The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is “open to right-wing extremism,” Wolfgang Schäuble, the president of the Bundestag (Germany’s parliament) told the newspaper Handelsblatt on Saturday.
“The problem is that the AfD does not draw a line,” he said, criticizing the party for its affiliation with right-wing extremism.
His comments follow several days of finger-pointing towards the far-right, anti-immigrant party — the third-largest in Germany’s parliament — in the wake of Wednesday night’s deadly shootings in Hanau, which targeted the patrons of two hookah bars.
Schäuble gave the example of Thuringian AfD state leader Björn Höcke, who he said could be called a fascist, in reference to Höcke’s support for another German nationalist and anti-Islam movement, Pegida.
Read more: Germany prepares for reprisal attacks after Hanau shootings
If every problem in Germany is attributed to immigrants, events will quickly escalate to include all minorities, Schäuble warned. “We have known for a long time that words can turn into actions. Elected representatives cannot be released from this responsibility,” he added.
The former finance minister said it was up to investigating authorities to quickly determine the motives and background relating to last week’s shootings. But it is up to the state to politicians and the state to “not only talk about a well-fortified democracy but also enforce the law,” he added.
Read more: After Hanau attack, Germany steps up protection of Muslims
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland
Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team’s defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch – but people would not want “someone like Boateng as a neighbor.” He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: “We can’t be blackmailed by children’s eyes.”
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alice Weidel
Alice Weidel generally plays the role of “voice of reason” for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians “pigs” and “puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Frauke Petry
German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must “use firearms if necessary” to “prevent illegal border crossings.” Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame” and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year – leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts – but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. “People who won’t accept STOP at our borders are attackers,” the European lawmaker said. “And we have to defend ourselves against attackers.”
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Marcus Pretzell
Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote “These are Merkel’s dead,” shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Wendt
The member of parliament in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to “get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus” — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland – again …
During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be “disposed of” back to Anatolia. The German term, “entsorgen,” raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
… and again
Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD’s youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany’s responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a “glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andreas Kalbitz
The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. “Der Spiegel” had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of “14 neo-Nazis” who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of “curiosity.”
Author: Dagmar Breitenbach
‘Racist incitement’
Meanwhile, politicians from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) said that public servants belonging to the AfD should leave their posts. “It is from the civil service that one expects a clear commitment to democracy, and that is what this democracy stands for,” said CDU parliamentarian Patrick Sensburg. “In my opinion, it is not possible to work with the AfD.”
Read more: Merkel’s CDU and far-right AfD may be nearing cooperation
“AfD functionaries have no place in the public service,” said SPD politician Ralf Stegner. Those who belong to such a party identify themselves with a nationalistic, right-wing extremist policy that, with its racist incitement, bears a “significant share of the responsibility for right-wing terrorism in Germany.”
Read more: Germany and right-wing extremism: The new dimension of terror
FDP interior affairs spokesman Konstantin Kuhle expressed similar sentiments. “One cannot be in public service and at the same time want to abolish the free democratic basic order,” he said. The more the ideas of Thuringian AfD leader Höcke become “mainstream” in the AfD, “the sooner civil servants and public employees should reconsider their involvement in the party.”
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lc/mm (AFP, dpa)
Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-s-sch%C3%A4uble-denounces-far-right-afd-for-not-stamping-out-extremism/a-52476628?maca=en-rss-en-ger-1023-xml-atom
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