Tipping
point for the German far-right
Alternative
for Germany vying for first place in regional election.
By
Janosch Delcker
8/31/16, 5:23 AM CET
SCHWERIN, Germany —
The German political establishment’s worst nightmare could become
reality this weekend when voters head to the polls for an election in
the northeast: the far-right Alternative for Germany might, for the
first time, become the most powerful party in a state.
To make matters
worse, it could happen in Angela Merkel’s back yard.
The refugee crisis
continues to dominate the political landscape across Germany, and
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the country’s most sparsely-populated
state, and home to Angela Merkel’s constituency, is no exception.
The AfD has used the crisis to woo disaffected voters and makes it
very clear who it thinks is responsible for the country’s problems:
Merkel.
“The refugee
crisis has helped us, there’s little question about that,”
Leif-Erik Holm, the AfD’s lead candidate in the regional election,
said.
Holm’s party is
polling at 21 percent, behind the Social Democrats (28 percent) and
Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democrats (22 percent), but party
officials are confident of a bounce on election day. It’s happened
before: in March in Saxony-Anhalt the AfD was polling at 19 percent
and won 24 percent. It finished second in that ballot and hopes to go
one further this time.
Whatever happens,
the AfD will almost certainly enter its ninth state parliament out of
16. Number 10 will likely follow two weeks later when voters go to
the polls in Berlin, where the AfD is polling at 10 percent.
The changing face of
German politics was on display when Merkel traveled to
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in mid-August to meet with farmers,
traditionally staunch supporters of her conservatives.
The chancellor was
well prepared, telling farmers she would support their use of the
weedkiller glyphosate, answering questions about security
regulations, and describing in great detail how impressed she was by
a combine harvester in front of the farm. The farmers weren’t
angry, but they were concerned.
“I’m not just a
farmer, I am also a worried citizen,” one man told Merkel, without
explaining what he was worried about. “Please use your power so
that our children will have a safe future.”
The chancellor is
aware that, as her popularity has been decreasing, her new far-right
rival is trying to capitalize on these hard-to-explain fears.
At a campaign event
in Schwerin a day later, Björn Höcke, the leading light of the
AfD’s right wing, spoke in the main square. The former teacher was
asked to give his opinions on education, but went much further, being
cheered for comments such as “I would like to live in a democratic
state based on the rule of law. This is why I say ‘No’ to a
multicultural society,” and “we can’t take this unbearable
dictator of a chancellor anymore.”
The event ended with
the crowd chanting “Merkel muss weg” (Merkel has to go).
The AfD doesn’t
really do local issues. It’s happier to hammer home the
anti-immigration message with slogans such as “Stop the asylum
chaos.”
“National topics
clearly dominate these state elections,“ said the AfD’s Holm. The
former radio host is more softly-spoken than Höcke, but he leaves no
doubt about his ultra-conservative stance.
“First, it was the
Euro-Retterei, the [flawed] rescue of the euro, then it was the
energy transformation with Merkel overtaking even the Green Party,
and then — which marks the low point — the refugee crisis, which
caused a fear among people about what else might come,” he said.
“Those crises were managed poorly, and there was no conservative
alternative [to the ruling parties.]”
Wounded big beasts
For decades, the two
main parties — the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats —
have fought it out to see who can lead a coalition government, both
at state and national level. For a decade, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has
been governed by a “grand coalition” of SPD and CDU.
The AfD claims there
is no longer a difference between the two big beasts, thanks to
Merkel’s “social democratization” of her party as she opened
the doors to refugees from Syria and the wider Middle East.
“We basically
replace the old CDU, because Ms. Merkel moved it too far to the
left,” Holm said, echoing comments from the national party
leadership.
A crowd at an AfD
Campaign event in Schwerin, Germany, in mid-August. Two men are
holding up a sign that reads “Lying press — USA Warmonger Nr. 1 —
Ami, go home!” | Janosch Delcker
A crowd at an AfD
Campaign event in Schwerin, Germany, in mid-August. Two men are
holding up a sign that reads “Lying press — USA Warmonger Nr. 1 —
Ami, go home!” | Janosch Delcker
“For ten years,
there has been a potential for a right-wing populist party,” said
Tim Bleis, who works for an advice center for victims of right-wing
violence in Rostock, the largest city in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
The state has form
in voting for the Right. At the last state elections, in 2011, the
extreme-right NPD won 6 percent of the votes to remain in the state
parliament, where it has been since 2006. The threshold is 6 percent.
However, the NPD,
which openly expresses Neo-Nazi views, is stigmatized, and the other
parties agreed on a policy called “Schweriner Weg,” essentially
an agreement to ignore the party.
Back then, the AfD
didn’t even exist.
The AfD has
morphed into an ultraconservative, anti-immigrant party that appeals
to those who harbor right-wing views.
It’s come a long
way in a very short space of time. Founded in 2013 as a protest party
against the largely German-funded bailouts for indebted eurozone
countries, the AfD has morphed into an ultraconservative,
anti-immigrant party that appeals to those who harbor right-wing
views, Bleis said, but were repelled by the extreme nature of the
NPD, as well as those wanting to rebel against the establishment.
At the AfD campaign
event in Schwerin, there were protesters holding up signs against the
“lying press” and the “warmonger United States.” One man was
wearing a T-shirt that said “Großdeutschland,” which describes
Germany’s pre-World-War-II borders.
An architect from
Hamburg, who refused to give his name, said he was there to complain
about what he called the “step-by-step Islamization” of Germany.
One woman said she wanted to protest against “gender
mainstreaming,” such as school children being taught about
homosexuality.
The only common
denominator seemed to be their disapproval of the current
government’s refugee policy.
Worried about the
rapid rise of the far-right, state officials from both major parties
are trying to distance themselves from decisions taken by the
national government in Berlin during the refugee crisis.
“To this day,
Merkel pretends that Germany could take in everyone who’s
persecuted. That’s disconnected from reality,”
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state premier Erwin Sellering of the SPD told
Welt newspaper. Sellering declined to be interviewed for this
article.
Lorenz Caffier, the
candidate for Merkel’s conservatives, has repeatedly tried to paint
his party as a stronghold of domestic security by pressing ahead with
law-and-order policy ideas, such as a burqa ban.
It’s an uphill
battle for both parties. The SPD won 35 percent of the vote in 2011
and is on course for 28 percent this time, and the CDU is polling at
22 percent, down from a historic low of 23 percent last time.
‘I have my doubts’
Out on the campaign
trail, the big two are sticking to their guns.
“The difference
from the CDU is obvious: the SPD speaks out for the man in the
street,” Rainer Albrecht, a member of the SPD in the state
parliament, told a passerby who asked him about the difference
between the two parties as Albrecht handed out flyers by a shopping
center on the outskirts of Rostock.
“I have my
doubts,” the man replied.
Behind Albrecht, a
handful of SPD volunteers folded flyers and handed out lollipops.
Every one of them was unhappy at the leadership of Sigmar Gabriel,
the economy minister and vice chancellor.
Earlier this year,
Gabriel made a policy decision that enraged the local party faithful:
he decided to raise taxes on petrol even though gas prices had
fallen. This caused outrage in a predominantly rural state where many
rely on their cars.
“Now people tell
us, ‘They are raising taxes, and at the same time there’s enough
money for all the refugees,” one of the SPD volunteers said.
It takes about five
minutes to drive from where Albrecht was campaigning to the Rostock
neighborhood of Groß Klein, which made headlines in early August
when the city decided to move young asylum seekers out of an
apartment after far-right extremists rioted in front of their house.
By mid-August, there
were campaign posters for the AfD and the NPD on every street lamp in
the main street that cuts through the neighborhood of Soviet-era
apartment blocks.
“I’m not a Nazi,
but I will vote for the AfD because something has to change,” said
one Rostock woman, who refused to give her name.
If the AfD becomes
the strongest party in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the other parties will
almost certainly club together to block it. But the effect will still
be huge.
“If we end up
becoming the strongest party in the parliament, this will have an
enormous effect [on the national stage],” the AfD’s Leif-Erik
Holm said. “There also seems to be pressure now [on Merkel] to move
further towards our direction — the question is if she wants to do
that.”
 |
Merkel
admits mistakes made in Germany, EU with refugee crisis
By Erik Kirschbaum
and Andrea Shalal | BERLIN
Tue Aug 30, 2016
2:56pm EDT
Germany and other
European Union countries turned a blind eye to the refugee crisis
building on its external borders for too long, Chancellor Angela
Merkel said in a German newspaper interview to be published on
Wednesday.
Merkel, who has
faced criticism in Germany for launching her policies of welcoming
refugees a year ago, also told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung that Germany
and the EU will need patience and endurance in dealing with migration
of people to Europe.
"There are
political issues that one can see coming but don't really register
with people at that certain moment - and in Germany we ignored both
the problem for too long and blocked out the need to find a
pan-European solution," she said.
Merkel made the
comments in an unusually self-critical analysis that appeared to be
timed to the one-year anniversary on Wednesday of her now-famous
statement "wir schaffen das", or "we can do this",
when asked about the rising tide of refugees.
Her conservative
party is expected to take a beating in two regional elections next
month in part due to her refugee policies.
She said Germany,
which has taken in most of the more than 1 million refugees from the
Middle East and Asia who arrived in the EU in the past year, had let
Spain and other EU border countries deal with the refugees on their
own.
"Back then, we
also rejected a proportional distribution of the refugees," she
said.
Merkel said Germany
had not supported models such as the Frontex European border agency
that would have impinged on the sovereignty of the EU member states.
"We said we would deal with the problem at our airports since we
don't have any other external EU boundaries. But that doesn't work."
The three-term
chancellor said refugees will be a long-term issue.
"We didn't
embrace the problem in an appropriate way," she added. "That
goes as well for protecting the external border of the Schengen
area," she said, referring to the EU's passport-free and
frontier-free zone.
Merkel said the EU
needed to improve cooperation with and dramatically increase
development aid to countries in Africa as well as Turkey and other
troubled regions.
Also In World News
Merkel said Germany
had long been content to focus on other problems after years of
welcoming refugees from the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the
1990s. "I cannot deny that," she said.
She admonished
German politicians to express themselves in moderate terms and not
participate in the current ratcheting up of rhetoric about threats.
A number of Germans
had always had a certain racism toward foreigners and were willing to
commit violent acts for that cause, but that tendency had grown over
the past year, she said.
The German leader,
the daughter of pastor, also cautioned against equating all migrants
with terrorists. "It's simply incorrect to say that terrorism
came only with the refugees," she said. "It was already
here in myriad forms and with the various potential attackers that we
have been watching."
(Reporting by Erik
Kirschbaum and Andrea Shalal; Editing by Alison Williams)
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