Hate speechAfD leader: Nazi era mere “bird s***” in “1,000 years of successful German history"
Alexander Gauland, the co-leader of the far-right, xenophobic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has described the Nazi era as a brief and insignificant episode in Germany’s otherwise glorious history. In the October 2017 German election, the AfD was actively supported by the same Kremlin’s hackers and disinformation specialists who effectively interfered in the U.S. 2016 presidential election. The AfD emerged as Germany’s third-largest party.
Alexander Gauland, the co-leader of the far-right, xenophobic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has described the Nazi era as a brief and insignificant episode in Germany’s otherwise glorious history.
Kremlin’s hackers and disinformation specialists conducted a broad and effective campaign in support of AfD in the run up to the October 2017 German parliamentary election – a campaign modeled on the Kremlin’s 2016 effort to help Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election.
The AfD, for the first time in its history, won seats in the Bundestag – and with its 94 seats, became the third largest party in the German parliament.
Many of the AfD leaders, especially at the state level, and a sizeable portion of the party’s rank and file, are all manner of neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, Islamophobs, racists, and Greater Germany revanchists who, in an uneasy coalition, join populists, anti-immigration activists, Euroskeptics, and pro-Russia elements.
The tensions among various factions within the AfD over the party’s direction have only increased since the October 2017 elections. The tensions are similar to tensions within France’s Front National (which, last week, changed its name to Rassemblement national, or National Rally).
On the one side there are the more traditional AfD elements who call for restrictions to be imposed on Jews, Muslims, Gypsies, and other “non-Germans” (“not everyone who holds a German passport is German,” Gauland says); the AfD traditionalists engage in various degrees of Holocaust denial and say that, in any event, Germany has already paid – indeed, overpaid — for its misdeeds; and they call for Germany to reclaim territories in the east – East Prussia, Farther Pomerania, East Brandenburg, Upper Silesia, and almost all of Lower Silesia – which were transferred from Germany to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Russia in the Post-World War Two settlement at the Potsdam Conference.
