Sigmar Gabriel has said that Chancellor Merkel is partially to blame for the rise of the far-right AfD party. Germany's foreign minister has said Merkel failed to take care of those who feel forgotten by the government.
Image: Reuters/F. Bensch
Advertisement
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in an interview published Thursday that Chancellor Angela Merkel's domestic policy mistakes boosted the popularity of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
#BeBoldGermany
05:02
This browser does not support the video element.
"Not every potential AfD voter is a right-wing radical," Gabriel told German news magazine Der Spiegel.
Gabriel, a Social Democratic Party (SPD) politician who until recently held the post of economy minister, said that during the refugee crisis he had encouraged Merkel's conservative alliance (CDU/CSU) to take care of German residents in the country through social welfare programs.
"It was tremendously difficult to explain to Angela Merkel and the CDU/CSU that we also need to take care of those who otherwise feel that we forgot about them," Gabriel said.
After his predecessor Frank-Walter Steinmeier took on the role of German president, Gabriel became the country's new foreign minister. In this position, Gabriel said proposals to triple social housing and guarantee a minimum pension were dismissed as "pitiful" by Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble.
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
8 images1 | 8
'Nazis will speak in parliament'
Furthermore, Gabriel said his calls for "double integration" were ignored. The SPD plan aimed to integrate refugees who had recently arrived in Germany and to continue strengthening social welfare programs at home by limiting housing price rises and hiring more teachers and police officers.
"Right-wing radicals shamelessly exploit these failures," the foreign minister told Der Spiegel.
Gabriel said the Bundestag's final parliament session last week was a sad and reflective event for him because "it was probably the last session of our parliament without a radical right-wing member of parliament."
"If the AfD actually makes it into the Bundestag, Nazis will speak in Reichstag [the building that houses the Bundestag] for the first time in over 70 years," Gabriel told Der Spiegel.
The AfD is currently polling between eight percent and 11 percent — putting it well above the five percent threshold needed to gain parliamentary representation after Germany's September 24 election.
Gabriel's SPD is polling between 21 percent and 24 percent while Merkel's CDU/CSU alliance is currently well in first place, polling between 36 percent and 38 percent.
