Jewish leaders worried after far-right surge in Thuringia
October 28, 2019
People who voted for the AfD in Thuringia "knew exactly what they were doing," says the former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Others say the growth of the far-right sent a "menacing signal."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/S. Hoppe
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German Jewish leaders voiced concerns about the surge in support for far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in state elections in Thuringia on Sunday.
"The fact that a party like the so-called Alternative for Germany can experience such success in a state election shows that our whole political system is coming apart at the seams," said Charlotte Knobloch, former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
"Anywhere where a party like that celebrates success, is a place with real problems," she added.
The current president of the same council, Josef Schuster, agreed with those sentiments, dismissing what he called the "excuse of the protest vote." AfD voters unequivocally expressed "racist sentiment," he said.
"Whoever votes for the AfD votes for an anti-democratic Germany," he claimed.
Although the Left party won the greatest number of votes, the AfD came in second after managing to more than double their vote share. They also pushed German Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party into third place.
"For survivors of German concentration camps, this massive increase in votes for the AfD in Thuringia is another menacing signal that right-wing extremist attitudes and tendencies are consolidating in Germany," said Christoph Heubner, vice president of the International Auschwitz community.
Charlotte Knobloch, now president of the Israeli Cultural Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria (IKG), also said that the result indicates the "steady erosion" of democratic culture.
"Many of the electorate have used their votes to support a party who have for years downplayed the horrors of the Nazi era, who are openly nationalistic and have spread messages of hate against minorities, including the Jewish community, and who have prepared the breeding ground for exclusion and extreme right-wing violence," she said.
The election came mere weeks after after two people were shot following a failed far-right attack on a synagogue in the city of Halle, located in Thuringia's neighboring state of Saxony-Anhalt.
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
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.
