"Schneider's glasses"

The non-preventers

Can demonstrations stop the advance of far-right movements?(Bild: Viennareport)

It's good when civil society shows its colors. However, this can harden fronts, at least according to "Krone" columnist Robert Schneider. The results of the recent EU elections confirm his theory.

How do you undermine the rise of a party? By consistently writing and demonstrating against them? Certainly not! But this is a truism that should have gotten around long ago. At the beginning of January, when the big demonstrations against the right were springing up like mushrooms in Germany, demonstrations in which over two million people took part, I had a queasy feeling. My fear was that this would only strengthen the AfD even more - and secretly - especially in eastern Germany.

That is exactly what happened. It is also astonishing that young voters in particular have migrated to either the AfD or the BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance). You might think that these two parties have no overlap at all. But that is not true.

What they do have in common is that war and warmongering have been voted out. This was astonishingly evident in the German Bundestag last week when the Ukrainian president addressed the Germans. The seats of the AfD and the BSW remained almost completely empty.

You remember the seas of light in the 1990s, where people bravely demonstrated against forgetting, so bravely that the term "do-gooder" was coined, which everyone actually found stupid and hasty. Hasn't this constant "remembering" produced precisely the opposite, namely an ever-increasing anti-Semitism?

Writing against something is important, but when it becomes obsessive, it is always counterproductive. Jörg Haider had so much power - purely fictitious power, by the way - precisely because the media suggested it to him. As a politician, he was an extremely modest light. His fire only burned in the newspapers.