Visit the Instagram page of Frank Franz and you encounter an image-conscious man with an interest in smart suits, selfies and sunsets. Less obvious is the 37-year-old graphic designer's other profession: leader of Germany's neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD).
As the number of asylum seeker tops one million this year, watchers of Germany’s extremist scene warn the situation is ripe for exploitation by a new generation of far-right leaders.
Shaven heads, bomber jackets and jackboots are passé. Suits, side-partings and beards are the preferred look for these neo-Nazi hipsters, or Nipsters.
Mr Franz is a Nipster poster boy, a young father of three plastered across social media as the perfect son-in-law. He says he’s not anti-EU, just opposed to the current EU order and euro bailouts. He’s not anti-foreigner, just worried about long-term effects of asylum on Germany’s national identity.
"We are not the world's welfare office," he said to cheers at last weekend's NPD conference, one of his many slogans you could just as easily hear these days from the mouth of a Bavarian politician. Afterwards he said: "Germany is the home of the Germans and not a laboratory for multicultural experiments," echoing chancellor Angela Merkel's 2010 claim that "multiculturalism has failed, failed utterly".
Radical twist
By echoing mainstream ideas, with an occasional radical twist, the NPD leader hopes to reverse the fading fortunes of a party founded half a century ago in West Germany. Although it polled 1.5 per cent in the last federal elections, falling short of the Bundestag’s 5 per cent rule, the NPD is more active, and successful, in local and state politics.
It won almost 10 per cent of the Saxon state vote in 2004 and entered the Dresden parliament for two terms. Former NPD leader Udo Voigt was elected last year as the party’s first MEP, marking the turnaround after a decade of internal feuds, financing scandals and public campaign disasters.
As a new age of anxiety looms over refugees, Mr Franz sees a chance to score big. But his party no longer has the field to itself, squeezed between the new, openly extremist “Der III. Weg” (The Third Way) and the increasingly hard-right Alternative für Deutschland.
Last year, in Saxony’s state election, the AfD stole most of the NPD working-class vote and added disillusioned Merkel supporters. Since ousting its economic-liberal but moderate founder, Bernd Lucke, earlier this year, the AfD has taken a more strident anti-migrant.
“Germany is the homeland of our predecessors and must remain the homeland of our children,” said Mr Björn Höcke, AfD leader in the state of Thuringia. At the AfD’s party conference he stole a march on the NPD, deriding Dr Merkel and her refugee policies as a “topdown multicultural revolution”.
While Mr Höcke appeals to more extremist clientele, AfD leader Frauke Petry, a pastor’s wife, plays the concerned card, linking uncontrolled migration to Europe and terrorism risks.
As the AfD encroaches on NPD turf, Mr Franz has let his moderate mask slip somewhat to differentiate his party, accusing Germany of being a US “vassal” and “the willing briefcase carrier of US war politics”.
German authorities are unsure how to react, in particular whether they should make a second attempt attempt to ban the NPD. A decade after the first attempt failed, a ban might simply hand them free publicity.
For now, Mr Franz is playing a long game, hoping to convert his social media followers into voters. Amid a noticeable radicalisation in Germany’s refugee crisis rhetoric, the Nipsters are ready to pick up disillusioned mainstream voters – if the AfD doesn’t get them first.
