Far-Right party vows to put an end to Merkel’s ‘foreign invasion’
THE far-Right party which secured shock gains in the German election has vowed to end the ‘invasion of foreigners’ it blames on Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Nationalists in the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party gave a taste of the hostile tone they have pledged to use to ‘hound’ Mrs Merkel, whose position was significantly weakened by the poll result.
The AfD’s top candidate in the election, Alexander Gauland, said: ‘I don’t want to lose Germany to an invasion of foreigners from foreign cultures.’
He added that his party – which campaigned with slogans such as ‘Bikinis Not Burkas’ – would ‘get our country and our people back’.
But the AfD was in disarray just hours after its election triumph when one of its co-chairmen, Frauke Petry, dramatically resigned.
Miss Petry, who caused a storm last year when she called for police to be authorised to open fire on illegal immigrants, sensationally quit during a morning press conference yesterday, leaving fellow politicians agog.
She said that after a ‘long deliberation’, she would not be entering the German parliament as an AfD MP. She then walked out of the room.
It is understood Miss Petry found the party’s direction too radical, and she was sidelined at a party conference in April where former Goldman Sachs banker Alice Weidel and Mr Gauland were chosen as the lead candidates instead.
The anti-migrant party’s 12.6 per cent share saw it sweep into third place, poaching a million votes from Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union.
The AfD had a robust showing in the former communist East German states where there has been strong resistance to the Chancellor’s open-door immigration policy.
Jens Hamburger, a 72-year-old voter in the hill-top town of Baut- zen, in Saxony near Germany’s borders with the Czech Republic and Poland, said: ‘It wasn’t easy for me, but this woman (Mrs Merkel) should have got an even bigger knock over her head. She practised the politics of indifference toward us. I voted for AfD and I’m very content with the results.’
Alexander Ahrerns, the mayor of Bautzen, said: ‘The people who voted for AfD are not bad people. One has to talk to the people, approach them, and should by no means judge them for their fears.’ Last night Mrs Merkel said she would talk with all mainstream parties about trying to form a ‘good, stable’ government after Germany’s watershed election, and vowed to try to win back voters who supported an upstart nationalist force.
‘We had hoped for a better result,’ she admitted, after her party’s worst outcome since 1949.
Mrs Merkel, 63, said she would seek exploratory talks on an alliance with two smaller parties, the pro-business Free Democrats and the Greens.
All other political parties have ruled out working with the AfD, whose leaders call Mrs Merkel a ‘traitor’ for allowing in more than a million asylum seekers since 2015.
It came as senior AfD figure Dr Weidel enters parliament with not one but two scandals snapping at her heels.
The first is her admission that she is a lesbian, despite being a member of a party which is vehemently opposed to same-sex marriages. The second is an allegation she employed a Syrian women to work in her house without reporting it to authorities.
The weekly magazine Did evZeit claimed that Dr Weidel, 38, employed a student and then a Syrian refugee to work in her house in Biel, Switzerland, in 2015.
According to the report, Dr Weidel never offered the women work contracts, nor were they asked for invoices for the work they had done. Payment was always in cash.
‘Get our country back’