Germany's Wutbürger

The phenomenon of the Wutbürger ("enraged citizens") in Germany has now attracted the attention fhe New York Times:

They are called “Wutbürger.” And they have become the bane of every political party in Germany.

Loosely translated as “enraged citizen,” the Wutbürger has stepped outside the classical political and parliamentary system by organizing demonstrations and town-hall meetings, protest marches and sit-ins.

“It’s as if the post-1945 consensus of Germans accepting the status quo and the conventional structures of the main political parties is coming to an end,” said Andrea Römmele, a professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. “These new trends should be seen as a strength, not as a threat to democracy,” she added.

The New York Times lumps all of the recent mass demonstrations in Germany as examples of the Wutbürger "movement".  Thus the Stuttgart 21 protests against the rail station, the anti-nuke protests, and the protests in Berlin concerning the airport expansion are all expressions of populist rage that stands outside the established political parties. 

“The Wutbürgers are not ideological as such,” she added. “They are educated people who are against a certain style of politics in which the political parties have failed to create a platform for citizens’ discussions.”

The citizen’s sense of alienation from the political parties is reflected in the increasingly low turnout in both federal and regional elections.

“Over the past 20 years or so, you have seen here, but in other European countries too, a trend toward de-politicization,” said Harald Welzer, a political sociologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. “The citizens feel isolated from the parties.

But the mass protests cited in the article were all supported by the Green Party and play a role in the rise of the Greens to the second largest political party in Germany.

The Wutbürger "discovered" by the NYTimes are separate from the "Bürger in Wut" party, which is a right-wing populist group that is primarily concerned with immigrants in Germany.  This group has found new members after Thilo Sarrazin published his best-selling book on the genetic inferiority of Turkish and Arab immigrants.  The party has achieved some electoral success in the city-state of Bremen, where they have joined forces with the right-wing nationalist party DVU (now merged with the neo-Nazi NPD). 

I have read the Party Platform of the Bürger in Wut ( available here for download - pdf warning), and it is a document of right-wing xenophobia.  Much of the Program consists of imposing restrictions on immigrants, on the construction of mosques, and the teaching of the Islam religion in Germany.  In particular, the group is especially concerned with who is and who isn't "a German":

Deutscher kann nur sein, wer Abkömmling deutscher Staatsbürger ist oder die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit nach erfolgreicher Integration durch Einbürgerung erworben hat.

(Only descendents of German citizens can be German, or those who achieve citizenship following a successful integration through naturalization.)

Of course, "successful integration" is a 15-year process and it is unclear who determines whether the integration is "successful" or not.  The group Bürger in Wut is hypersensitive to being labeled "right-wing populist"  and is suing the journalist Alexander Häusler under Germany's ridiculous defamation laws.  But one of the biggest supporters of the group is the völkisch nationalist weekly Junge Freiheit, which this week has an adoring interview with Jan Timke, the leader of Bürger in Wut.

 

 

Comments

[Strahler 70]

Wikipedia:
"In psychiatry, rage is a mental state that is one extreme of the intensity spectrum of anger...A person in a state of rage may also lose much of his or her capacity for rational thought and reasoning, and may act, usually violently, on his or her impulses to the point that they may attack until they themselves have been incapacitated or the source of their rage has been destroyed."

The BiW might be, by this definition, a beast that will never be satisfied, always needing new targets to keep the rage alive once one source is destroyed.

[Strahler 70]

btw, every channel of tv has labelled the BiW a right-wing populist party yesterday.
Elections in Bremen:
SPD 38%
Greens 23%
CDU 21%
the Left 5.8%
BiW 3.8%
FDP < 3%

2/3 of the voters rejected conservative politics!

[David]

Saw that! Another impressive showing by the Greens.