Far-right victory in German state alarms Jews

JTA – For the first time since the Nazi era, a far-right party in Germany has won the largest piece of the electoral pie in a state election.

Mainstream politicians and Jewish leaders are expressing alarm following the elections on Sunday, 1 September, in which the anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic, and pro-Russia Alternative for Germany (AfD) party came out on top in the state of Thuringia, with 32.8% of the vote.

The 11-year-old party also earned second place to the traditional conservative Christian Democratic Union party in the neighbouring state of Saxony. Both states are in the former East Germany.

“No-one can brush this off as a ‘protest’ vote anymore,” Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, said on Sunday.

“Exactly 85 years after the start of World War II, Germany is in danger of becoming a different country again: more unstable, colder and poorer, less secure, less worth living in,” said Knobloch, a former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany who herself survived the Holocaust in hiding.

The election came just over a week since a Syrian refugee was arrested after a stabbing spree at a festival in the city of Solingen, and only days after Germany resumed its programme of deporting refugees convicted of crimes. The knife attack, in which three people were killed, reignited popular anxiety about unrest connected with the more than one million refugees admitted to Germany since 2015.

AfD stresses isolationism, takes an anti-European Union and pro-Russian stance, and is accused of fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment. Some of its most extreme representatives have also belittled the Holocaust, saying that Germany has paid enough penance for the sins of an older generation.

Mass protest against the party took place earlier this year following revelations that it had held a secret meeting at a lakeside villa to discuss plans to deport foreigners, including those who had become German citizens. Prominent neo-Nazis attended the meeting, according to the news organisation that broke the story, inducing painful echoes of the gathering of Nazi leaders at nearby Wannsee in 1942 to devise a plan to deport and murder Jews.

But though support for the AfD dipped in polls at the time, it soon rebounded and then accelerated. Now, its breakthrough results have raised concerns for next year’s national elections.

The party, whose Thuringen leader, Björn Höcke, has been convicted twice of using a Nazi slogan to boost it, is unlikely to form a ruling coalition in either state since it’s shunned by other parties. Still, it will have additional seats in the state legislatures and will have the numbers, particularly in Thuringia, to interfere with some governing decisions.

The election results bode ill for Germany’s future, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster said on Sunday.

Younger voters overwhelmingly favoured the AfD in this week’s elections, according to an NTV-Infratest exit poll.

“The survivors are asking themselves, ‘Didn’t we do enough to teach, to tell, to show?’” Christoph Heubner of the International Auschwitz Committee, told The Guardian.

Some Jewish leaders say German politicians would do well to address the concerns apparently expressed by voters.

“The election results in Thuringia and Saxony are a clear wake-up call to the centrist parties in Germany to listen to the real concerns and fears of the people,” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis.