Two years after Germany took in more than a million asylum seekers, there’s scant evidence of the influx here in this struggling former communist stronghold hard on the Polish border.
There are no mosques, few ethnic-minority restaurants and only a scattering of nonwhite residents.
But in recent weeks, Muslim faces — a man with a long, scraggly beard, a woman fully veiled but for the eyes — have been everywhere, staring down from posters that bear the message: “Islam doesn’t belong in Germany.”
The posters are the handiwork of the Alternative for Germany party. And the message is part of a campaign likely to propel the party, known as the AfD, to a historic outcome in national elections on Sunday. For the first time since 1961, Germany is on track to seat a far-right party in Parliament.
The AfD’s success has unnerved Germans who see the party as the ominous vanguard of a return to a far darker past built on prejudice and hate. In the final days of campaigning, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s allies have deemed the party an affront to the German constitution, while her top rival, center-left candidate Martin Schulz, described the AfD as “our enemies.”
