The head of Germany’s far-right populist AfD, has condemned what he has called the “theatrics” around the death of Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny, claiming it has been exploited for political means.
Tino Chrupalla said the speech of Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya at the Munich Security Conference last weekend had been “stage managed”, implying that it had been instrumentalised by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to shore up her own support having just launched her own bid for reelection.
Why are they getting so much support? Is it just a protest vote against the liberal status quo that people feel fed up with (like with Brexit, Trump, etc.)?
The AfD is a populiststs party. They are really good at giving easy “solutions” for complex problems. Then we also have the shift towards the right and we also experience the downsides of late stage capitalism. If you combine all of these together you get the perfect environment for populiststic right wing party’s.
The shift to the right is also enforced by the so-called centrist parties like the CDU, which are basically using the same talking points in regard of migration with a little softer phrasing. The party chairmen of the CDU and CSU (bavarian sister-party of the CDU) are both populists with a long (and documented) history of right wing opinions (like slandering ukrainian refugees, not participating in anti-rape legislation, …). So, the political climate is pretty good for fascists, thanks to the so-called centrists.
Probably because they (like others political parties in others countries) propose some supposed easy&fast solutions to problems that the other parties basically refuse to even acknowledge.
That the solution does not work (and they probably know it) is irrelevant to the people who have, or think to have, such problems, they simply see AfD to want to take care of their problems.
It is the same reason why the right wing won in Italy last time, not because the people suddently became fascist/nazist/whatever but simply because the left wing talked only about the problems of a small minority while basically ignoring the problems of the majority of people, and this alineate even long time left wing voters.