Germany’s shift to the right has left its mark on the country’s national game, causing all kinds of ructions.
Many German football clubs and fan groups have held demonstrations against the far right over the past year, both in the stadiums on match days and in the streets of their cities. Several major clubs from Germany’s top two leagues, including Werder Bremen, VfL Bochum, FSV Mainz 05, 1. FC Köln, and Hannover 96, have called on their supporters to oppose .
The sustained success of the far-right appears to have sharpened attention leading up to the : At a recent home game at St. Pauli, a Hamburg-based club with a strong anti-fascist tradition, fans made their feelings known by chanting: “The whole of Hamburg hates the AfD!”
They also marked on January 27 by holding up a banner that read: “Those who fight against Nazis can’t rely on the state.”
More racism, more politics
But this outpouring of political sentiment is far from universal — and, for some politically engaged football fans, if anything the overall trend among fans in recent years has been to shy away from overt displays of political allegiance.
“I’d like them to have more courage,” said Rico Noack, chairman of Gesellschaftsspiele (“social games”), an organization of football fans that helps promote an inclusive society. Too often, he said, he has seen “fan groups negotiate among themselves, decide something is ‘too political,’ then they settle on the smallest possible consensus, or they don’t say anything at all.”
This is paradoxical, because Germany’s culture wars have often focused on football, by far the country’s most popular sport and a major presence in German society. The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, for instance, turned political when the German national football team to take to the pitch with “One Love” armbands to protest the host country’s laws on .
Similarly, last year, when Germany hosted the European championships, the AfD used the opportunity to on what it deemed “wokeness” in football. Maximilian Krah, the party’s leading candidate in the June European election, described the men’s national team on as a “politically correct mercenary troop.”
“It is the rainbow team, the pride team,” he said, referring to the team’s defense of LGBTQ+ rights. “We can ignore it.”
“Football is more political than ever,” Noack told DW. He sees the rightward shift in Germany’s political culture reflected in football culture, though “it’s not like you see actual right-wing banners” in the stadiums, he added.
But both Noack and the journalist Ronny Blaschke, who has just published a book about racism in football, have noticed that racism has become less of a taboo in the stands.
“Especially after the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, we have observed a shift to the right in the stadiums as we have more racist incidents on the stands against Black football players,” Blaschke told DW’s Dana Sumlaji. “We have massive racism and social media, so whenever you have Black German national players for the youth teams or for the national team, you can look in the comment sections of social media and find many racist comments.”
Other demonstrators ‘could learn a lot from organized football fans’
German football fan culture is complex. Some clubs, like St. Pauli, have long had an overtly left-wing identity. Others, like Alemannia Aachen, are thought to have associations with the far-right scene — though the club itself has denied this.
Many other clubs, meanwhile, harbor both left and right-wing fan groups. Noack has also noticed that, with some fan groups, whatever political identity they have becomes less important on match day, when club allegiance takes precedence.
Noack is also skeptical that political football fan cultures can have a general effect on society. But he does think that football fans have a special power: When they do organize protests, they have a confrontational, rebellious spirit — combined with unity and a sense of humor — that regular anti-AfD demonstrations sometimes lack.
“You could learn a lot from organized football fans: Football fans are often very creative, they are good at knowing what to do to create effective images in the media,” he said. “The classic example is the use of pyrotechnics and smoke bombs — they are always the pictures that get printed. Certainly, other demonstrators could learn something from that.”
‘It feels like the last stand fighting for democracy in Germany’
Susanne Franke is board member of the Schalker Fan Initiative — an anti-racist organization of Schalke fans founded in 1992, when violent right-wing hooligans were a regular sight in football stadiums.
Schalke is based in the town of Gelsenkirchen, in what was formerly Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr Valley. Though it was once a stronghold for the center-left , industrial decline in Gelsenkirchen has turned the town into one of the poorest cities in Germany, and the far-right AfD has gained ground. The club’s neighbor and biggest rival, Borussia Dortmund, also has a much-feared neo-Nazi contingent in its fan base dating back to the 1970s.
Franke is concerned that football culture is reverting back to those days. “It had got better, and now it is getting worse again. In many places fans are wrestling for control of the narrative,” she told DW.
For Franke, the decision by Christian Democrat leader to with the help of the AfD has made her group’s work all the more urgent. “To me, it feels like the last stand fighting for democracy in Germany,” she said. “Whether you’re a football fan or not, it is very important that you take this moment very seriously.”
Though there is no obvious evidence that football fans are any more or less politically engaged than anyone else, football’s presence in German society often makes them more visible when they do express political views.
“Football has a huge chance, and a huge reach,” said Franke. “It is widely visible — in the news, in social media and in German society. This is why I honestly do hope that people will take an honest stand and say something.”
Edited by: Rina Goldenberg
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