But the party is not, as is sometimes assumed, merely an eastern German phenomenon. The AfD gets double-digit results in some west German states, such as Bavaria. In the state election in Lower Saxony at the end of 2022, for example, the party almost doubled its vote from five years ago to 11 percent. According to a recent study, 23 percent of western Germans say they believe the country is being “swamped with foreigners.” (The figure in eastern Germany is 40 percent.) Behind this general support is widespread racism and what the sociologist Oliver Nachtwey calls a “society of decline.”...