“This is the first and only time that something like this has happened to me in the 22 years I have been living in Germany,” Adeline Abimnwi Awemo wants to make that clear before explaining how, at the end of July, she suffered a racist attack in the street of her home town of Cottbus, near the Polish border. She was hanging her own election banners – she is running in the elections this Sunday in Brandenburg – when a 29-year-old woman attacked her, shouting as she tried to tear them down. “You are not human,” she told me, “can you believe it?” She was also physically attacked, the police arrived and the case is now in court.
Awemo, born in 1977 in Cameroon, decided to go ahead. “Not only did I not stop campaigning, but it gave me more strength to continue,” she says, sitting on a bench in front of Cottbus train station, where she takes advantage of a gap in her agenda as a candidate (for the CDU) to speak to Morning Express before a campaign event. She says she is not scared by the rise of the far right in this state, part of the former communist Germany: “I am not afraid, because fear paralyses. Yes, I am worried, a lot, but that motivates me to fight for the democracy we have.”
Tempers are running high in Brandenburg, land surrounding Berlin, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party could become the leading force this Sunday, according to polls. A party with a harsh anti-immigration discourse, which demands the closure of borders and which presents as its head of the list a man who openly claims that remigration [la expulsión de miles de inmigrantes] “It is not a secret plan but a promise.”
Cottbus, once the capital of a prosperous mining region in Lusatia, is trying to reinvent itself as a university town. It is increasingly welcoming students from outside Germany, who can even study for degrees in English. But the success of the far right is starting to make foreigners uneasy, discouraging those who were considering moving to eastern Germany or, if they already live here, thinking of leaving. In Cottbus, 29.2% of those who voted in the European elections in June voted for the far right.
Nadeem Manjouneh, 31, is determined to stay. Cottbus is his home. He came from Syria with his parents and younger brother in 2015, during the wave of migration that brought more than a million Syrians to the German borders in search of refuge. He taught himself German, finished his architecture degree, which he had to interrupt in Aleppo, and is now a social worker. “I can understand why the East Germans are voting like this,” he says during a walk through his neighbourhood, where he is well known for his work and because he stood for a small party in the last municipal elections.
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Manjouneh says that as an immigrant and as a Muslim he feels threatened by the rise of the extremists, but he believes that a large part of the vote is pure protest. “The history of the GDR still weighs heavily on us here, the 40 years of dictatorship, the feeling of inferiority compared to the West, the wage gap… I empathise with them,” he says: “They don’t trust political parties or the government and they are carried away by propaganda. Many things don’t work and there has to be someone responsible. In this case, it’s us immigrants.”
Manjouneh’s parents returned to Syria in 2018. “They were unable to integrate,” she says. But they tried. They learned German, looked for work, tried to get through the bureaucracy. “My father was a lawyer in Syria. Here at the employment office, they told him to become a taxi driver,” she explains. Her mother, a social worker, also couldn’t get a job that suited her training and experience: “They didn’t want to live on social benefits, and I understand them. There is sometimes no electricity there, but at least their life is more dignified.”
For him and his younger brother, who is studying physiotherapy, Germany has offered them an opportunity that they would never have had in Syria during the war. But he is worried about “the hostile environment with immigrants” and what could happen in the future if the far right comes to power. He believes that Germany is “shooting itself in the foot” by giving wings to a xenophobic party. The labour market needs foreign workers. “I know several doctors who are studying in Turkey or Serbia and who were considering emigrating to Germany but have already ruled it out. They prefer other countries.”
The hostile environment that Manjouneh describes has also been experienced by Raiyan Al Jaber and Muntasir Hossain, both 30 years old from Bangladesh. The former, an engineering student, shows on his mobile phone a photo of an AfD election poster reading “Stop Islamisation”. “It has already been removed, but for a Muslim, even a secular one like me, it is not a pleasant sight,” he explains. Two weeks ago, an elderly woman hit his girlfriend with a stick at the bus stop. “For no reason, just because she ran there so as not to miss it,” he explains.
Hossain, who works as a waiter, adds that he sometimes notices disapproving glances from fellow citizens. “It’s usually older people. There’s no racism among young people. And we move around in university environments, which are very safe,” he says. He has been in Germany for two years and would like to stay. “We were just discussing how our German classes are going,” he laughs, sitting in a park in the city centre.
Manjouneh says, without dwelling on it too much, that in addition to everyday racism, such as against the hijab in schools, there have recently been other acts that worry her. In addition to the attack on the CDU candidate born in Cameroon, some Muslim neighbours have found pigs’ ears in their letterboxes. Experts explain that people who never liked foreigners have been emboldened by the success of the AfD, so that instead of just looking dirty as they did before, they now turn to insults or aggression.
This is not the city where Manjouneh feels at home: “12% of the inhabitants are immigrants, and without them the barrier of 100,000 inhabitants would not have been overcome, which has given Cottbus its status as a big city, a bigger budget, better services. In fact, it owes a lot to them.”
