Earlier I wrote about the growth of right-wing extremist groups in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the NPD won some seats in the state assembly in a recent election. We like to think that right-wing extremism is a phenomenon limited to the economically and politically disadvantaged states in eastern Germany. But the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung has just released a comprehensive report that shows that right-wing and xenophobic attitudes are endemic to eastern and western Germany.
The study is entitled Vom Rand zur Mitte (From the Fringe to the Center) and is based on a statistically rigorous survey conducted by the Foundation (the first 50 pages of the report deal with the methodology and implementation). The entire report can be downloaded here (pdf file). The report shows that – as might be expected – authoritarian attitudes are prevalent in the east, but western respondents showed a greater presence of antisemitism. In some cases, the eastern respondents were much more open about the roles of women and the ideals of democracy than their western counterparts. But the researchers found widespread intolerance of foreigners in both the east and west – it is very much a mainstream German phenomenon.
It is important to separate this pervasive right-wing orientation from the right-wing extremist parties, such as the NPD. Many Germans who harbor prejudices against foreigners are perfectly comfortable voting for the the mainstream parties:
Ein Ergebnis der Studie ist, dass die großen Parteien Menschen mit einem geschlossenen rechtsextremen Weltbild in ihre Wählerschaft deutlich besser integrieren können, als die rechtsextremen Parteien selbst. Auch die anderen Parteien haben einen hohen Anteil an ausländerfeindlichen Wählern unter ihrer Anhängerschaft. Die Grünen wiederum fallen mit einem relativ hohen Anteil an antisemitischen Wählern auf. Bei der Wertigkeit des rechtsextremen Weltbildes folgen den Wählern der rechtsextremen Parteien die Nichtwähler.
One bright spot in an otherwise bleak study: education is shown as a key antidote to xenophobic and authoritarian orientation.
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Deeply flawed and politically motivated study.. “Ausländerfeindlichkeit” should never be separated from “Antisemitism”, those are just semantics. I’m myself just foreigner but a german passport holder, so when people who were historically prejudiced against their jewish countrymen are now also against me, that would deserve its own category too.
And Islamophobia is strangely comppletely missing from the “measured” factors. I wonder what that has to do with the officially prescribed hyper-zionism in Germany and the very real extermination of the Palestinian and now also Iraqi cultures on the other side. They do however also “measure” social darwinism, but by that measurement the capitalist system itself would be “rechtsextrem”. It’s all very strange and jumbled in this study.
Not to miss the sentence that Green voters are the most “antisemitic”. If there was ever any kind of anti-xenophobic political movement in Germany it is the Greens.
Seems that “rechtsextremismus” is a very arbitrary label asides from authoritarian orientation. These German “experts” were probably not aware of the French Revolutionary Parliament and the meaning of its seating order. I wonder what those guys would have said to such demeaning semi-government studies though. Heads off, maybe?