One issue that seems to explain the right-wing protest vote is the flood of foreign "asylum-seekers."

Heinrich Frank, a salesman who led the Republican slate in Frankfurt, pledged that the party would try to stop cash subsistence payments to foreign asylum-seekers.

Refugees and Attacks Decline They worried about the influx of foreign asylum-seekers and a wave of rightist violence against foreigners.

Right-wing violence peaked in 1992, as did a wave of foreign asylum-seekers.

In 1991 rioting took place in Hoyerswerda outside a hostel for foreign asylum-seekers.

Today, he insists, he does not support killing as a way of keeping out the hundreds of thousands of foreign asylum-seekers who have poured into Germany since reunification.

But differentiating between "good" ethnic German immigrants and "bad" foreign asylum-seekers no longer works.

Weeds grow in parade grounds and foreign asylum-seekers and refugees hang their laundry out the windows where American soldiers used to live.

Observation Post Alfa, where soldiers used to peer across at the Communists through binoculars and infrared night scopes, is now full of foreign asylum-seekers.