Far-right party’s rise may put Nazis back in the Reichstag, warns minister
Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland predicted to win seats in election on back of immigration fears
GERMANY’S foreign minister said yesterday that voting for the far-right AFD party could put “Nazis back in the Reichstag”, in an insult rarely heard in na- tional politics.
Sigmar Gabriel said many German voters were considering voting Alternative fur Deutschland in the upcoming election as they felt their concerns about migration, security and jobs were not being addressed.
“If we’re unlucky, then these people will send a signal of dissatisfaction that will have terrible consequences. Then we will have real Nazis in the German Reichstag for the first time since the end of the Second World War,” the Social Democrat told t-online.de.
His comments were unusually strong given Germans’ continued sensitivity to Nazi references, even 70 years after the end of the war. The AFD is yet to respond to his comments.
It came at the same time as Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, admitted in a separate interview that it was “naive” of the EU to introduce free movement of people without stricter border checks.
“I see a major task ahead of us in security policy, which is that we Europeans need to know exactly who is staying with us,” Mrs Merkel told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “It was too naive at the time to create a European area of freedom of movement without effectively controlling our European external borders.”
The Chancellor, who is expected to beat her Social Democrat rival Martin Schulz at the election on Sept 24, added: “We have made considerable progress in protecting the external borders. Now we are setting up a register in which everyone who is entering and leaving the European Union is registered.”
Mrs Merkel has faced intense criticism over her “open door” refugee policy, under which hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers entered the country in 2015. The influx was followed by a spate of domestic terror attacks carried out by Syrian and Afghan refugees, which have been linked to growing anti-immigrant sentiments among German voters and the rise of the AFD.
Founded in 2013 as an anti-european Union party, the AFD shifted its focus after the eurozone debt crisis eased off and began to campaign against immigration, fuelled by Mrs Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open Germany’s borders to more than a million migrants and refugees, many fleeing war in the Middle East.
The party has seats in 13 of 16 state legislatures and is poised to move into the national parliament for the first time, according to polls that show its support at around 8 to 11 per cent. Political experts say it will be the first time a far-right party has been represented in the post-war German parliament.
Mr Gabriel, who led the Social Democrats, junior partners in Mrs Merkel’s “grand coalition”, until earlier this year, said the AFD was gaining strength in the towns and villages of the former East Germany.