This is terrifying but not surprising — when people are hurting, scared and ignored, dangerous demagogues step into the vacuum with easy answers and scapegoats. The AfD’s promises aren’t “radical change” for ordinary people so much as radical exclusion: segregating refugee children, erasing LGBT visibility, rewriting Nazi history and building a bureaucracy to deport people. Those are attacks on fundamental rights, social solidarity and the kind of pluralist democracy most of us believe in. At the same time we can’t pretend voters’ frustrations are irrelevant — high energy bills, housing pressure, rural decline and a feeling that mainstream parties stopped listening are real and must be addressed with bold, progressive policies: stronger social protections, green jobs, affordable housing and meaningful local investment. But fixing those problems requires democracy and facts, not xenophobia or cozying up to foreign autocrats. If democracy is to hold, the centre and left must stop treating this as a moral lecture and start offering tangible solutions while mobilising communities, protecting minorities and calling out extremist networks and foreign interference. This is a moment to defend pluralism — and to show that solidarity, not division, is the route to a better future.
