German right-wing party on course to enter parliament
AfD is forecast to take between eight and 11 per cent of the vote on Sept. 24
— A nationalist party that wants Germany to close its borders to migrants, give up the euro and end sanctions against Russia is predicted to enter parliament for the first time, propelled by voters’ anger at Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than a million refugees since 2015.
Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is forecast to take between eight and 11 per cent of the vote on Sept. 24, giving it dozens of lawmakers in the national parliament. Some polls even project that it could come third behind Merkel’s party and the centre-left Social Democrats.
If the predictions are correct, it would be the first time in 60 years that a party to the right of Merkel’s conservative Union bloc has attracted enough votes to enter the Bundestag.
“It’s quite an achievement for a right-wing party to clear the five per cent minimum threshold,” said Gideon Botsch, a political scientist at the University of Potsdam.
AfD’s poll numbers are all the more remarkable because the party has become increasingly extreme since its founding in 2013, he said.
“German voters haven’t wanted to vote for a right-wing party in recent decades,” Botsch said. “Germany’s Nazi history is obviously one of the reasons for that.”
At an election rally last week in the southwestern city of Pforzheim, the mostly male, middle-aged audience gave a standing ovation to party co-leader Alexander Gauland, a 76-year-old former civil servant who sparked controversy last year by saying that Germans don’t want to live next to a black football player.
Gauland, a former member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, made headlines again recently for suggesting that the government’s integration czar should be “disposed of ” in Turkey, from where her family emigrated before she was born.
In Pforzheim, Gauland touched on a subject the party’s supporters are particularly anxious about: the influx of migrants from Muslimmajority countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Only if we defend Europe against a new Islamic invasion,” he told the crowd, “do we have a chance to remain a majority in this country and survive.”
Gauland’s anti-Islam comments fell on fertile ground in Pforzheim, at the northern tip of Germany’s Black Forest. His party achieved a surprise victory there in last year’s regional election. It now has seats in 13 state assemblies and the European Parliament.
Observers say AfD benefited from Pforzheim’s large population of so-called Russlanddeutsche — ethnic Germans who emigrated from the former Soviet Union and hold more conservative views than the general population.
One such voter, Waldemar Meister, said he thinks AfD is the only party that listens to ordinary people’s concerns. “We’re lied to, we’re deceived (by the other parties),” he said.
According to Timo Lochocki, a Berlin-based researcher at the German Marshall Fund think-tank, AfD’s success is partly due to the disillusionment voters feel with Germany’s established political parties.