Almost 10 percent of Germans openly classify themselves as racist, a new study has revealed.
Germans are generally willing to accept refugees. More than two-thirds of respondents “strongly agreed” with the statement “Germany should let people in who are fleeing wars.” Only 2.8 percent strongly disagreed.
While two thirds of Germans would like the country to welcome refugees, nearly 40 percent strongly supported putting an upper limit on the number of asylum requests approved.
The study also discovered that almost 40 percent of Germans were of the opinion that Islam was undermining German culture.
At the same time, 28 percent agreed with the statement: “You cannot freely voice your opinion in Germany without getting into trouble.”
A similar quota agreed that: “The ruling [political] parties are betraying the people.”
The statement: “It is time to show greater resistance to modern-day politics” was approved by 30 percent of the respondents.
Such ideas, FES said, are a more “subtle form and intellectual guise” with which to propagate nationalist positions.
Voters who supported more right-wing political parties were the ones more likely to agree with these “new right” ways of thinking.
In fact 84 percent of the professed AfD voters surveyed supported such positions with 68 percent supporting xenophobic positions, 64 percent opposing Islam, 59 percent opposing Roma, 88 percent opposing asylum-seekers and 68 percent voicing disdain for Germany’s long-term unemployed.
FES said: “The population’s fundamentally positive attitude, its calmness and its willingness to engage on refugees’ behalf is underestimated. It stands against a small, tough minority, which does not just reject refugees, but rather recoils from other social groups as well and tends towards extreme-right ideologies.”