Rich and retired: The boom beneficiaries who finance Germany's far right
Hartmut Issmer tell it, Germany's recent history is one of decline from the 1970s to 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel let the migrants in.
The construction engineer, who grew rich from the property boom in eastern Germany and is now the far-right Alternative for Germany's biggest known donor, looks with nostalgia to a time when he was in his 20s and with trepidation to the future.
"Franz-Josef Strauss was still around," he says, referring to the firebrand Bavarian politician who was an icon of arch-conservative Cold War anti-communism. «I'm old now, but I don't want Germany going in the direction it's going now.»
With the AfD high in opinion polls ahead of regional and European elections later this year, the party is facing legal and political scrutiny as never before, which could lead to it being cut off from all state financing.
That would make backers like Issmer, who gave 250,000 euros last year, even more important. Wealthy, elderly products of Germany's post-war rise, they have cash to spare and views they are unafraid to air.
The AfD gets around half its total 20 million euros annual income from private sources — mainly donors and membership dues — and half from the state, whose funding to parties rises and falls in line with electoral performance.
«The AfD gets fewer large donations of more than 50,000 euros than the other parties,» said Kai Arzheimer, a politics professor at Mainz University.
That means the many businessmen giving
