2023-08-12 13:09:05
In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has the wind in its sails, according to recent polls, which credit the far-right formation with 19 to 22% of voting intentions. A sign of this shift in the country, teachers are resigning in the face of the resurgence of far-right gestures and speeches in schools.
The climate of the political and school return is tense in Germany. Before the summer holidays, several teachers have indeed requested their transfer. They had denounced neo-Nazi signs in their colleges. Not receiving any support, they preferred to leave.
One year before important European and regional elections, the far-right German party has become one of the largest political parties in the country, ten years after its creation.
In the latest surveys, this party now ranks second nationally (19 to 22%), ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, and just behind the Conservatives (26 to 27%), currently in opposition .
“Denounce the professors who would be leftists”
Hélène Miard-Delacroix is a history professor at the Sorbonne, specializing in Germany. Invited to the program Tout un monde, she analyzes these events.
“We have had pressure from the AfD asking students and parents to ‘denounce teachers who are leftists’ and who have comments that do not conform to their vision of how the world should be. For the moment, these are isolated cases. It should not be a trend”, nuances the specialist.
But for her, this phenomenon is “quite revealing of the way in which the main political parties and in particular the AfD – which is on the line of a fight for culture, the ‘Kulturkampf’ in German – intervene in the school , considering that the school is a weak link, a fragile link”.
“Basic German population invaded”
The historian observes that the school has become a new political arena for certain parties. According to her, the AfD sees this institution “as a laboratory where the various tensions of an increasingly diverse and multicultural society are played out and which would highlight – they claim – the violence of certain groups, the inability to some others to integrate, and the state of victimization in which the ‘basic’ German population would be, which would be ‘invaded’.”
In response, “the teachers do not want to play this line”, she believes. “There is a concern on the part of the teachers to see the problems of society entering their schools, in particular this question of anti-Semitism, neo-Nazi signs. From time to time, we see reactions from exasperated teachers who are It’s not a generalized phenomenon, but they are signals both about the strategies of the far right and about the concern of those who are in charge of our children”.
The atmosphere is therefore not looking good. “There are a lot of concerns in Germany. (…) Until then, political scientists analyzed the vote for the German far right as a protest (…). However, we see on the contrary that there has an adherence to the proposal made by the far right”.
“We are witnessing a shift, which concerns many European countries: the ideas and proposals of the far right, which is against migrants, xenophobes and climate skeptics, score points in part of society”, she concludes.
Interview by Céline Tzaud
Adaptation web: Julien Furrer
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