Candy Jacob posted an illustration from another time on the social network X: a mother surrounded by three blond children, under the protective arm of a man, with a crucifix in the background. The text she relays explains that the best way to fight against “degeneration of the modern era” is of “to get married, to have many children” and of “find God”. On TikTok, the young woman with 14,000 subscribers displays her attachment to the « tradition »cuddled up in the arm of her boyfriend at a political demonstration in Erfurt (East), under the title: “Resistance binds us.”
Candy Jacob is one of the leading figures in the Thuringia section of Junge Alternative, a youth organisation linked to the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, and classified “certain extreme right” by the general intelligence service. The movement is one of the most ardent supporters of the ultra-radical right-wing candidate Björn Höcke for the presidency of the Thuringia region, which is renewing its parliament on 1is September. The AfD, which is credited with more than 30% of the votes, is campaigning in particular for a “increase in the birth rate of the indigenous population” against immigration, as well as for the return of “individualized care of children under 3 years old”.
Model driven by propaganda
This is one of the paradoxes of the German far right: very established in the east of the country, where it capitalizes on the frustrations of reunification, it defends an image of women… in vogue in West Germany in the 1950s. In the German Democratic Republic, the dominant model was the opposite: women were encouraged to study, to work, to exercise typically masculine professions, and to entrust their children to daycare centers, which welcomed babies from the age of 3 months.
Certainly, this model was pushed by the propaganda of a dictatorship with well-understood economic interests. But East German representations remain marked by these images of independent women with rolled-up sleeves, wearing hard hats, working in factories or in scientific professions. Today, the Eastern regions still display a gender pay gap that is up to three times smaller than in the West.
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The anti-feminist movement of young AfD recruits is not unanimous among the members of the party, notoriously led by a lesbian woman, Alice Weidel. “In the East, women were also backhoe and crane drivers! Why should they suddenly all want to start cooking?”Barbara Benkstein, 41, AfD member of the Bundestag for Saxony, recently protested in the press.
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