> I don't think most of those votes are about hating foreigners. Some people believe the story they get every day, that the country is broken and that immigrants are the problem. You find that story almost everywhere. The rest are angry that certain problems here have not been solved for years by the existing parties, so they look for an alternative.

I came to Germany with my parents in the 1990s. Both of them had university degrees, but those qualifications did not really help them much when they arrived. They ended up working in low-paying jobs in Germany's Niedriglohnsektor, which was heavily expanded through reforms under the Social Democratic Party.

I grew up in a poor neighborhood and most of the racism I experienced happened during my school years. What was interesting to me is that things changed quite a lot when I moved to a better school to get my Abitur. After I started university, I basically stopped experiencing racism. People were more open, easier to talk to, and seemed less focused on judging others based on where they came from or what they look like.

Today I work in tech. There are days when I do not speak German at all, because at work and in my private life I mostly speak English or my native language. My daily life is very different from when I was growing up.

This has made me wonder whether interpersonal racism is less about people being hard-core nazis but instead connected to people's life circumstances. I am not talking about institutional racism, which is a different issue, but about everyday interactions between regular people. In my experience, I encountered more hostility in environments with more poverty and fewer opportunities, while people I met later in education and professional life were generally much more open-minded.