Christian Baron – „Ganze Regionen Westdeutschlands werden zum AfD-Rust Belt“

In the podcast, author Christian Baron talks about his beloved football club, 1. FC Kaiserslautern, and the poverty in his hometown. The Spiegel bestseller author is certain: The industrial regions in crisis in western Germany will become the new epicenter of the AfD's electoral success. ... Listen to the podcast with Christian Baron about his bestseller "A Man of His Class": https://www.cicero.de/kultur/christia... #ChristianBaron #Podcast #AfD #WestGermany #Kaiserslautern #RuhrArea #StructuralChange #Poverty #Politics #Democracy #1FCKaiserslautern #Germany Podcast Content: 07:16 "FCK meant to me what it meant to so many people in this region back then and still means today. This awareness that we are actually the underdog. We played—back then it was the first division—against Bayern Munich, HSV, Werder Bremen, all of whom were so much richer and actually more powerful than us, but we always managed to trip them up. We always managed to be better than them. And that's because we were there for each other as a community and believed in ourselves. That's what FCK radiated back then, and what people also felt." "Like my father, at least when FCK won, he would hold his head high, saying, 'Here, this is also my success, and if I see that they can achieve it through sports, then I can achieve it in my life too.'" (Christian Baron) 8:16 "Today I am convinced that my so-called social mobility would not have been conceivable, would not have been possible, if I hadn't been able to maintain this hope: Why shouldn't things get better? We see it with FCK, that we little guys can achieve something too. This knowledge, or this belief, has been increasingly lost. We'll certainly talk about this later, that in my view this is a very important factor in why the AfD has become so strong, but it still worked to a certain extent in the 90s." (Christian Baron) 6:59 PM "So this is a huge mistake that will only lead to the AfD potentially having an absolute majority in Kaiserslautern and other similar cities in a few years. Because it's important for me to say: this isn't about me personally; I just know Kaiserslautern because I'm from there and grew up there, but this is certainly representative of many other regions. The fact that the AfD now has this simple majority in Gelsenkirchen and Kaiserslautern and has even won direct mandates is just the beginning. There are regions in western Germany, in the Ruhr area and elsewhere, where they are very close to achieving that." (Christian Baron) 40:16 "I think it's very important to differentiate here. There are other reasons why the AfD is so strong in Thuringia or Saxony-Anhalt, for example, than in the Palatinate or the Ruhr area. Those who now vote for the AfD in the Ruhr area or the Palatinate are overwhelmingly former SPD supporters. So they are neither Nazis nor right-wing extremists; the vast majority are not. On the one hand, this gives hope, because one can say that they are certainly not lost to democratic processes, but one has to make a tremendous effort to win them over." (Christian Baron) 41:26 "It's also very important to keep saying this, especially to the left-liberal elite who like to pretend that there are migrants and post-migrants on one side and native Germans or white Germans on the other. No. Duisburg-Marxloh is also quite right-wing, and almost everyone there has a migration background. They vote for the AfD because they're fed up and say, 'You guys just look down on us.' So, it's important to always maintain a nuanced perspective and not fall into morally sound categories or fantasies of purity in order to understand what's really going on in this country." (Christian Baron)