Young people are the most right-wing generation in Germany, and a eurodance rave classic with reworked lyrics calling for foreigners to be deported is emerging as an unlikely youth anthem, sending the country’s political police scrabbling to intervene.
German youth are increasingly right wing and the anti-mass migration AfD party is now the most popular among 14 to 29-year-olds, recent polling shows. While this may have an impact at the ballot box — Germany and its neighbours vote in the EU elections in two weeks — it is also emerging in culture.
German politicians and media have reacted with outrage several times in the past year as video clips of young people dancing and singing along to a song proclaiming “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer Raus”, ‘Germany for the Germans, foreigners out’, keep emerging. The latest such instance which has again set fingers wagging comes from an apparently exclusive nightclub on the German holiday island of Sylt.
The social media video that spread across German social media this week shows a group of young men and women jumping up and down, singing, laughing, and throwing their arms in the air. Given the context, whether the gestures are dance moves or ‘Hitler salutes’ is obviously a matter of discussion in German media.
Germany’s federal security police, which normally concerns itself with terrorism and international crime gangs is investigating the young people singing, reports Die Welt. German journalist and “diversity consultant” Ferda Ataman who was appointed the government’s Federal Commissioner for Anti-Discrimination in 2022 said the song being sung showed “people are being discriminated against and degraded”.
The song, Ataman said, is “pure racism, which is increasingly ingraining itself in all social groups and age groups and is being openly expressed.”
Welt also cited Green Party state government Integration Minister Aminata Touré who expressed her opinion that singing the song could not be dismissed as a “boyish prank”, but that it had to be seen as “Nazi yelling… They should be ashamed of themselves! Criminal investigations must now follow.”
The Sylt video is not by far the first time the Auslander Raus song has emerged among young people in Germany of late. As noted by German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), clips of it being sung have been released “again and again” at “discos and festivals all over Germany”.
The song itself is not an original composition, but rather is the transposition of the controversial lyrics onto a popular nightclub hit, DJ Gigi D’Agostino’s L’amour toujours, released in 2000. The electronic dance music (EDM) song became a popular track for European DJs and a remix hit number one in Germany in 2018. The new connection with right-wing politics has seen some nightclub owners and DJs vow to stop playing the song, BR states.
Threats of arrests or not, it remains the case that young German people are shifting considerably to the right. In recent memory support for Germany’s pro-border control, anti-Islamification Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was properly confined to the middle-aged, with little interest from the young or old. Yet recent research shows support for left-wing parties among the youngest cohort of Germanys in freefall, and right wing parties.
In April, a large study showed the AfD had become the favourite party of 14-to-29 year olds, support having more than doubled in two years. This was caused by pessimism among young people, mainstream German outlets stated at the time. Professor Klaus Hurrelmann said of the results: “We can speak of a clear shift to the right among the young population… While the parties of the [coalition] government continue to fall in popularity, the AfD is particularly popular.”
He said: “We have a crumbling optimism about the future among the younger generation. The feeling of mental overload is very high, the fear of the spread of wars, of economic losses, of debt.”
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