Germany’s far-right AfD party has beaten Angela Merkel’s Christian Dem ocrats in Sunday’s regional elections in the eastern state of Thuringia.
Bjoern Hoecke, a politician who has been compared to Adolf Hitler on German national television, led the anti-immigrant anti-Muslim Alternative for Germany party to second place with 23.8 per cent, initial polling showed.
Popular premier Bodo Ramelow’s far-left Die Linke party easily retained the top spot with about 30 per cent.
The anti-immigration AfD was in second spot, narrowly ahead of Merkel’s party, who won about 22 per cent, and far ahead of her coalition partners, the once powerful Social Democrats (SPD), who scored only eight per cent.
Bjoern Hoecke, Alternative for Germany (AfD) party leader and top candidate for the Thuringia delivers a speech after announcement of first exit polls in Erfurt, Germany
The anti- immigration AfD was in second spot, narrowly ahead of Merkel’s party, who won about 22 per cent
The AfD’s strong result came despite widespread criticism after an October 9 attack in the eastern city of Halle, where a suspected neo-Nazi gunman tried and failed to storm a synagogue then shot dead two people outside.
After the bloody attack, the commissioner for combating anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, like many other critics, argued that the AfD had trafficked in incendiary anti-Jewish sentiment.
The Thuringia campaign has been marked by anger, threats and recriminations, with CDU candidate Mike Mohring labelling the AfD’s local leader, the nationalist hardliner Bjoern Hoecke, a ‘Nazi’.
A triumphant Hoecke told supporters on Sunday that the state – 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall – had voted for a second revolution, a ‘Transition 2.0’, and delivered ‘a clear ‘no’ to the ossified party landscape’.
Hoecke is under investigation by German intelligence as a possible threat to national democracy.
The rise of the AfD has made it harder for the other parties to form a governing coalition, boosting the likely role of smaller players with single-digit results such as the much reduced SPD and the Greens.
Jewish community leaders in Germany voiced fears today over the surge in support for the far-right AfD.
Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor who heads Munich’s Jewish community, said the fact that the party was able to garner such a strong score, shows ‘something fundamental has gone off the rails in our political system’.
Popular premier Bodo Ramelow’s (right) far-left Die Linke party easily retained the top spot with about 30 per cent
She warned that ‘the erosion of democratic culture is continuing’, saying that voters who picked the AfD have ‘backed a party that has for years prepared the ground for exclusion and violence of the far-right’.
Christoph Heubner, deputy president of the International Auschwitz Committee, which represents survivors of the Nazi death camp, also voiced fears over the trend.
‘For survivors of German concentration camps, this strong increase in votes for the AfD is a new terrifying sign that raises fear of a further consolidation of right-wing extremist trends and attitudes in Germany,’ he said.
Hoecke had labelled Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a ‘monument of shame’ and called for a ‘180-degree shift’ in Germany’s culture of remembrance of the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime.
While popular premier Bodo Ramelow’s far-left Die Linke party easily retained the top spot with about 30 per cent, the Alternative for Germany scored at least 23 percent
In Thuringia, the only state ruled by Die Linke, the post-election situation is complicated further by the CDU’s refusal to cooperate with the hard-left party, despite the relatively moderate stance of Ramelow, a folksy former trade union official.
In the eastern states of Saxony and Brandenburg last month, the AfD also scored above 20 percent to become the second-largest force.
However, in both cases the mainstream parties kept a pact not to enter into government with the far-right party, a pledge they have also made in Thuringia.
The election in the state of just over two million people was closely watched as another snapshot of the mood in the AfD heartland, especially given the role of Hoecke, a former history teacher considered extreme even within his party.
Signalling political ambitions at the national level, Hoecke has openly challenged the AfD’s senior leadership and was accused of a ‘personality cult’ after marching into a hall escorted by flag-waving supporters.
The CDU’s Mohring recently declared that ‘to me, Hoecke is a Nazi’.
With tensions running high on the campaign trail, police have been investigating death threats against Mohring and Greens co-leader Robert Habeck, and an arson attack on an AfD campaign truck.
The AfD started out as a eurosceptic fringe party before reinventing itself as an anti-Islam, anti-refugee movement to capitalise on anger over a massive influx of asylum seekers in 2015.
Its populist message has resonated most strongly with voters in Germany’s former communist east where resentment lingers over lower wages and fewer job opportunities.
Ramelow on the eve of the vote said that ‘the AfD claims to be the party that cares. But in reality, it is a party that knows nothing but outrage’.