Thousands march to mourn Hanau’s dead
Thousands of people marched through the streets of the German town of Hanau yesterday, local time, in solidarity with the victims of a racist gun attack in which 10 people were killed.
Police estimated that some 10,000 demonstrators joined the march, which started at a shisha bar in the west of the town where Tobias Rathjen shot dead five people last week, and ended on the inner-city street where his killing spree began.
Marchers carried signs reading ‘‘Love for all, hate for no one’’, as well as Turkish and Romanian flags, in solidarity with the victims, local media reported. Nine of those killed were from immigrant communities.
Rathjen, who was 43, also shot dead his elderly mother, before turning the gun on himself. A manifesto he posted online indicated that he advocated ethnic cleansing and suffered paranoid delusions. Politicians from across the political spectrum have pointed blame at the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, claiming that the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the fledgling nationalist movement motivated the psychologically disturbed gunman to carry out his crime.
Alexander Gauland, the AfD leader, has rejected ‘‘the political instrumentalisation of the crime’’.
Polling carried out in recent days shows that roughly 60 per cent of Germans believe that the AfD’s criticism of Muslim minorities was partly responsible.
The crime is the country’s third fatal far-Right attack in less than a year, following the killing of Walter Luebcke, the CDU politician, in June last year, and an attempted attack on a synagogue in Halle in October.
Polling conducted immediately after the Hanau attack showed support for the AfD had fallen to 9 per cent, the lowest in three years.
In Hamburg, voters handed German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives their worst-ever result, punishing them for flirting with the far-Right in an eastern state and descending into a messy leadership battle.
Preliminary results also showed the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) scraping into the Hamburg parliament, only four days after the Hanau attack.
The Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens celebrated in Germany’s second-biggest city after taking first and second place, meaning they will probably keep ruling together in the northern port and city-state.
The conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) suffered after party leader and Merkel protege Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said she would stand aside, blowing open the race to succeed the chancellor and throwing the party into turmoil.
The CDU slipped into third place, scoring just 11.2 per cent. The AfD, which has capitalised on anger over Merkel’s open-door migrant policy, especially in the former Communist East, won 5.3 per cent, just over the 5 per cent threshold needed to get into the state parliament, according to the preliminary results.
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