I understand Germans not being overly happy about a million refugees and migrants allowed entry in one year's time - that's a lot of people. Germany is roughly the size our US state of Montana with a population of 80+ million. I'm sure the current citizens are feeling the squeeze on housing and social resources. Merkel should have spaced those numbers out, seems a bit ambitious.
It's actually all fairly simple.
Before the immigration wave(that's all what it is, immigration, illegal at that) there was no money for anything. Be it infrastructure(not as bad as Belgium but getting there), no construction of social housing for I think over 12 years, no support for more Kindergartens, overall social services and so forth.
The motto was "Den Gürtel enger schnallen" which means "to tighten the belt".
But then it all slowly started during the summer, suddenly there was money for all kinds of stuff. Housings for vagrants who've found shelter were being demolished for brand new homes. But only for "refugees".
Kindergartens got the promise of more funding, even to build new ones.
I personally think the turning point was when the government proclaimed how they had saved so and so much money in 2015.
Some perhaps thought "well perhaps we will get some taxes cut a bit", nope.
Everything that was saved will be put to use with the refugees. Every single Euro.
And then it hit people, this money would've vanished forever. Nothing would've been spend. If not the "refugees" had turned up.
"The Government spends money for the refugees but not for us."
The Parties in the Government deny this of course, but its too obvious.
Ever tried to break the law in Germany? The state will prosecute you or wring you out for all kinds of stuff. But suddenly people coming from far away places could do all kinds of stuff without being prosecuted.
This you obviously won't read in the country wide newspapers, for that you have to read the local ones.
Suddenly there are an awful lot of cases of rape, molestation, theft, robberies and so forth. These local newspapers sometimes show the police sketch of how the perpetrator looked like. Yeah they don't look very German.
People being sexually assaulted at the local swimming pool by refugees being accompanied by their social worker? Well the "refugees" in the city are banned from it. This gets out into the state press and from there the federal press. Some time later the ban is lifted due to obvious state or federal intervention. Then the natives stay away from places where this happened, which gets them branded as racists.
During carnival a Belgian journalist was apparently groped by drunk German men live on TV in Cologne. Sexual molestation all right and the press loved it.
The very next night in Cologne a women on her way home was first harassed by a refugee, then knocked unconscious and finally raped.
It was a mere side note in the newspapers, obviously not a single TV station reported on it.
Then the next thing came out, the whole Lügenpresse(lying media, a word the Nazis coined back in the days) slogans of Pegida were actually true. The media chose not to report any crimes by refugees for at least 2015. They claimed they did it because they didn't want to upset the natives. Yeah right.
And during all of this Merkel said one thing "Wir schaffen das", we'll manage.
Some people asked what we are going to manage, well "it".
What's the plan? Who knows, Merkel still hasn't gone into any detail.
But there is at least a Plan B right? Nope. That she made perfectly clear. Either we go with Plan A or... we fail, at whatever.
The AfD meanwhile is demonised beyond any common sense. Every day there are multiple stories on them in one credible news outlet. And its always how they are bad, Nazis, got no answers, death awaits and more fun stuff.
The people are sick and tired of it.
When there is a debate on TV and someone from the AfD is invited everyone knows its going to be an X vs 1. Sometimes an X vs 1.5 if some other guy is halfway on their side.
AfD members are supposed to explain everything of what they want to achieve and how on the spot. No other party is supposed to do so.
And then there is of course their oh so racist anti-immigration program. You want to know what's so bad? No they don't want to outdo Australia. They want to go the Canadian way. Yes they want to copy the racist Canadian immigration laws. Oh the horror.
Are most of their members political amateurs? Sure.
Will they turn Germany into a paradise when elected? No of course not.
But the same is true for the other parties.
The next elections are going to be Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin. I doubt the AfD will have much success in Berlin, the city is far too cosmopolitan aka filled with foreigners, hippies and polls currently at 7%.
But M-V is going to be different. Its the ugly duckling of German states with its low population density and Nazi problem which shows itself in the NPD being in parliament. There the AfD polls at 16%, 6 months before election. That's a whole lot of time to get more votes. And the warmer the temperatures are the more problems with "refugees" will arrive.
So uhm yeah I wrote too much.
