Should we fear growing separatism? Germany offers a clue

Thanks to two nurses making casually – they say jokingly – antisemitic statements on social media, Australia has had a terrifying glimpse into a possible future. That future is playing out on the other side of the world in Germany.

Nurses Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh in Max Veifer’s video.

In a week, the Germans go to a federal election. Despite the dire state of Germany’s economy, including sky-high energy costs, the top issue in that election will not be the cost of living or the economy – they should be so lucky as to have such straightforward and solvable concerns. Rather, it will be immigration and the increasingly unavoidable consequences of decades of failed integration. If the polls are accurate, Germans will now vote to slam the door shut to new migrants.

The conservatives, under a leader who is making an effort to talk tough on the issue, are the election favourites. But only by a whisker. The second favourites are Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party that has made immigration its main issue since former chancellor Angela Merkel admitted a million supposedly Syrian refugees (spoiler – many were neither Syrian nor refugees) in 2015. That intake compounded existing problems with unintegrated migrant communities in Germany, worsened by decades of well-meaning but negligent policy.

I reckon Australia is about at the point Germany was when I moved there in the early 2000s. In the well-established Australian custom of blundering from lucky break to lucky break, we’ve had 25 fewer years (and an island border worth of fewer opportunities) to mess things up.

We’re lucky that social media brings issues that were once hidden to the surface. The nurses did a show-and-tell, to a stranger online, of attitudes which go against everything Australia stands for. Back in the 2000s, the only way to discover that multiculturalism wasn’t working out as hoped was by spending time in the areas where the failures were plain to see. The chattering and keyboard-clattering classes don’t tend to live in those areas. For them, Bankstown – the location of the hospital where the antisemitic nurses worked – is a mere political footnote as the birthplace of Paul Keating.

Australia’s vast expanses make accidentally stumbling across a culture clash less likely. Not so in Berlin. By an accident of youthful naiveté (I fell for a cheap apartment) I ended up living right in the midst of Germany’s policy failure. In the heavily welfare-dependent migrant suburb, I became friends with some of the young people from Turkish and Arabic backgrounds who used the same laundromat. But when I wasn’t with them, there were a number of instances where I was followed and insulted by groups of youths I didn’t know, who called me a “German whore” and clearly meant to be intimidating.

It was definitely not fashionable to acknowledge such experiences back in those days. It was easy to point to individuals who weren’t like that and hope the group behaviour was the exception. I knew many asylum seekers who were genuinely wonderful, kind men who would never have treated a woman – or anyone, I believe – so poorly. But racially motivated harassment wasn’t something that just happened to me. It was spreading and worsening.

The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 woke up many in the West to the threat of fundamentalist Islam, but it also seemed to give some rudderless migrants from Muslim backgrounds in Europe a sense of a group identity – one which was at odds with the culture in which they were living. At the same time, misdirected fear of any and all Muslims made it difficult to point out real problems without being accused of Islamophobia.

Some brave souls such as Heinz Buschkowsky, the social democratic mayor of one of the areas in which these migrants were concentrated, tried their best. Buschkowsky wrote a thesis called “Multiculturalism has Failed” which he later fleshed out into a book, detailing the clannish behaviour of extended families who deliberately drove people of other ethnicities out of the apartments surrounding theirs, sometimes with threats, sometimes with other forms of harassment. He described the schools in which teachers didn’t dare to discipline students for fear of repercussions; women brought into Germany via arranged marriages, who only left home to buy groceries from shops whose owners spoke their mother tongue; a society becoming brittle because cohesion comes from a shared culture.

But the warnings of Buschkowsky and others reached a limited audience. The mainstream media was at that time still the primary channel through which people outside the troubled suburbs could discover what was happening in the places they never went. And they often baulked at reporting it in case they were branded racist, or – and an editor once said this to me in all earnestness – in conveying the facts, they made Germans into a racist people.

It turns out that not finding out in time is what has pushed German voters to the right. Hate crimes and terror attacks perpetrated by asylum seekers are increasing in Germany. A synagogue near where I lived was firebombed in 2023 – the police who now guard the building tell me there are regular threats. For them, even allegations that the AfD has been infiltrated by neo-Nazis have become a secondary concern.

According to people I’ve spoken to in Sydney’s drive-through suburbs, the clannish behaviour Buschkowsky observed is happening in Australia too – in Melbourne a firebombed synagogue shows that what starts with words ends in violence.

The Bankstown Hospital nurses revealed that in some communities “joking” about killing Israelis and sending them to Islamic hell is hardly considered controversial. In a subsequent Sky News vox pop in Bankstown, a resident grinningly told the reporter, “I stand with them.”

Lucky Australia – we’ve been given an early heads-up. It’s a gift to receive a very public insight into a growing separatism in society before we follow in Germany’s footsteps.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.