German
police investigate AfD flyers resembling plane tickets for immigrants
Karlsruhe
police say they have opened inquiry into ‘persons unknown on suspicion of
incitement of racial hatred’
Deborah Cole
in Berlin
Tue 14 Jan
2025 13.40 GMT
German
police have launched an investigation after the far-right Alternative für
Deutschland party distributed flyers designed to resemble plane tickets for
deportation that were addressed to “illegal immigrants” as part of an
increasingly provocative campaign for next month’s general election.
People from
immigrant communities in the south-western city of Karlsruhe found the flyers
in their letterboxes, although it was not immediately clear if they had been
directly targeted.
The criminal
police force in Karlsruhe said in a statement on Tuesday it had opened an
investigation into “persons unknown on suspicion of incitement of racial
hatred”.
A police
spokesperson said a complaint had been filed referring to a social media post
about the flyer, which had an AfD logo, a QR code linking to the website of the
party’s local chapter and the purported destination of a “safe country of
origin”. Below that was the tagline: “Only remigration can still save Germany.”
The flyers
strongly resemble the fake plane tickets distributed by the neo-Nazi NPD party
in 2013 in a racist bid to discourage immigrant candidates from standing for
parliament. Both campaigns recalled chilling Nazi-era appeals to Jews to leave
Germany offering “free tickets to Jerusalem … never to return” with a design
that also mimicked actual travel documents.
The Greens
politician Beate Hoeft from Ettlingen, south of Karlsruhe, posted about the
flyer on her Instagram account with the caption: “People from a migrant
background in the Karlsruhe region found this in their letterboxes,” adding
hashtags reading “No AfD”, “Protect democracy” and “Beware the beginnings”. She
said she was in contact with one affected family.
The mayor of
Karlsruhe, Frank Mentrup of the Social Democrats, accused the AfD of fomenting
“fear” among communities that already felt anxious about far-right sentiment
spreading in Germany.
The AfD MP
Marc Bernhard, from Karlsruhe, told the public broadcaster SWR that 30,000 of
the flyers had been printed and that they had been distributed at election
campaign stands as well as dropped in residential mailboxes. He denied those
with “foreign-sounding names” had been targeted, as well as any connection with
the decade-old NPD campaign.
Markus
Frohnmaier, the co-chair of the AfD’s Baden-Württemberg state association, said
he supported “the creative action by local chapters”. It was the party’s goal
to see the nearly 1 million Syrians in Germany returned home after the fall of
the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, he said, calling it “enforcement
of existing law”.
One year
after tens of thousands of Germans took to the streets in protest against
reported secret AfD plans for mass “remigration”, the party openly embraced the
term at its congress last weekend before the 23 February election.
The AfD,
which authorities class as suspected rightwing extremist, is polling in second
place with about 21% support behind the centre-right Christian Democrats,
meaning it is highly unlikely to win an outright majority. All the mainstream
democratic parties have ruled out forming a governing coalition with the hard
right.
.jpg)
.jpg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário