dominate the state elections in eastern Germany this September: polls put it ahead in all three states that are set to vote. Imagine Reform UK winning the north of England by promising to target and deport refugees and immigrants. It feels threatening to people like me.
I guess my alarm is no surprise, given that I come from a Vietnamese family. But I have been shocked to learn that even immigrant Germans are considering voting for the AfD. There are no numbers on this yet, but still, I cannot help but feel a personal sense of disappointment. How can people like me side with them?
The Turkish-German journalist Selma Duman called the AfD the “only alternative to the monolithic bloc of other parties”, which she bashes for “their psycho terror during the Covid pandemic”.
In the Bundestag, there are elected AfD members with Dutch-Italian, Czech and African American roots, in a party that is making headlines for its connections to Putin’s Russia and white nationalists.
During a recent court hearing in Münster, three members of the AfD from immigrant backgrounds testified that they had not experienced discrimination within the party. That case concerns an AfD appeal against a decision by the German domestic intelligence service to place the party under surveillance on suspicion of extremism.
For many years, I have thought of immigrant Germans as a community bound by a sense of exclusion and a longing to be accepted – feelings I know so well from growing up here. Now I realise that we can be worlds apart. According to the 2022 microcensus, close to a quarter of the German population (20.2 million people) are immigrants or children of immigrants, with that number increasing. Why do I assume that we should all share the view that diversity is better than nationalism?
Still, I don’t understand how anybody could support a party that proudly promotes an agenda of “remigration” (a euphemism for deportation) for hundreds of thousands of people.
I reached out to one of the politicians who gave evidence at the court hearing: Robert Athanasios Lambrou, co-leader of the AfD in the state of Hessen. Born in Münster to a Greek father and a German mother, he heads a group of 50 party members with migrant backgrounds – set up to improve the image of the party – and has become the AfD face of diversity. Softly spoken and polite, the 56-year-old former businessman seemed keen to present himself as a reasonable conservative. Repeatedly, he complained about “false framing by the media”, which has reported on an AfD politician who used a Nazi slogan, AfD offices that employ people across the neo-Nazi spectrum or party members that are accused of serious crimes – one former MP is currently awaiting trial on terrorism charges.
Like many second-generation immigrants, Lambrou grew up with the sense of being different – at school, he was the only child from a multicultural family. He was 15 when he dropped his Greek first name in favour of his German one. “I felt that it was important to make a clear decision in favour of one culture instead of wavering back and forth between two,” he said. Later, it was the Greek debt crisis that led him to the AfD. Lambrou was against bailing out the country even though his Greek relatives told him in tense family conversations that they were hoping for just that. He cited economic arguments for his position, but I wondered if, deep down, it was also his way of showing he was more German than Greek.
During our two-hour interview, my thoughts wandered back to my own childhood in Berlin. Strangers often asked me where I was from, expressing surprise that a girl with black hair spoke German flawlessly. My mother, who came here in the 1970s as a student, believed that in the hierarchy of German society people like us were second class, obliged to prove our usefulness. “You need to work twice as hard in order to be accepted,” she would say. Germans, she told me, were suspicious of immigrants, so we had to show that we were “the good ones”.
It’s a toxic but widespread belief among immigrants that came up again and again when Lambrou spoke about his own encounters with immigrant voters. According to him, some felt it was “madness” that Germany took in more than a million people in 2015 – the majority fleeing the war in Syria. “Many immigrants had to work hard for a long time to make it here,” he told me. They don’t want to be lumped together with the newcomers who they believe are dragging everybody’s reputation down.
A 2018 poll showed that during that year’s election in Hesse, the AfD got slightly more support from immigrant voters than from white Germans (14% versus 13%).
It pains me, but I understand where this drawbridge mentality comes from. Immigrants who have “made it” often seek to melt into the middle class by moving away from ethnic neighbourhoods, putting a distance between themselves and those who aren’t affluent or don’t speak the language. In the hierarchy of society they look up, not down. Rivalries might also play a role: I have met Russians who distrust Turks, Vietnamese who don’t like Chinese, Iranians who feel superior to Egyptians.
On X, I come across a post by one of Lambrou’s colleagues, Anna Nguyen, a second-generation Vietnamese like me, and a new member of the AfD’s parliamentary group in Hesse. Another Vietnamese-German wrote to her: “As a Vietnamese with the same last name, I feel ashamed for you. You’re blind! You’re hoping for a steep career in an inhuman party. But according to them, you and I will never be German. Wake up!” To which Nguyen replied: “I’m terribly sorry, but I didn’t realise that I wasn’t allowed to have a different political opinion.”
According to the migration researcher Naika Foroutan, social media has become a powerful tool for the AfD to target immigrant voters. She noticed that on TikTok, AfD members have begun posting videos aimed at the conservative German-Turkish community – and some influencers have picked up their message, ranting about there being “too many refugees”.
Just as not all women are feminists, not all people with immigrant heritage are fans of an open-door policy. Think of Suella Braverman, former British home secretary, Vivek Ramaswamy, a former candidate for the Republican nomination in the US and Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally in France. Do they, subconsciously, think that by slamming others into the category of “bad immigrants” they will be seen as “the good ones”? Are they trying to be overzealous nationalists because they want to demonstrate how British, American or French they really are?
Lambrou who wore a national flag pinned to his blazer during our video interview, calls for more patriotism and laments that too many Germans feel “ashamed” of their country. (On account of its Nazi past, open displays of national pride are widely considered insensitive.) This, he claims, opens the door to “the Islamisation of everyday life”. “Germany is weak while political Islam is bursting with self-confidence,” he alleges. When the city of Frankfurt decided to put up Ramadan lights, like London, for example, he called it “a gesture of submission towards Islam”.
The more we spoke, the clearer it became that he uses his own cultural background as a shield. Since he’s half-Greek, his views can hardly be prejudiced towards immigrants, right? This makes him and his small circle of immigrant colleagues very valuable to the party. They make it appear less xenophobic than it really is. Indeed, research shows that populist parties across Europe have been sending ethnic minority members to parliaments as “reputational shields”.
Rightwing parties have always exploited the narrative of “good” versus “bad” immigrants. Now the AfD seems to have discovered a new group of voters among immigrant Germans, some of whom seem all too willing to embrace its message and support the party. This doesn’t mean the AfD is any more tolerant, but it has become smarter, and therefore even more threatening.
Khuê Phạm is a German journalist and writer. Her debut novel, Brothers and Ghosts, which is inspired by her Vietnamese family, has just been released
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