Alternative for Germany has joined France’s National Rally and Reform U.K. in becoming the most popular party in its country, according to polls.

A poll Tuesday showed Alternative for Germany — which is under surveillance by the country’s intelligence services over suspected extremism — is now the most favored by voters. The survey by broadcaster RTL put the AfD at 26%, ahead of the ruling Christian Democrats at 24%.

This is a high watermark for the European far right, a once fringe movement whose virulently anti-immigration, anti-Islam and culture-war politics were shunned by the mainstream just a decade ago.

Today, these parties have developed deep ties with President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, who openly cite nationalists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as inspirations on policy and tactics.

  • theparadox@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    Can you link me to some credible sources on legitimate problems caused by immigration in Europe? I’m in the US and I don’t see the downside of immigration. Most of the folks angry about immigration here are just being sold a scapegoat.

    Admittedly, we’re much more culturally diverse to begin with, harder to get to, and have quite a large base population so maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges.

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      legitimate problems caused by immigration in Europe

      Just my opinion, but: There are no systematic ones that can’t just as plausibly be explained by anti-immigrant stances of the locals. Yes, of course, immigration also means SOME people immigrating will be bad in one way or another, but statistically significantly not more or less than the amount of bad people born in the country. Most of the problems “with immigrants” arise from a mutual escalation of people not willing to integrate. In short, and without saying which comes first:

      • immigrant does bad thing X
      • anti-immigrant people point at X and claim it’s because they are immigrants
      • some people will believe the accusations and behave more poorly towards immigrants
      • some immigrants will turn the prejudice against them into a dislike / hatred of their host country
      • immigrants do bad things
      • rinse and repeat

      Speaking for Germany, all of this is FAR outweighed by the richness that immigrants bring to our country. Germans - and I say that as a German - really needed (and still need) a lot of lessons in empathy and kind-heartedness - and we have more of that now than 50 years ago, thanks to not only evolution of society, but also thanks to immigrants from the mediterranean - Italians, Spanish, Greek and Turks. If Germany had no immigrants, I would leave this country in an instant.

      • bier@feddit.nl
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        2 hours ago

        The thing that people ( not you of course) just do not understand, is that for a lot of western countries the birth rate is under 2. So every year the population has a larger part of old people.

        Our systems for retirement, government, social programs, etc only really work when more young healthy people are added.

        So we actually really need young immigrants to basically keep the boat floating.

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          There’s that, too. But I hope we can find a way to keep the population size stable at most, because the world already has too many humans…