Anti-migrant backlash grips city; mayor assures visitors
CHEMNITZ, GERMANY — Days after a street killing sparked violent anti-migrant protests, the mayor of Chemnitz sought Friday to reassure foreign visitors, students and investors that the eastern German city is safe, even as authorities prepared for further demonstrations at the weekend.
Images of neo-Nazis shouting “foreigners out” and performing the stiff-armed ‘Hitler salute’ during a protest Monday made headlines far beyond Germany, prompting concern among businesses and the city’s University of Technology, which has a large share of students from abroad.
“At the moment there’s a lot of uncertainty and fear on various sides,” Chemnitz’s mayor, Barbara Ludwig, told reporters on the city’s cobble-stone market square. “We’re going to make clear in the coming weeks and months that foreign students and foreign investors do indeed have their place in this city and will be safe here.”
Switzerland’s foreign ministry has already updated advice for its citizens traveling to Germany in the wake of the protests. It didn’t single out Chemnitz but said that “there may be demonstrations in big cities” and cautioned that “rioting is possible.”
The protests followed the fatal stabbing early Sunday morning of a 35-year-old German man, Daniel Hillig. Two men, a 22-year-old Iraqi and a 23-year-old Syrian, have been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter.
The killing and the unrest that followed have reignited the simmering debate over German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision three years ago to allow hundreds of thousands of refugees into the country, straining its resources and hospitality beyond what some Germans considered acceptable.
Anti-migrant sentiment has been particularly strong in Saxony, the state where Chemnitz is located. The nearby state capital of Dresden is home to the group Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA, and the farright Alternative for Germany party received almost a quarter of the vote in Saxony last year.
The party, known by its acronym AfD, publicly sided with the anti-migrant protesters in Chemnitz and organized a demonstration of its own in the city on Saturday.
The strategy appears to be paying off. A poll published Friday by public broadcaster ZDF put the party’s rating nationwide at 17 percent, up from 13 percent in last year’s elections.
The same poll found that 65 percent of the party’s voters don’t believe far-right extremists are a threat to democracy. The telephone survey of 1,216 randomly selected respondents, carried out from Aug. 28-30, found that supporters of all other parties overwhelmingly consider far-right extremists a threat to democracy.
Officials in Saxony have requested help from federal police and are drawing together all available officers to police the weekend protest. The move has resulted in the rare cancellation of a soccer match Saturday in Dresden, for lack of available police.
Such short-term effects could pale in comparison to the medium-term impact that the spike in anti-migrant sentiment could have for the region, according to experts.
Chip maker Globalfoundries told business daily Handelsblatt that Saxony’s reputation has made it difficult to attract skilled foreign workers to the state.
“It’s not easy to convince an engineer from abroad to move to Saxony and bring his family,” spokesman Jens Drews told the newspaper. “We need to explain to him that the Dresden region is safe, that his children can go alone to school and one won’t be marginalized for wearing a head scarf.”