ExtremismGermany: Far-Right Lawmaker Punished over Anti-Semitism

German lawmakers on Wednesday, in a move which is unprecedented in modern German history, removed a far-right politician from his position as the chairman of the powerful Legal Affairs Committee of the Bundestag.

The move came after the politician, Stephan Brandner, has repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments.

All the parties in the Bundestag, except his own AfD party, voted to strip him of the committee’s chairmanship.

“The dismissal of Brandner is a clear signal against incitement and hatred — we are finally returning dignity to the office,” said Jan-Marco Luczak, deputy parliamentary spokesperson for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU). Johannes Fechner, a parliamentary legal expert for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), said “Mr. Brandner was simply no longer acceptable.”

Even before the vote in the Bundestag, several professional associations condemned Brandner for his open anti-Semitism. The German Bar Association issued a statement that Brandner was “not able to meet the demands of his office.”

Historians say that no such dismissal has occurred in the Bundestag since it was established seventy years ago.

Der Spiegel reports that the pressure on Brandner has been growing for a while. Earlier this month, after the popular singer Udo Lindenberg was awarded Germany’s prestigious Federal Order of Merit, Brandner twitted that the reard’s name should be changed to “Judas reward” because of Lindenberg’s outspoken stand “against us [the AfD]” (Brandner used the more demeaning German term “Judaslohn,” or “Judas wages,” which is used to describe the wages paid to a traitor for his betrayal).

Other leaders of the AfD have freely used anti-Jewish terminology which dates back to the Nazi era, such as “Volksverräter” (“traitor of the people”); and openly suggested that some groups – Muslims, Gypsies, immigerants from Africa — should be “entsorgt“ (“disposed of”). The Nazis used this term to describe their ambitious plan to kill millions of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies in order to create more “Lebensraum” (“living space”) for Germans ins Central- and East-Eur

Jan-Marco Luczak, a member of the Bundestag from Merkel’s CDU, said Brandner “toyed quite deliberately with anti-Semitic terminology.” 

In October, after a right-wing extremist’s failed to enter a Synagogue in the city of Halle on Yom Kippur in order the massacre those who were inside – after he failed to enter the synagogue, the gunmen killed to passers by outside — Brandner had retweeted a post asking why German politicians were “hanging around” mosques and synagogues with candles, when the two people who were killed in the attack had been “proper” Germans (that is, not Jewish) Germans.

DW reports that after his removal from the chairmanship, Brandner depicted himself as the victim. “Whatever we do, the other parties just want to kick the AfD in the shins.”

Party co-leader Alexander Gauland  condemned the move and said he had no problem with Brandner’s previous comments. “I don’t know where the scandal is … This [dismissal] is an affront to democracy.”

Gauland has been criticized for his own statements, including referring to the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the millions of others the Nazis have killed — as “just a speck of bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history.”

Der Spiegel notes that the removal of Brandner takes place against the backdrop of growing concern about radicalism in the ranks of the AfD. The party was founded in 2013, and in 2017 became the third largest party in the Bundestag in the wake of public anger over Merkel’s 2015-2016 policy on refugees.

Another factor in the party’s 2017 success was the overt and covert support it received from the Kremlin: The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence branch, employed the same combination of hacking and fake postings on social media which it had used to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election, to help the AfD in its parliamentary campaign.

The AfD has gained increasing support in three state elections this autumn.