Nothing scares Germans more than the US president's policies and their global impact, according to a new survey. Concerns about refugees and integration came in second and third place.
More than two-thirds of Germans — or 69 percent — are extremely concerned that US President Donald Trump's policies are having a dangerous impact worldwide, according to the annual survey "The fears of Germans" by the R+V Infocenter.
"Trump's ruthless 'America First' politics, his aggression in regard to international arrangements and his equally aggressive trade and security policies, even towards allied countries, scare the majority of the population," said Manfred G. Schmidt, a professor at Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg and a consultant for R+V Infocenter.
It was one of the highest percentages ever recorded in the survey, which has cataloged German fears since 1992.
Refugees and asylum-seekers
A whopping 63 percent believe that German authorities and institutions are unable to cope with refugees and asylum-seekers, 63 percent also fear that increased migration will spark further tension between Germans and asylum-seekers and refugees. Both figures are higher than in the survey released in 2017.
Lack of trust in politicians
More than 60 percent of those polled put little store in politicians, fearing that they are not up to the job. Nearly half mark their performance as a 'fail' or a mere one grade above that. Both percentages show a significant increase from last year's survey. Just 6 percent marked their work as "good" or "very good."
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
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Terrorism, the debt crisis and the environment
Fifty-nine percent of Germans are still concerned about terrorist attacks in Germany, although the number has dropped in recent years.
Nearly the same number applies to fear over the impact of the eurozone's debt crisis. Germany's taxpayers, Schmidt pointed out, are still at risk of paying the lion's share in case of an EU country defaulting on payments.
The survey also shows 48 percent of Germans are worried about climate change and believe it will have a dramatic impact on the environment. More than half think there will be more natural disasters in future.
The researchers point out that none of the categories showed significant regional differences.
The annual survey is commissioned by insurance firm R+V Versicherungen. Around 2,400 Germans across the country were polled between June 8 and July 18, 2018.
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