What is the point of AfD using dog-whistles as described? Their voters are already on-side. surely the points made in any speech should appeal to an as yet unconverted audience, to increase the vote share. Not much point if the telling phrase is flying over the heads of the unconverted.
I think there are several reasons. 1) you attract hard core neo-Nazis who previously didn't vote at all, or voted for the NPD. 2) perhaps more significantly, it is not about directly winning over voters but about trying to make the political establishment look authoritarian by banning a 'harmless patriotic phrase' - the idea being to try to raise doubts in people's minds about whether the Nazis were that bad in comparison. This is a harmless phrase after all, so what does that tell us about the people trying to ban it.
That said, I don't agree with banning such phrases. It is self-defeating, as we can see in the case of Höcke.
What is the point of AfD using dog-whistles as described? Their voters are already on-side. surely the points made in any speech should appeal to an as yet unconverted audience, to increase the vote share. Not much point if the telling phrase is flying over the heads of the unconverted.
I think there are several reasons. 1) you attract hard core neo-Nazis who previously didn't vote at all, or voted for the NPD. 2) perhaps more significantly, it is not about directly winning over voters but about trying to make the political establishment look authoritarian by banning a 'harmless patriotic phrase' - the idea being to try to raise doubts in people's minds about whether the Nazis were that bad in comparison. This is a harmless phrase after all, so what does that tell us about the people trying to ban it.
That said, I don't agree with banning such phrases. It is self-defeating, as we can see in the case of Höcke.