> It's interesting that you say that, because the former GDR is where AfD is having the most success. Y'know, the part of the country that was run as a puppet of the Soviet Union and was more stridently "anti-fascist" for the majority of the postwar period? [0]

It's running strong in the racist part of the country. The area of Germany where they were literally tying up people at the side of the road and the police did nothing. Or where a bunch of racists stood and chanted racist chants at a bus and the police made the people on the bus get off. That's the area where they have the racist marches. Aka the poor part of Germany. Where there are poor people there are people blaming someone for them being poor.

But not in all of the former GDR.

> Most Germans today only know of the horrors of Nazism from the history books. They have no real experience with it. There is nothing special about any particular nationality that makes them immune to the scourge of reanimated fascism. The Soviet Union bore horrible losses to the Nazis in WWII and the largest former SSR, Russia, is more-or-less a fascist state today. A salute isn't as alienating as "being left behind" by the world.

You seem to think I'm saying they're immune. I'm saying that a large majority of the country is very anti the far-right. So much so that the CDU had to walk back a vote where they voted with the AfD, this was a vote for a permanent border control. It passed the first vote, the second vote it did not after Germany had massive protests over the fact the CDU broke the unwritten rule that mainstream parties don't cooperate with the far-right parties.

> A salute isn't as alienating as "being left behind" by the world.

I think you think this is profound but it's just showing a lack of overall insight. Being left behind is basically what facists want.

> You seem to think I'm saying they're immune. I'm saying that a large majority of the country is very anti the far-right. So much so that the CDU had to walk back a vote where they voted with the AfD, this was a vote for a permanent border control. It passed the first vote, the second vote it did not after Germany had massive protests over the fact the CDU broke the unwritten rule that mainstream parties don't cooperate with the far-right parties.

And?

There were people who hated the NSDAP back in the 1920s. Hitler was seen as an egomaniacal leech with no aristocratic roots and a band of street toughs to back him up. No one wanted to cooperate with them in the Weimar Republic.

But the Nazis said the right things to the right people, and developed a voter bloc. After a while, it does not matter if you hate working on legislation with the far-right. They have the votes, and if you want government to "work", you have to cater to their whims.

As there are more and more migrants moving into Germany, and more and more international competition in the manufacturing sector worldwide, you can generally count on more and more people getting interested in at least part of AfD's message.

The fact that Björn Höcke was kept in AfD after decrying the presence of Holocaust memorials on German soil, and was given a token punishment for using far-right propaganda in campaigning, reminds me a lot of Trump's trajectory.