From an excellent long article on AfD by Christopher Caldwell:
Harald Martenstein, a conservative columnist for Welt and hardly an AfD backer, took part in a debate in Hamburg last winter over whether to ban the AfD, and shocked the audience by contemptuously throwing the question back at his mostly progressive audience. “You know that you are not trying to prevent the Fourth Reich, but only to eliminate your political competition,” Martenstein said. “It would be child’s play to keep the AfD down. All you would have to do is tackle a few problems that are real problems.”
It’s not paywalled, so you can read the whole thing. And it’s exactly what I say. If anybody in Germany really thinks that AfD is dangerous, defeating it would be extremely easy. All you need to do is listen to the people who want less migration, deportations, and cheap energy. But everybody to the left of AfD, not only in Germany but in Western Europe at large, clearly decided that everything should be sacrificed to the cause of mass migration. The economy, women’s rights, gay rights, the welfare state: all of it has been thrown away to get more Muslim migrants.
People say that Alice Weidel is being hypocritical, leading a far-right political party while being a lesbian. But she explained that in a speech that I listened to in the original German. She said that you can’t have your queer lifestyle while welcoming millions of people from a culture that despises gays. I don’t like Wiedel, but I agree. I strongly believe that it is a great and wonderful achievement of Western civilization that gay people should be able to live their lives unmolested and unpersecuted. It is also a great and wonderful achievement that women should be able to be out in public unmolested and unbothered. That this all of a sudden became a far-right position is weird, but that’s how things are.

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