{"id":27341,"date":"2018-02-05T16:02:45","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T15:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libmod.de\/?p=27341"},"modified":"2020-03-28T02:47:56","modified_gmt":"2020-03-28T01:47:56","slug":"far-right-extremists-in-the-bundestag-radical-delegates-from-saxony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libmod.de\/en\/far-right-extremists-in-the-bundestag-radical-delegates-from-saxony\/","title":{"rendered":"Far-right extremists in the Bundestag: Radical delegates from Saxony"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The five AfD Members of the Bundestag from Saxony are among the most radical in the party\u2019s (Alter\u00adnative for Germany) parlia\u00admentary group. At a party event near Pirna, the party base indulges in brutal mob fantasies. The new parlia\u00admen\u00adtarians in atten\u00addance show tacit consent, conveying a sense of how dangerous their party really is.<\/h2>\n

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To under\u00adstand the world view repre\u00adsented by Saxony\u2019s AfD deputies to the Bundestag, one has to leave the parliament and the capital behind and follow the deputies to their electoral districts.<\/p>\n

It is 25th January 2018, a Thursday evening falling in a one-week recess of the Bundestag. The AfD is hosting an event in the Heidescheune in Cotta, a proper country inn located just a few minutes\u2019 drive from Pirna. A board member of the local AfD chapter (Kreisverband S\u00e4chsische Schweiz\/\u200bOsterzgebirge), serving as emcee at the event, unblush\u00adingly relates a brutal anecdote \u2013 and not the slightest objection comes from the three newly elected parlia\u00admen\u00adtarians \u2013 their names are Siegbert Droese, Tino Chrupalla and Jens Maier \u2013 sitting next to him on the podium.<\/p>\n

Mob fantasies of the party base<\/h2>\n

An incident on the fringe of the Biathlon World Cup in Ruhpolding. Nation\u00adalist-minded Norwe\u00adgians come upon a supposedly left-wing winter sports fan. The left-wing \u201cscumbag\u201d, the board member reports enthu\u00adsi\u00adas\u00adti\u00adcally to hundreds of listeners, was no match for the proud Norwe\u00adgians: in a pub, they\u2019d grabbed the guy and smacked him one, left and right, hard enough \u201cthat he lost his hearing and sight\u201d. They had then \u201chauled him out into the street\u201d and \u201cthrown him in the rubbish\u201d. Each of them, he said, \u201cspit on the guy\u201d, and then made it clear to him that \u201cif he came back to the pub, he wasn\u2019t going to end up lying on the street, but a bit deeper instead.\u201d What the young German had done to awake the ire of these thugs was not made clear. But the chapter\u2019s board member, who has also capti\u00advated audiences as a speaker at Pegida events on a number of occasions, held the perpe\u00adtrators up as role models: \u201cPeople, this is what national pride means!\u201d Jubilation in the hall \u2013 and nary a word of protest from the three Members of the German Bundestag.<\/p>\n

He calls himself \u201cthe little H\u00f6cke\u201d<\/h2>\n

So, who are these politi\u00adcians? No one is surprised that radical right-wing Jens Maier feels at home in circles like the one in Cotta. Maier himself calls himself \u201cthe little H\u00f6cke\u201d. In January 2017, speaking in Dresden\u2019s Ballhaus Watzke just before Bj\u00f6rn H\u00f6cke, who was about to give his infamous histor\u00adi\u00adcally revisionist speech, Maier blustered on about the \u201cproduction of mixed races\u201d and called for an \u201cend to the cult of guilt\u201d. At the time, he was still a judge serving on the Dresden district court. According to a report in the SPD monthly Vorw\u00e4rts<\/em>, Maier voiced under\u00adstanding for the deeds of the far-right Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik at an event hosted by the right-wing magazine Compact<\/em> in April of 2017, claiming that despair had made the man a mass murderer.<\/p>\n

At the Cotta event in late January, Maier advocated repealing the statutory provi\u00adsions banning incitement to hatred, as they were being used to wage a \u201cwar on dissenters\u201d. \u201cDissenters\u201d like Maier? This was only a few weeks after Maier\u2019s Twitter account was used to launch a racist attack on the son of ex-tennis pro Boris Becker, prompting the leadership of AfD parlia\u00admentary group to distance itself from Maier.<\/p>\n

Poser photos in front of the \u201cWolf\u2019s Lair\u201d<\/h2>\n

Like Maier, parlia\u00admen\u00adtarian Siegbert Droese also has close ties with Bj\u00f6rn H\u00f6cke\u2019s nation\u00adalist wing, which dominates the Saxon chapter of the party. Droese already made headlines back in 2016, because as district party leader in Leipzig, it was under his respon\u00adsi\u00adbility that two AfD cars were driving around with Nazi codes on their license plates: L\u2011AH1818, i.e. Adolf Hitler\u2019s initials and L\u2011GD3345 \u2013 Gro\u00dfdeutschland<\/em> (Greater Germany) 1933\u20131945. According to the Tagesspiegel<\/em>, Droese claimed not to know what the combi\u00adna\u00adtions of letters and numbers meant: \u201cI was aston\u00adished by what people read into that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, an opponent of Droese from within the party published a photo showing him posing, with one hand on his chest, in front of the ruins of the Wolfss\u00adchanze <\/em>(Wolf\u2019s Lair), the former Wehrmacht headquarters. This did not, however, prevent the AfD Saxon party congress in Hoyer\u00adswerda from choosing Droese, who had previ\u00adously been acting head of the Saxon chapter, as the new deputy head of the Land party on Sunday.<\/p>\n

The moderates remain silent<\/h2>\n

And Chrupalla, who holds office in the Bundestag as one of five deputy chairs of the parlia\u00admentary group? Die Zeit<\/em>, which sorted the AfD deputies into categories after the Bundestag elections, classed the master painter from Weiswasser as a moderate. Perhaps the former CDU supporter himself would agree with this assessment. The far-right radicals are the ones setting the tone at the Saxon chapter of the AfD now though. It appears that any lingering inhibi\u00adtions were jetti\u00adsoned when former federal and state party leader Frauke Petry left the party, along with several of those loyal to her. As was evident at the Heidescheune in Cotta, AfD politi\u00adcians like Chrupalla prefer to keep silent in the face of their even more radical party colleagues.<\/p>\n

The CDU is baffled<\/h2>\n

How could the AfD have become so powerful, in Saxony of all places? It beat out the CDU in the Bundestag elections there, albeit narrowly, with 27 percent of the vote, to become the strongest party in Free State of Saxony, which the CDU had dominated since 1990. Minister-President Stanislaw Tillich stepped down after that. The Saxonian Union had not been able to clearly distin\u00adguish itself from the AfD. On the contrary, with its ongoing relativi\u00adsation of far-right extremism and xenophobia, it has blurred the line between democrats and authoritarians.<\/p>\n

In Saxony in 2014, the AfD entered a Land parliament for the first time. Electoral successes in Brandenburg and Thuringia followed shortly there\u00adafter. In Saxony, the AfD replaced the NPD, which had been repre\u00adsented in the parliament in Dresden for two legislative terms, since 2004. Led by the party\u2019s former leader Petry, the AfD won 9.7 percent of the vote. While Petry and her supporters made words like \u201cv\u00f6lkisch<\/em>\u201d socially acceptable, her supporters were seen as less radical in comparison to the other groupings within the party, such as those in Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg. A study by the former Green state parlia\u00admen\u00adtarian Miro Jennerjahn attested that the demands made by the Saxon AfD were compar\u00ada\u00adtively modest.<\/p>\n

Role in the Government after the election?<\/h2>\n

Nonetheless, the AfD spoke straight to the Zeitgeist, especially in Saxony. The subse\u00adquent radical\u00adi\u00adsation of the Saxon chapter did nothing to change that. A survey run by the daily S\u00e4chsische Zeitung<\/em> showed that two out of three Saxons believe that East Germans are merely second-class citizens. According to the \u201cSachsen-Monitor\u201d, prepared at the behest of the Saxon State Government, 56 percent of Saxons believe that the \u201cFederal Republic is swamped to a dangerous extent by the many foreigners\u201d. That is a substan\u00adtially higher percentage than those found in compa\u00adrable national surveys. This feeling of being outpaced is coupled with a pronounced hostility towards foreigners and is the fertile soil which gave rise to the ArD\u2019s explosive success.<\/p>\n

The CDU, the party to which all heads of government in Saxony has belonged since 1990, is appre\u00adhensive about the Land parlia\u00admentary election to be held in the summer of 2019. Tillich\u2019s successor, Kretschmer maintains that he considers a coalition with the AfD to be out of the question \u201cforever\u201d. He has said that anyone in the state party seeking such an alliance is in an \u201cextreme minority position\u201d. He does not want to shift the Saxon CDU back towards the centre and thus closer to the positions of Angela Merkel though. The Tageszeitung<\/em> attests that Kretschmer is steering \u201cambivalent course vis-\u00e0-vis the extreme right\u201d, quoting from a keynote address he gave at the TU Dresden: \u201cOn the asylum issue, it is completely legit\u00adimate to say: This has gone too far for me, I don\u2019t agree, I think it\u2019s too expensive. We did not allow this debate to happen in 2015.\u201d<\/p>\n

The AfD has stated the objective of taking so many votes away from the SPD, tradi\u00adtionally weak in the Saxon parliament, that it will become impos\u00adsible to form a government without the AfD. In this way, they hope to put the CDU in a position where it has no choice but to offer a coalition to the AfD. According to a November survey commis\u00adsioned by the S\u00e4chsische Zeitung<\/em>, the AfD, with 23 percent, would become the second most powerful party, after the CDU (33 percent). The SPD would come in as an also-ran at 12 percent.<\/p>\n

It sounds alarming, but it is not improbable: if the CDU caves in, Saxony might be the first Bundesland with radicals from the far right in government.<\/p>\n

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