Why This Topic Landed in Japan

The framing that carried the story was that support keeps rising even for pledges criticised as evoking the Nazis, which reads in Japan as a warning about its own immigration debate rather than as German domestic news. The 42% figure is polling by Infratest dimap for a Saxony-Anhalt state contest, not a result already delivered at the ballot box, though it spread in Japan as an election outcome. Explaining the AfD's rise also pulls anyone doing it back into modern German history, and that is where the thread went — further into the 1930s and 40s than into any current policy. With Japan running its own argument about accepting foreign workers, readers kept treating Germany as a version of their own future.

Key Reaction Themes

  • The largest block of posts by volume was an argument over Hitler's legacy — Seven of twenty comments belonged to a single exchange in which one side held that he would have been remembered as a historic leader if not for Auschwitz, and others answered with the T4 killing programme, the Mefo bill scheme propping up the economy, and American material superiority.
  • Next in weight came immigration and Merkel — Left-wing governments took in refugees and lost control of the consequences, so the right's rise was inevitable, with Merkel's decisions named as the specific cause.
  • A recurring line was that Japan is next — The same road, with no obvious way to head it off.
  • A smaller group looked at mechanisms rather than blame — Social media as an amplifier of extreme feeling, and the AfD's pro-Russian position as a route to talk of eastern secession.

What Japanese Netizens Are Saying

Polling puts the AfD at 42% against the CDU's 22%

In an eastern German state, support for the hard right reached nearly double that of the second-placed party.

Sources: Yomiuri, 2ch

Comments:

  • "The Hitler-reappraisal track."
  • "Japan will go down the same road before long. The fact that you can't head it off in advance is truly awful."
  • "This is what happens when you let migrants in. It's idiotic."
  • "Social media amplifies people's extreme emotions, so it's poison for democracy."
  • "Left-wing governments took in migrants and refugees en masse, couldn't control it, and it turned into a mess, so European countries shifting right is unavoidable. For Germany the Merkel government's effect is huge."
  • "When Merkel first took office the media hammered her as a dangerous conservative right-winger. Being in the Christian Democratic Union with a pastor for a parent, she was treated as a pretty dangerous right-winger."
  • "So it splits into East and West Germany again?"
  • "They must hate staying beaten by Russia. One more round then 😡"
  • "The AfD is pro-Russia, so if they lock down a political stronghold in the east, they might well start talking about seceding from Germany."