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As the article states, the National Government has gone further left in recent years (CDU has been replaced by a coalition between SPD and the Green Party), but the fact that AfD (which is basically a neo-nazi party) has won a district suggests that the right is unhappy with the government becoming more progressive, and they're opting towards far-right extremism.

This is dangerous, and antifacist action is needed to prevent the facism from spreading.

I guess Germany is in panic as their counter-Nazi measures are falling apart.

Germany implemented anti-Nazi laws, which also blocked ultranationalists like AfD to run for election. AfD, however, found a loophole and have been exploiting it. Now they finally brainfucked enough people to win a state, and is rapidly expanding.

Now that the constitutional counter measures stopped functioning, it's up to the crowd whose parents enabled holocaust.

Here is a film which may shed some light.

10 years old. A mixture of scripted scenes and Borat-esque real reactions, it purports to show how the populace of Germany would react to the return of Hitler.
(There also was made an Italian language remake with Mussolini

While I don't recall AfD being mentioned, a different neo-nazi party NPD (which has since renamed itself "Die Heimat" and lost support to AfD) is.

Short answer I would say nazis are always a cause for concern.

It's bad, but you could see it coming for a couple of years. It's only a matter of time until they manage to win a state. I guess it's going to be Saxony and/or Thuringia.

In my opinion there are two rules of thumb regarding voting population and politics in Germany and probably western countries in general:

1. A third of every population consists of morons who are easily deceived by right wing populists who manage to present themselves as the rebellious underdog. UK, France, USA, Sweden etc., you can see that everywhere. These people, for some reason I still fail to fully understand, are unable to make a connection between their legitimate feeling of betrayal through our current system (aka capitalism) and factual solutions. Instead they follow those who do not offer solutions and instead propose to make everything worse, but, like I said, manage to present themselves as the ones who "fight the system". All right wing populists have something in common: They do not publicly say too much about what policies they are effectively going to implement, resulting in them being a huge canvas for every kind of projected wishes their voters have. That's why Trump worked for conspiracy nuts, libertarians, religious extremists, right wing extremists, moderate conservatives, economically liberals and unpolitical dumbasses alike. Everyone of these factions could project what they wanted for society into what Trump would do, because aside from singular statements, Trump was actually pretty vague in what he wanted. The whole stupid "drain the swamp" theme is a perfect representation of what I mean. The AfDs motto in the last general election was "Germany, but normal". The proposal of Brexit basically functioned like that, too. It was going to solve all the problems for whatever reason and enough people believed it.

2. About 10% of the German population (huge overlap with the proportion mentioned in 1.), and it might be the same for other western countries but i don't know, are more or less openly fascist. These are the ones who profit from a "collective movement" that manages to assemble different parts of the political spectrum. This is different from a "big tent" approach where a compromise between related groups is thought to give them all a political representation.* This is not a new invention. The NSDAP functioned just like that. They managed to gather a huge chunk of the political spectrum around them, from nobility over capitalists over nationalists to liberals deep into the the political left. There were even former social-democrat and communist groups that merged into the NSDAP. I had a pretty illuminating chart about that, but i can't find it online. The AfD works just like this. They have a fascist wing (literally called "Flügel" = "wing"), evangelicals, nobility, conspiracy nuts, economically liberals, former SPD and Linke-politicians and voters. They are united in their refusal of migrants, but that is pretty much all they can agree on. The new district leader of Sonneberg is a member of the "Flügel" and I'm sure all of the future ones will be, too. The "Flügel" is pretty effective in bullying everyone else out of important positions or even the party.

AfD votes are like 2/3rd protest votes. That is, people who say "I don't like the AfD but it annoys the other parties so let's go for it".

I understand the sentiment but motherfuckers can't you vote for Die Partei instead or something. They obviously messed up, time to resurrect the APPD.

As to "counter-Nazi measures falling apart": All other parties are fire walling the AfD. Meaning that we'd rather see CDU and Die Linke in coalition somewhere than an AfD mayor.

Don't know about Germany, but in the U.S. it's just fear mongering. Once you convince your side that the other side is a bunch of baby killing, child genital mutilating, corrupt, Satan worshipping libtards that want to get paid to sit around all day leaching off your hard work, oh and don't forget they wanna take your guns away so you can't "protect your family".. then you can justify doing anything and everything to them.

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet -- and this is its horror -- it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. -- Hannah Arendt

"I'm poor, and someone on TV said it's because of those people who don't look like me"

In this day and age the answer is almost always money. Short term gains for the few over the many.

There are always one or two people who know what they're doing. These people are the truly evil. The rest are just buying the party line or are afraid of the "other".

Here we go again…