Far-right threat looming as Germans head to polls

World
Europe

Germans will cast their ballots in the national election this Sunday amid growing fears rightwing populists could resonate in the national parliament.

Far-right populists have been on the march in previous European elections and have even triggered Brexit, and "the rise" of the right-wing Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) or Alternative for Germany has not come as a surprise.

A group of economists founded the party in February 2013 to reject bailout packages for weak eurozone members. But it was held at bay after failing to secure 5 percent threshold necessary to reach the parliament in 2013.

Around the same time, similar forces were trying to find a footing elsewhere in Europe.

Far right voices

Authoritarian nationalists secured victory in the 2014 Hungarian parliamentary election. The right in Poland followed suit in 2015 by claiming election win.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen (R) and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (L) during a press conference in Paris, France on April 29, 2017. /VCG Photo

Britain’s Ukip triggered the Brexit after former British Prime Minister David Cameron failed to secure a pro-EU vote in the 2016 referendum. The country is all set to leave the European Union in March 2019.

Rightwing populism, however, suffered consecutive defeats in Austria, the Netherlands, and France.

Environmentalist Alexander Van der Bellen defeated far-right Norbert Hofer in Austria's presidential election in December 2016. Dutch election defeated right-wing earlier this year and Marine Le Pen was down in France.

A sigh of relief, but for how long?

Europe signaled relief after far rights lost. But Germany is different than other European democracies.

AfD started as an anti-euro party but has garnered support on anti-immigrant rhetoric. The outfit got 21 percent of the vote in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. It holds nearly 25 percent of the seats in the parliament of Saxony-Anhalt.

Frauke Petry, head of the party, stirred up a controversy last year by saying that police should "if necessary" shoot at migrants attempting to enter the country illegally.

Earlier this month, Alexander Gauland of AfD called on Germany to stop atoning for its World War II crimes and proclaim its military achievements.

"If the French are rightly proud of their emperor and the Britons of Nelson and Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars," he said while addressing supporters on Sept. 2.

‍Britain's eurosceptic UKIP has been a driving force behind Brexit. /AFP Photo‍

"People no longer need to reproach us with these 12 years. They don’t relate to our identity nowadays," he said.

The speech was made public last week. The 76-year-old is likely to become the next parliament’s oldest member.

AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel stirred up a hornet's nest after she described the current government in her leaked email from 2013 as "pigs", saying it is "nothing other than marionettes of the victorious powers of the second world war, whose task it is to keep down the German people."

Weidel is openly lesbian and lives in Switzerland with her Sri Lankan born partner. German weekly Die Zeit has recently accused them of illegally hiring a Syrian refugee for housekeeping.

'Positive outlook'

The scandals, however, appear to have failed to dent the popularity of AfD’s as its prospects already looked promising.

Opinion polls put the outfit in third place, projecting 11 percent of the votes. Under this scenario, it could emerge as the biggest opposition force in the parliament.

The polling institute Emnid conducted the survey and results were published in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday. The poll put Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) at 36 percent and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) on 22 percent.

Martin Schulz, the head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a former European Parliament president, faces an uphill battle to unseat Merkel. /AFP Photo

AfD has gained the third position in four of the last five polls.

Who did trigger the rise of the right?

SPD’s candidate for Chancellor Martin Schulz has alleged that Merkel had paved the way for the far right.

In a recent interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, Schulz said, "Merkel's attempt to avoid the debate about the future of our country has led to a political vacuum that the opportunists of the day are filling by peddling fear. And those opportunists are members of the AfD."

He stopped short of holding Merkel responsible for the rise of the right but said, "AfD has naturally profited from the fact that Merkel has robbed the Christian Democrats (CDU) of their ideological core."

German political science professor and director of the Center for European Integration Studies (ZEI) Ludger Kühnhardt linked the rise of the far-right movement to the identity issue.

Refugees cheered Merkel as savior, for some she is "austerity queen" and some call her the new "leader of the free world." /AFP Photo

"The question of the identity of the citizens gradually came back because of the increasing Europeanization, increasing integration in Europe, and it has been fundamentally coming back as a consequence of this enormous increase in migration, especially illegal migration of so many refugees," he said in a recent interview with CGTN.

If AfD manages to break the 5 percent threshold in Sunday’s general election, it will be the first time since the parliament fire of 1933 that a racist party will sit in the building (Reichstag).

Angela Merkel praised Dutch voters earlier this year for "a very pro-European result" after they defeated the far-right populists. She has to wait and see whether or not the voters at home reject the local right-wing populists, who pose a far bigger threat than those in the Netherlands.