Study into xenophobia sparks angry backlash
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