« News From the Sun » Wählen Gegen Rechts #9

Today’s episode is produced with – or rather, as part of – Wählen Gegen Rechts, an anti-facist collective that a few of my friends in Berlin and me formed this summer; our first project by the same name (Wählen Gegen Rechts, which means vote against the right) was a voter participation campaign encouraging people to use their vote against Germany’s far-right extremist party AfD in the parliamentary elections, since many of those targeted by the German far right are not allowed to vote here (like me) – Despite our efforts and that of many other ant-fascist activists the AfD won 12.9% of the votes. So much for Germany “having dealt with its past”. On of the ongoing projects of Wählen Gegen Rechts is also a demystification campaign, trying to expose just how racist, misogynist, antisemitic, queer-antagonistic and ableist the AfD is and how Nazi mentality is still very present in Germany. This initiative is one of the things that kept me very busy this summer and autumn, and the people in our core group – Diana, Tina, Marah, Naomi, Hayley – are so brilliant, so I thought I would be great to use this radio format to present the project and talk about the issues we’re up against here in Deutschland.