Soeren Kern 
Other political and media elites are ramping up a months-long campaign to delegitimize AfD voters as agitators, arsonists, far-right extremists, fascists, Nazis, populists and xenophobes.
German media are also churning out stories — many of which are based on hearsay — aimed at discrediting the AfD. The magazine, Stern, published this headline: «Reports of Nazi Songs at AfD-Election Party.» The Berliner Kurier: «Former Teacher Calls AfD Leader Frauke Petry a Liar.» Die Welt: «AfD Candidate Accused of Running Escort Service.» Berliner Morgenpost: «After AfD Coup, Saxony-Anhalt’s Hoteliers Are Anxious.» Stern: «AfD and Donald Trump: Hate is the Main Issue.» Die Zeit: «AfD Principles: Not So Important.»
On Election Day, Die Zeit ridiculed the AfD’s 70-point political platform by using the following bullet points:
«More popular referendums, more monitoring of citizens, stiffer penalties for criminals, dissolve the EU, shrink the state, lower taxes, cut social spending, put women back in the kitchen, ban employment quotas for women, make it harder to file for divorce, abolish abortion, close borders, harass Muslims, ruin the climate, expand nuclear power, expand the military, more private weapons, etc.»
Taxpayer-funded ZDF public television broadcast an interview with Thomas Kliche, a German psychologist, who compared AfD voters to «children who are stubborn and unreasonable.» The only way to deal with such people, he said, is «just have patience, ignore the stupidity, and confront it with rationalism.»
According to Kliche, AfD voters are suffering from «macro-social stress» induced by globalization (i.e., mass migration):
«People react with various forms of shock management. This begins with retrograde, regressive, childish fantasies that everything can be as it was before. Some believe that by shouting ‘We are the People!’ [the main slogan of anti-government demonstrators in East Germany in 1989-1990, reminding their leaders that Germany should be ruled by the people, not by an undemocratic party claiming to represent them], the migrants will disappear…. They have no solutions, just fantasies. Building a fence — this is a fantasy. Separate yourself from the world — that is a fantasy.»
Meanwhile, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has called on German intelligence to begin monitoring the AfD, presumably in an effort to silence critics of the government’s migration policy. Gabriel — who leads the SPD, which also suffered significant losses on March 13 — has called the AfD a party of «right-wing extremists» who «use the language of the Nazis.» At the same time, Gabriel has called for Germany to take in even more migrants by airlifting them into the country directly from the Middle East.
By contrast, Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Socialist Union (CSU), the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, said the rise of the AfD amounts to a «tectonic shift in the political landscape of Germany.» He warned that tectonic shifts trigger earthquakes that cause irreversible changes. Seehofer demanded that Merkel reverse course: «It cannot be that after such an election result, the answer to the electorate is: everything will go on as before.»
CSU politician Hans-Peter Uhl summed it up this way: «I expect the chancellor clearly to admit: ‘Yes, we have understood. We are going to return to the voters. Politics must move toward the voter, not the other way around. This is called democracy.'»
Merkel has not said if she plans to run for a fourth term in 2017.
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter. His first book, Global Fire, will be out in 2016.
