Du Arschloch, jetzt bitte mit Applaus

AfD campaigners opened their Stralsund election launch this week with an insult, a microphone, and the kind of stagecraft that treats bad manners like a spine. The room had the stale sheen of a rented community hall near the harbor, the sort of place where fold-out chairs, lukewarm coffee, and municipal resignation always arrive before the politics does. Party activists filled the front rows early, while a thin line of critics outside stood under the gray Baltic light, looking like people who had already been forced to watch this country flirt with its own humiliation.

The evening followed the familiar choreography of petty authoritarian theater. First came the grievance warm-up, then the speaker who delivered rage with the moist certainty of a man auditioning for relevance, then the applause from supporters eager to be told that their own bitterness counts as courage. One heckler fired back, “You asshole, what’s that?”, which briefly cut through the fog and improved the event by making it sound like something a real human being might say when confronted with a cheap demagogue in a blazer.

A local organizer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he still needed to attend meetings with people who believe shame is a liberal hobby, said the launch was designed to project fearlessness. What it actually projected was dependency: the need to be seen as hard, the need to be admired for being crude, the need to turn every insult into foreplay for the crowd. “It’s a costume,” he said. “They want brutality to look like honesty.”

That trick is old, sweaty, and barely dressed. The right sells contempt as authenticity; the liberal center responds with the emotional intelligence of a damp brochure, forever insisting that if everyone just stays calm, the poison might politely stop leaking. In practice, that means media panels that launder extremism into “concerns,” city statements that praise dialogue after the damage is already on the floor, and police routines so carefully neutral they could escort a fire out of the building and call it de-escalation. Everyone performs responsibility while the far right grinds its teeth and calls the sound common sense.

By the second round of speeches, the room had the intellectual depth of a pub ashtray and the moral atmosphere of a backseat after a bad decision. The slogans came in a familiar slurry: border panic, betrayed workers, national decline, that dead-eyed prayer to “common sense” mouthed by people who have never once had a thought that survived contact with reality. It was all very proud of itself, like a cheap suit gloating over the body inside it. The supporters did not look emancipated; they looked needy, entertained by their own corruption, hungry for the thrill of being told their resentment was virtue.

This is where the local texture matters. Stralsund is not some abstract stage for national rot; it is a harbor town with enough winter silence to make a lying politician sound almost holy. The campaign venue, the clustered police vans, the bundled-up spectators, the bored-looking passersby on the sidewalk—all of it gave the event the sour fragrance of a society that has learned to keep its shame tidy. Not because the place is uniquely broken, but because the country has gotten very good at arranging its ugliness in neat rows and calling that order.

Outside, police kept the separation immaculate, as if the state’s main job were to preserve the right of fascist flirtation to continue undisturbed. City officials offered the standard line that democratic debate must remain peaceful, one of those polished little sentences that sounds upright until you notice it is usually deployed after the room has already filled with smoke. The next test is not whether the AfD can shout louder; it is whether the institutions around it will keep mistaking procedural politeness for courage, while the party keeps selling the public a cheap erection of outrage and calling it politics.