Hellersdorf – AfD gets 50 percent: “People here vote like this because they have become poorer”
Deep in the east of Berlin, the AfD is getting more than 50 percent - and it sounds like a cliché: Hellersdorf and prefabricated housing. The best explanation comes from a Syrian, of all people.
Inside the Berlin S-Bahn ring, the Left Party's landslide victory is being admired. On the outskirts of the city in the east, things are different. In front of the Jean Piaget School in Hellersdorf, there are still signs showing the way to the polling station located there. There were several polling stations in the long, flat prefabricated building. In the dining room, the AfD won 50.9 percent of the second votes. In the foyer, it was even 53.4 percent. The second places went to the Left with around 15 percent each.
On the Monday morning after the election, the schoolyard is empty. A little snow melts in the sun at the soccer goal. Only a few voices of young people can be heard from the school. And if you ask people on the street about the reasons for the AfD's success, they are not particularly talkative. "I don't know anything about this party," says a sporty young man with an accent. An older woman, whose pug is sniffing at a rental bike in the ditch, laughs.
She is uncomfortable. "No, no," she says. She doesn't want to say "anything." She carefully pulls the pug along, looks at the ground - just get out of here! Towards the state border. A few hundred meters further on, the company signs of the Kaufpark Eiche can be seen. It is already in Brandenburg.
On the terrace of a ground floor apartment opposite the school, a woman in her fifties is smoking her morning cigarette. The coffee in her hand is steaming. She has no time for politics, she says: "Going to work in the morning, coming back in the evening - that's all there is to it." But perhaps you could ask the young man there.
With a casual gesture, she points to a man in his mid-thirties who is just coming home with his little daughter in his arms. The neighbor is called Michael. He doesn't want to reveal any more. But he seems to know the reasons for the AfD's success: "Food, travel prices - everything that goes wrong in politics, I'll tell you." An evasive answer, as quickly becomes clear. The greatest "dissatisfaction" is caused when someone asks "the foreigners who are here, do nothing and behave like anything else."
For one thing, there are simply too many for him. One should take a look at "what kind of cars are parked here: Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian." Three years ago, he and his family moved into the small new housing development of the municipal housing company Stadt und Land. He recommends taking a look at the doorbells. Only foreign names, "90 to 95 percent."
His specific problems with these neighbors don't seem very big at first. Both children's rooms face the back yard, he explains. The children's playgrounds there are often still busy after 8 p.m. "Not now, but in the summer." However, complaints about disturbing the peace are only accepted after 10 p.m.
Little Hannah in his arms sucks on her pacifier, quite unimpressed. A little exhausted and bored, she fiddles with her father's zipper until she pinches her skin when she pulls and he cries out: "Ouch!" She still seems unimpressed, he strokes her hair lovingly.
The apartment is "really nice," he says, but "the surroundings aren't right." Across the street at Gesobau, it's "the same: always a party in the evenings with blue lights." The garbage is also a problem, says Michael. At the moment, however, the neighborhood is very tidy. He admits that.
He himself does not believe that the majority of foreigners are just hanging around. "It's a large proportion," he says with some qualification. "Many work." He has nothing against them. And fortunately, there have been no problems with crime in his neighborhood "so far." "But you don't want to let the children play outside alone." Michael was at the school across the street on Sunday. "But I won't say who I voted for," he explains, turning to his daughter, who has now waited long enough. "That's a secret," he says conspiratorially. The two go inside.
A few meters further on, a man is watching them. He is waiting at the side of the road to be picked up and can explain everything until then. Mohamad Waleed Sukari (35) came from Syria in 2018. After a few months, he started working as an Amazon driver, then "gathered friends" and founded a logistics company.
He has now bought three cars and a small apartment around the corner. Ikea is just his best-known client. "People here vote AfD because they have become poorer and think that foreigners are to blame," he explains. "But foreigners work harder than Germans and for less money." Inflation is also affecting Sukari, although he is no longer poor. "If you go to Lidl with 50 euros, you don't buy anything," he says. "It used to be different."
Inflation in Hellersdorf: “If you go to Lidl with 50 euros – you buy nothing”He himself works around 16 hours a day, including weekends. There is always something going on. His drivers receive significantly more than the minimum wage, currently around 16 euros.
"If someone comes from abroad, deliberately doesn't want to work and draws citizen's income - you have to throw them out," he says. He would probably agree with his neighbor Michael on that. "But what do you want with a German who just drinks all the time and says: Why should I work? So that I can pay taxes for you foreigners?!"
Sukari, which stands for sugar, says: "There are idiots everywhere." You can't tar Arabs with the same brush any more than you can Ukrainians or Germans. On the other hand, you need generalizations to get your bearings. That's also completely normal. It's all a question of weighing things up.
Three times recently, Sukari had dog excrement in the elevator, and it was definitely not the fault of a foreign owner. And the empty liquor bottles in front of the front door were hardly Arabs. The same goes for the vomit.
The young entrepreneur has not yet applied for a German passport. The permanent residence permit is enough for him. When he talks about the billions for the war in Ukraine, which "only bring death" and "are urgently needed for investments here", he is in line with the AfD. "They are sometimes right," he says, "but they use the problems for their own benefit and create a mood that all Arabs carry knives and so on."
There are no worlds separating Sukari and his neighbor Michael, even if the latter may think so. And the small prefab housing estate is far from lost. In the courtyard, children are cheering on a playground that looks almost new. Swings, climbing frames, sandpits - everything is in pristine condition.
Sukari described the daycare his three-year-old goes to as "super perfect." The new buildings are all in good condition. There is hardly any garbage on the streets. For every 100 meters, one tissue, three empty dog poop bags, a can without a deposit code and a refill pack of windshield washer fluid for the car, citrus freshness - that's it.
At first glance, only about one in ten names on the doorbells of the new buildings is actually a traditional German one. But nobody could say that most of the people here behave “like anyone else” – it seems more like orderly people live here.
At least there are no unsolvable problems at the Jean Piaget School. "We are multicultural," says a woman who is taking a cigarette break in front of the building and wishes to remain anonymous. "We have all colours, all languages." Of course there are groups formed and "small things happen every now and then" - that is completely normal. But on the whole things are going well.
Is she sugarcoating things? The AfD majority would suggest that she is. But Mohamad Waleed Sukari keeps the district running better than many people with German passports. And if you read the names on the doorbells, he is certainly not the only one. So this election result is probably only part of the truth. There are a few others.
Berliner-zeitung
