Far-right close to seat in German parliament

Influx of refugees helps fringe party make gains

FRANKFURT AN DER ODER, Germany — Two years after Germany took in more than a million asylum seekers, there’s scant evidence of the influx here in this struggling former communist stronghold hard on the Polish border.

There are no mosques, few ethnic-minority restaurants and only a scattering of nonwhite residents.

But in recent weeks, Muslim faces — a man with a long, scraggly beard, a woman fully veiled but for the eyes — have been everywhere, staring down from posters that bear the message: “Islam doesn’t belong in Germany.”

The posters are the handiwork of the Alternative for Germany party. And the message is part of a campaign likely to propel the party, known as the AfD, to a historic outcome in national elections Sunday. For the first time since 1961, Germany is on track to seat a far-right party in Parliament.

The AfD’s success has unnerved Germans who see the party as the ominous vanguard of a return to a far darker past built on prejudice and hate. In the final days of campaigning, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s allies have deemed the party an affront to the German constitution, while her top rival, center-left candidate Martin Schulz, described the AfD as “our enemies.”

But as the contest for a parliamentary seat here in Frankfurt an der Oder shows, it is far from clear whether the AfD’s rise represents a German lurch to the extreme right or simply a protest among voters fed up with a cross-party consensus that on key issues has drifted steadily left.

“The German political establishment has made it pretty easy to fill a market niche,” said Jürgen Neyer, a politics professor at this city’s European University Viadrina. “It’s as if all car manufacturers offered only red cars. Now someone is offering a black car. Wow! Is it better? Hard to say. But it’s something different.”

One of the establishment parties is led by Merkel, who has governed for 12 years and is overwhelmingly favored to win another term.

The other three parties have been hard-pressed to meaningfully differentiate themselves from the chancellor on policy, endorsing her decision to welcome refugees and standing beside her as she has reached beyond her conservative base to capture the center ground on the environment, the economy and other major policies.

Then there are the left and right fringes. In a country with pungent memories of both communism and fascism, the extremes have long struggled. They remain relatively small, hovering at around 10 percent.

But both have been growing, especially the right. They have caught in their currents disaffected voters who had begun to see German politics as a conflict-free zone where Merkel decided and everyone else nodded along.

The AfD got its start in 2013 as a rebellion against European Union plans to bail out debt-stricken Greece.

But it was the backlash against Merkel’s response to the 2015 refugee crisis that came to define the AfD’s image, and that pushed its support to 15 percent or more early last year.

Michael Kappeler The Associated Press Chancellor Angela Merkel drinks a cup of coffee Saturday with election campaign workers in Berlin.