BERLIN: Germany’s fledgling anti-euro party celebrated election gains in two eastern states yesterday, in a show of strength that spells a growing threat for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives.
“We are the force that’s renewing the political landscape,” said a jubilant Bernd Lucke, leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which wants Europe’s biggest economy to scrap the euro and return to the Deutschmark currency.
“One can’t deny it anymore: the citizens are thirsting for political change,” said the economics professor, cheered on by applauding supporters in Potsdam, the state capital of Brandenburg.
His nascent party, which was only formed early last year, gained 10 percent in Thuringia state and 12 percent in Brandenburg, said preliminary results, two weeks after the AfD also entered parliament in the eastern state of Saxony with almost 10 percent.
Analysts had predicted the AfD would draw much of the protest vote in the former East Germany, which still lags western states in wealth, jobs and wages 25 years after the Berlin Wall fell.
The results give a political toehold to the party which only narrowly missed out on entering the national parliament last September and won seven seats in European Parliament elections in May.
The AfD denies seeking hardline right-wing voters, but flirts with populist ideas on issues such as law and order, immigration and traditional social values.
Among its demands are a referendum that would seek to block plans to build a mosque in the eastern city of Dresden. “Their protest draws on threat scenarios, be it refugee boats on the Mediterranean, Brussels bureaucrats or criminals at Germany’s eastern borders,” said Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Merkel, worried about the AfD’s growing ballot box appeal, this week said that “we must address the problems that concern the people” including “crime and rising numbers of asylum seekers”.
Analysts say the AfD has positioned itself to the right of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) while keeping its distance from the far-right fringe.
Political scientist Werner Patzelt of Dresden Technical University said “the CDU is now well advised to keep its nerve”.
“It remains to be seen whether the AfD turns out, in parliamentary practice, to be a flash in the pan or whether it proves itself in the political process without allowing itself to be hijacked by right-wing populists and far-right extremists”. AFP
