BECAUSE IT IS: It feels like the social order is crumbling in Germany.

The rise in political violence combined with a rapidly shifting party landscape in which a right-wing force is emerging as a major player reminds many Germans of the 1920s and 30s. AfD politicians and voters have long been called ‘Nazis’ by their opponents, but now a new spate of scandals has sparked fears that far-right sentiments may be more embedded than political polling suggests.

Over recent months, videos have appeared of people singing Nazis slogans to the 1999 party tune L’amour Toujours by the Italian DJ Gigi D’Agostino. In October last year, young people sang ‘Germany for the Germans, foreigners out’ (Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus) when the song was played at a harvest festival in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Recordings were posted on social media, and it became a trend with further cases being reported to the police across the country.

It then made the headlines when a group of revellers at an exclusive bar on the island of Sylt filmed themselves singing the ‘foreigners out’ version. One man was seen doing a Hitler salute and mimicking the dictator’s moustache with two fingers. The footage went viral, and the German press, politicians and public figures condemned the group as ‘champagne Nazis’. In another incident, students of the private school of Louisenlund in northern Germany were caught doing the same thing at a school party. Such blatant disregard for the country’s post-war taboos by members of the wealthy elite cast unsettling doubts over the idea that this only about the great unwashed.

It’s a fascinating article but it barely touches on the source of Germany’s current angst: uncontrolled immigration by Muslims who, at best, have no intention of assimilating.