A local councillor from the south-western German city of Baden-Baden has resigned from the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) after being accused of daubing Nazi swastikas on cars with Ukrainian licence plates.

The public prosecutor’s office in Baden-Baden had announced at the beginning of the week – without giving a name – that a councillor was suspected of defacing two cars with Ukrainian licence plates with the Nazi symbol and also writing the words “Fuck UA” in large letters on the vehicles.

The AfD faction in Baden-Baden announced that Martin Kühne had resigned from the party and his position as councillor.

“This closes the case for us,” the AfD party’s co-chair Markus Frohnmaier told dpa on Wednesday evening, after Kühne’s resignation.

Frohnmaier told dpa that people who did not act in the interests of the party had to leave it. He said the matter had been settled amicably at the district level, and the state-level party association had not intervened.

The Central Council of Jews is deeply shocked by the electoral success of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a local election in Thuringia.

“To be clear: not every one of the AfD voters has extreme right-wing views,” said the president of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, according to the Jüdische Allgemeine newspaper.

“But the party whose candidates they voted for is, according to the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, extreme right-wing.”

Schuster said he was deeply concerned that so many people agreed with this. “This is a breach of the dam that the democratic political forces in this country cannot simply accept.”

The International Auschwitz Committee also responded with horror to the result.

Executive Vice President Christoph Heubner said, “Today is a sad day for the Sonneberg district, for Germany and for democracy. A majority of voters have obviously said goodbye to democracy and deliberately opted for an extreme right-wing party of destruction dominated by a Nazi.”

Leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) have been rebuked for belittling the significance of the Nazis and criticizing a Holocaust memorial, but this has not stopped a small group of Jews from throwing their support behind the party.

On Sunday they formed Jews in the AfD, a political group based in the western city of Wiesbaden that seeks to foster support for the party, which says Islam is not compatible with the German constitution.

“We are not a religious organisation, we are a political organisation,” Jews in the AfD leader Wolfgang Fuhl told reporters at the inauguration ceremony, sitting on a podium with fellow Jews including a few wearing the Jewish skullcap.

He said people wishing to join had to meet two requirements: membership in the AfD and ethnic or religious association with the Jewish faith. Twenty people signed up at Sunday’s meeting.

The AfD entered the German parliament for the first time in an election last year, drawing support from a broad array of voters angry with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to welcome almost a million, mainly Muslim asylum seekers.

Its success drew immediate expressions of concern from Israeli officials and Jewish groups in Europe and the United States.

German politicians in June rebuked AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland after he said that Hitler and the Nazis “are just bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history.”

And Bjoern Hoecke, the AfD’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, triggered anger last year after he told supporters that Berlin’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was a “memorial of shame” and that history books should be rewritten to focus more on German victims.

But Jews for AfD leader Fuhl dismissed those concerns on Sunday, saying the AfD was the most pro-Israel party in Germany, not least because it supports the Jewish state’s right to have all of Jerusalem as its capital.

‘PRO-ISRAEL’

“The AfD is an exceptionally pro-Israel party, supposedly the most pro-Israel party in the Bundestag,” Fuhl said, referring to the lower house of parliament in which the AfD is the third-largest party.

Palestinians, with broad international backing, seek East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they want to establish in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Israel regards all of the city, including the eastern sector it captured in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed, as its “eternal and indivisible capital”.

Germany, home to an estimated 200,000 Jews, has built a reputation in recent decades as a tolerant, safe place for Jews to live. The rise of the AfD has alarmed the community.

Anti-Semitic crimes reported to the police rose 4 percent to 681 in the first eight months of 2017 against the same period last year, with an overwhelming majority of incidents linked to far-right extremism. The real number is probably much higher.

Members of Jews in the AfD appear unmoved by those figures.

When asked by a journalist what he would say to people who might call him a “Nazi Jew,” Bernhard Krauskopf said speaking in English: “I tell them that ‘you are talking to a Jewish-German person whose father lost more than 50 people in Nazi death camps, you should be a little bit more intelligent not to talk such nonsense.'”

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he was sceptical.

“It doesn’t go together for me,” he told Reuters. “In the end, I have to assume that these are people who simply have not recognised the true ulterior motive, also the goals of this more than right-wing populist party.”

He added: “I think that there are some who think, ‘The AFD is a party that today predominantly campaigns against or targets refugees, migrants, Muslims’. However, I consider it completely wrong to put Muslims under general suspicion. And the formula ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ does not work.'”

Police in Germany’s southern state of Bavaria are investigating two officers suspected of performing the illegal Hitler salute.

The German constitution makes it a crime to exhibit Nazi symbols and the incident is likely to feed into a heated debate about racism and the rise of the far right after a record influx of mainly Muslim migrants three years ago.

Police said in a statement on Saturday the two policemen had shouted anti-immigrant remarks and made the salute in a pub in the city of Rosenheim on Thursday. It based its information on a witness who was in the same beer garden as the two officers.

A third man, described as a security guard in the police statement, had also taken part and made the salute. The policemen have been suspended.

German politicians have been urging action to combat a rise in hostility toward foreigners after skinheads last Sunday clashed with police in an eastern city where a man was fatally stabbed and two migrants were identified as the main suspects.

Skinheads raised their arms in Nazi salutes, chased people who appeared to be outsiders and wrestled with police in Chemnitz after police identified the suspects as a Syrian and an Iraqi.

The leaking of the arrest warrant for one of the two stabbing suspects to the anti-Islam group PEGIDA raised concerns that some justice officials in the state of Saxony, where Chemnitz is located, were sympathetic to the far right.

“We will not allow the extreme right to infiltrate our society,” Justice Minister Katarina Barley told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday, urging authorities in Saxony to investigate far-right groups.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal immigration policy remains deeply divisive in a country that has taken in more than 1.6 million people over the last four years.

The influx contributed to the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which entered parliament for the first time in an election last year with a campaign that proclaimed Islam to be incompatible with the German constitution.

Some 8,000 people took part in a demonstration organised by the AfD and the anti-Islam group PEGIDA in Chemnitz on Saturday. About 3,000 people attended a rival protest by leftist groups.

Police said on Sunday that the demonstrations were largely peaceful.

Leftist groups will hold a concert in the city on Monday to denounce xenophobia and hatred against refugees and foreigners.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives faced accusations on Thursday of ignoring the rise of far-right groups in the eastern German state of Saxony after an incident there involving an off-duty police employee at an anti-Islam rally.

Saxony’s interior ministry confirmed late on Wednesday that the police employee had attended a march by anti-Islam group PEGIDA last Saturday and had reported TV journalists covering the rally to police who detained them for 45 minutes.

Video footage showed a well-built man in sunglasses and a hat in the colours of the German flag confronting the crew, waving his hands at the camera, telling them not to film and reporting them to the police.

State premier Michael Kretschmer, a senior member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), then appeared to defend the police action, tweeting: “The only people who come across seriously in this video are policemen.”

At a time when Germany is struggling to integrate more than a million migrants, the incident has raised concern both about entrenched right-wing sympathies among the police, especially in the former Communist East, and about press freedom.

A deputy leader of the Social Democrats (SPD), who share power with the CDU in the federal German government, accused Merkel’s party of complacency about the growth of the far-right.

“The CDU in Saxony has for decades denied or trivialised right-wing radical movements and violence,” Ralf Stegner told Handelsblatt daily.

It has “allowed right-wing thinking in Saxony not only to go unchallenged but also to be acceptable”, he said.

PRESS FREEDOM

German Justice Minister Katarina Barley, also from the SPD, said the events were “very worrying” and had to be quickly and comprehensively cleared up.

“Press freedom is an important part of our society and our constitution,” she said.

Kretschmer has since said he is a convinced defender of a free press and Die Welt newspaper quoted him on Thursday as saying: “I am intent on assessing the situation calmly and in a factual manner.”

Merkel’s decision in 2015 to let in about a million migrants, many fleeing wars in the Middle East, has fuelled support for far-right groups such as PEGIDA and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the main opposition party in parliament.

Saxony, the cradle of the PEGIDA movement, is a stronghold for far-right sentiment. In last year’s federal election, the AfD was the strongest party in the state, pushing Merkel’s CDU into an embarrassing second place.

Kretschmer, who has criticised Merkel’s migration policy, faces a tough challenge in next year’s state election to hold Saxony for the CDU.

Neo-Nazis have a strong tradition in Saxony, especially in the capital, Dresden, where they gather every year on Feb. 13 to mark the Allied firebombing of the city in World War Two which killed 25,000 people and destroyed its baroque architecture.

Asked by broadcaster NDR about the off-duty police employee taking part in a PEGIDA rally, a Saxony police spokesman did not deny there might be supporters of the group in police ranks.

“The police is a cross-section of society. We have all political views,” he said.

A growing number of migrants are finding jobs in Germany, according to data released on Tuesday that will give heart to supporters of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to let in hundreds of thousands of war refugees since 2015.

Figures last week also showed that German companies have managed to attract more apprentices to on-the-job training schemes due to a surge in applications from asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Syria.

The figures will feed into a running debate in Germany on the impact of Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open German borders to more than a million migrants, many of them refugees from war zones in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

Critics including the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have said the new arrivals will be a burden on Germany’s welfare system and economy.

But the head of Germany’s Labour Office, Detlef Scheele, told dpa news agency there was no reason to be overly pessimistic about the country’s ability to cope with the record number of arrivals.

“This is all going pretty well,” he said, adding that the numbers were slightly better than expected. “These are good numbers, also taking into account that the people came here for humanitarian reasons and not for finding a job,” Scheele added.

The number of employed migrants from the eight countries with the biggest numbers of asylum seekers surged by more than 100,000 to 306,574 in May compared with the same month in the previous year, data from the Labour Office showed.

SKILLED LABOUR SHORTAGE

Among those, roughly three out of four had a labour contract in which the company and the employee were paying full contributions to social insurance schemes, the data showed.

There were roughly 500,000 people from the eight main asylum seeker countries who were registered as looking for work in July, the data showed. This includes people who are currently completing an integration and language course.

Among those, nearly 197,000 people were registered as unemployed which is roughly in line with the level seen a year earlier, the data showed.

Shortages of skilled labour and a lack of young people willing to commit to on-the-job training for up to 3 1/2 years have become big concerns for managers in Europe’s largest economy.

Vacancies for training positions have reached their highest level in more than 20 years with more than a third of companies unable to fill all of their training spots.

The number of new arrivals in Germany has fallen sharply this year, partly due to stricter border controls across Europe as well as tighter asylum rules in Germany and other countries.

]]> 7811 https://www.faith-matters.org/germany-far-right-leader-sceptical-of-bannons-anti-eu-push/ Mon, 13 Aug 2018 09:34:52 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=7697

A leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has poured cold water on plans by Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former political strategist, to forge a wide populist alliance to undermine the European Union.

“We’re not in America,” Alexander Gauland, one of two co-leaders of the anti-immigrant party, told the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper chain in an interview published on Saturday.

“The interests of the anti-establishment parties in Europe are quite divergent,” he added in comments that amounted to a blunt rebuff of Bannon from one of Europe’s most influential far-right parties.

The former Trump strategist last month announced he had created a Brussels-based political organization called The Movement to rally nationalist and populist voters in European Parliament elections next May, with a goal of undermining and paralysing the bloc.

But Gauland said that while his co-leader Alice Weidel had met once with Bannon, he saw no possibility of cooperating with him. “Mr Bannon will not succeed in forging an alliance of the like-minded for the European elections.”

He said the AfD only had close contacts with Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO), junior party in Austria’s coalition government. Former AfD leader Frauke Petry had always wanted to work with France’s National Front, but that had not worked out.

Raheem Kassam, a spokesman for The Movement, said of Gauland’s comments: “The Movement is a clearing house of ideas, not a campaigning organisation that would seek to have anything to do with AFD’s national policy or election campaigns. We are content that senior AFD figures understand the project and are in touch with us every day. We look forward to working alongside those who want to do so, for the causes we all believe in.”

Gauland told Funke Mediengruppe that his party was polling at 17 to 20 percent in recent surveys, and its support could grow beyond that as long as Chancellor Angela Merkel remained in power.

The party won 12.6 percent of the vote in national elections last September, making it the third largest party and catapulting it into the German parliament for the first time.

Gauland said the AfD needed to become stronger, but he expected it to be ready to take on a governing role in the medium-term.

Political experts say the party could become the strongest party in the eastern German states of Saxony and Brandenburg in regional elections next year, raising the question of whether mainstream parties will reverse course and agree to form coalitions with it.

A senior German government official accused the opposition far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party of helping make anti-Semitism “presentable” again in Germany by challenging a longtime consensus about how to deal with its Nazi past.

Felix Klein, who holds a newly created government post tasked with fighting anti-Semitism, said in remarks to online news site watson.de on Thursday that the AfD tolerated party members calling for a new “culture of remembrance”.

“I don’t want to say the AfD is anti-Semitic, per se, but it tolerates representatives who are demanding a new policy of remembrance,” he said. “They initiated this discussion about drawing a line (under the Holocaust) and that is very dangerous because it helps make anti-Semitism presentable again.”

The AfD had no immediate comment on Klein’s comments. The party has denied being anti-Semitic or racist but has drawn sharp criticism for not sanctioning a key party figure after he called for a “180 degree turnaround” in the way Germany seeks to atone for Nazi crimes.

The AfD swept into the lower house of parliament for the first time after September elections, tapping into widespread frustration about Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to open the borders to over 1 million mostly Muslim migrants.

Klein’s post was created by Merkel’s conservatives and the centre-left Social Democrats as part of their coalition pact amid reports from Germany’s small Jewish community about what they see as rising levels of prejudice and hatred.

Anti-Semitism is a highly sensitive issue in Germany, whose 1933-45 Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

Klein said last month anti-Semitism was still rooted largely in extreme right-wing ideology and was not only being driven by Germany’s growing Muslim population.

German schools have long taught about the Holocaust, but rights groups say the rise of the AfD and other far-right parties has frayed taboos against anti-Semitic utterances and other hate speech.

Klein has also called for a national database to record anti-Semitic incidents, including by Muslims, that are not included in crime statistics.

He told watson.de that he would raise the issue with the German Conference on Islam, and encourage Muslim groups across Germany to take on the fight against anti-Semitism.

“This would not only send an important signal, but would allow Muslim groups to ask for solidarity when a mosque or a woman wearing a head covering are attacked,” he said.

]]> 7317 https://www.faith-matters.org/far-right-party-likened-to-nazis-to-shake-up-german-parliament/ Thu, 21 Sep 2017 16:02:49 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=6889

The first far-right party set to enter Germany’s parliament for more than a half a century says it will press for Chancellor Angela Merkel to be “severely punished” for opening the door to refugees and migrants.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has also called for Germany’s immigration minister to be “disposed of” in Turkey where her parents come from, could become the third largest party with up to 12 percent of the vote on Sept. 24, polls show.

That is far less than similar movements in other European countries – in France far-right leader Marine Le Pen won 34 percent of the vote in May and in the Netherlands far-rightist Geert Wilders scored 13 percent in a March election.

But the prospect of a party that the foreign minister has compared with the Nazis entering the heart of German democracy is unnerving the other parties. They all refuse to work with the AfD and no one wants to sit next to them in parliament.

Leading AfD candidate Alexander Gauland denies they are Nazis, saying others only use the term because of the party’s popularity. It has won support with calls for Germany to shut its borders immediately, introduce a minimum quota for deportations and stop refugees bringing their families here.

“We’re gradually becoming foreigners in our own country,” Gauland told an election rally in the Polish border city of Frankfurt an der Oder.

A song with the lyrics “we’ll bring happiness back to your homeland” blared out of a blue campaign bus and the 76-year-old lawyer said Germany belonged to the Germans, Islam had no place here and the migrant influx would make everyone worse off.

Gauland provoked outrage for saying at another event that Germans should no longer be reproached with the Nazi past and they should take pride in what their soldiers achieved during World War One and Two.

The Nazis ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, during which time they killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and invaded countries across Europe.

The AfD could end up as the biggest opposition force in the national assembly if there is a re-run of the current coalition of Merkel’s conservatives and Social Democrats (SPD) — one of the most likely scenarios.

That would mean it would chair the powerful budget committee and open the general debate during budget consultations, giving prominence to its alternatives to government policies.

Georg Pazderski, a member of the AfD’s executive board, told Reuters his party would use parliamentary speeches to draw attention to the cost of the migrant crisis, troubles in the euro zone – which the AfD wants Germany to leave – and problems related to the European Union.

“We’ll have a voice when we’re in parliament,” he said. “We won’t be an easy opposition.”

He expects other parties will shun the AfD for a year or two but ultimately work with it, pointing to the regional assembly in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD and Merkel’s Christian Democrats voted to set up a committee to investigate left-wing extremism.

Gauland told Reuters the AfD would call for a committee to investigate the chancellor after entering parliament: “We want Ms Merkel’s policy of bringing 1 million people into this country to be investigated and we want her to be severely punished for that.”

For an interactive graphic on German elections click – http://tmsnrt.rs/2h0NqCT

SUITS, NOT SKINHEADS

MPs have already changed the qualification for the ceremonial post of doyen of parliament to the longest-serving MP rather than the oldest, likely to have been an AfD member.

Sahra Wagenknecht, top candidate of the radical Left party, told Reuters it was important to look at individuals for committees but added: “I won’t elect any AfD member who belongs to Bjoern Hoecke’s wing and who really represents Nazi views into any position of responsibility.”

Hoecke has denied that Adolf Hitler was “absolutely evil”, described Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial as a “monument of shame” and demanded a “180 degree turnaround” in the way Germany seeks to atone for Nazi crimes.

The justice minister said some of the AfD’s programme like its demand to ban minarets is unconstitutional.

Alexander Hensel, who studied the AfD’s role in regional parliaments for the Otto Brenner Foundation, said debates in state assemblies had become more polarised since the AfD arrived and some other MPs would not shake hands with the newcomers.

“The AfD’s aggressive right-wing positions have intensified the debates while the tone and way people deal with each other in parliament has become noticeably rougher due to the AfD’s tough rhetoric and targeted provocations,” he said.

Unlike previous right-wing movements in Germany the AfD – founded in 2013 by an anti-euro group of academics – has become socially acceptable so radicalised people from the middle class feel able to vote for it alongside classic radical right-wing voters, said Manfred Guellner, head of Forsa polling institute.

“You don’t vote for skinheads but you can vote for professors in suits,” said Guellner, referring to the likes of Gauland, who tends to wear tweed jackets.

The AfD is unlikely to gain much more support though, said Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, predicting worsening infighting over whether to aim for government or stay in opposition.

“They’ll add to the yelling and screaming in the Bundestag,” he said, but added: “I don’t see them spreading like a cancer through society.”

Members of the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Sunday backed an election manifesto that says Islam is not compatible with the constitution and calls for a ban on minarets and the burqa.

Two other core points came out from the Party’s debate on Islam. These included members rejecting a call for dialogue with Muslims and attendees backed a manifesto that is highly critical of Islam.

Set up three years ago, the AfD has been buoyed by Europe’s migrant crisis, which saw the arrival of more than one million, mostly Muslim migrants, in Germany last year. The party has no lawmakers in the federal parliament in Berlin but has members in half of Germany’s 16 regional state assemblies.

Opinion polls give AfD support of up to 14 percent, presenting a serious challenge to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and other established parties ahead of the 2017 federal election. They rule out any coalition with the AfD.

In a raucous debate on the second day of a party congress, many of the 2,000 members cheered calls from the podium for measures against “Islamic symbols of power” and jeered a plea for dialogue with Germany’s Muslims.

“Islam is foreign to us and for that reason it cannot invoke the principle of religious freedom to the same degree as Christianity,” said Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, an AfD lawmaker from the state of Saxony-Anhalt, to loud applause.

Merkel has said freedom of religion for all is guaranteed by Germany’s constitution and has said on many occasions that Islam belongs to Germany.

“ISLAM IS NOT PART OF GERMANY”

Up to 2,000 left-wing demonstrators clashed with police on Saturday as they tried to break up the first full AfD conference. About 500 people were briefly detained and 10 police officers were lightly injured, a police spokesman said.

The chapter of the AfD manifesto concerning Muslims is entitled “Islam is not a part of Germany”. The manifesto demands a ban to minarets – the towers of a mosque from where the call to Muslim prayer is made – and the burqa, the all-encompassing body garment worn by some conservative Muslim women.

Germany is home to nearly four million Muslims, about five percent of the total population. Many of the longer established Muslim community in Germany came from Turkey to find work, but those who have arrived over the past year have mostly been fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last month the head of Germany’s Central Council of Muslims likened the AfD’s attitude towards his community to that of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis towards the Jews.

Although the AfD aimed to broaden its political agenda during the congress, members hardly debated on domestic issues, such as taxation and social welfare.

The party’s leadership has proposed the introduction of an income tax bracket system and the abolition of inheritance taxes, which experts say would benefit high earners.

The head of Germany’s DGB confederation of trade unions, Reiner Hoffmann, sharply criticised the AfD’s programme.

“Their alternatives are nothing but simple, dull and inconsistent,” Hoffmann said in a speech at an DGB event in Stuttgart to mark Labour Day.

He said the AfD was not only conducting a hate campaign against refugees, but also aiming for a tax policy that was against the interests of workers.

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