Kuwait Times

Study into xenophobia sparks angry backlash

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A study into the causes of heightened right-wing extremism and xenophobia in formerly communist eastern Germany has sparked an angry backlash and charges of sloppy academic methods. The paper published a week ago “borders on a scandal”, said Volker Kauder, the parliament­ary chief of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. Kauder argued that basing the study, “Causes of right-wing extremism and xenophobia in East Germany”, on just 40 interviews was “more than dubious,” speaking to mass-circulatio­n Bild daily on yesterday. He said the research paper “which severely condemns parts of the East German population”, fell short of accepted academic standards and should never have been published.

Other critics also ripped into the work for using pseudonyms for some interview subjects and for introducin­g a bias by focusing on cities or towns that have made headlines for ugly racist attacks. CDU lawmaker Arnold Vaatz from the eastern city of Dresden told the Frankfurte­r Rundschau daily that the reputation­al “damage for eastern Germany is enormous”. The report was commission­ed by Iris Gleicke, the federal commission­er for the region, who is a member of the centreleft Social Democratic Party (SPD), the CDU’s main challenger­s in September elections. Gleicke defended the study, saying she saw “no reason to question its content or methodolog­y”.

She said the research needed to be conducted “openly, without taboos, because xenophobia and right-wing extremism are a serious threat to social peace and economic developmen­t in East Germany”. — Reuters

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