“These AfD supporters were middle-class, educated Germans in suits,” he says. “It made me speechless that they felt comfortable enough to yell out their aversion to Muslims and foreigners in the middle of the afternoon in Munich’s city center. They merely smiled when I called them neo-Nazis.” [...]
Indeed, with the AfD expected to enter the lower house of parliament after the election, many of its legislators will bring a mindset far to the right of even the most conservative voices in Merkel’s party.
All the parties in the running have vowed to shun the AfD in negotiations to form a new coalition government. The extreme far right within the AfD is large, so this strong presence in the next parliament will be a power base to broaden its influence and media presence. [...]
Another potential AfD parliamentarian, Dubravko Mandic, 37, considers helping refugees a “modern Reichsarbeitsdienst” – the Nazis’ state labor service. He calls "traitors" people who reject the slogan “Germany only belongs to Germans,” and he has repeatedly called Barack Obama a “token black” president. Thomas Seitz, 50, a public prosecutor in southern Germany, where the AfD is particularly strong, calls refugees “migrassors” on Facebook – a play on migrants and aggressors. [...]
But even Petry distanced herself from her own party this week, and in an interview with the daily Leipziger Volkszeitung she said she was shocked at the headlines her party was producing. She said these were headlines “that make me ask myself every time, ‘can this be true?’ and then, if it’s really true, this is a scandal.”
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