NEWS CENTER – The growing support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the country’s east may be linked to a rise in anti-Semitism, according to top anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein.
“Dissatisfaction with the overall development of society actually manifests itself more strongly there than in the West,” Klein told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) in Berlin. History shows that social dissatisfaction is often also a yardstick for anti-Semitism, he said. On Sunday, an AfD candidate in the town of Sonneberg in the state of Thuringia has a chance of being elected district administrator in a run-off election. It would be the first top municipal office for the AfD nationwide.
The fascist AfD is currently polling between 18% and 20% nationwide, and significantly higher in the five states that used to form East Germany. Earlier Wednesday, AfD said it intended to nominate a chancellor candidate for the first time for the 2025 election as it soars in the polls. The announcement came a day after the German domestic spy agency, which has placed the party under surveillance since 2021, cautioned voters about backing the party.
Recent surveys have put support for the AfD at a record 18 to 20 percent, neck-and-neck with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and behind only the conservative CDU/CSU bloc. Thomas Krueger, head of the federal agency for civic education, warned this weekend the party should not be dismissed as a “mere protest movement”. Created in 2013 as an anti-euro outfit before morphing into an anti-Islam, anti-immigration party, the AfD has benefited from growing discontent with Scholz’s three-party coalition amid concerns about inflation and the affordability of the government’s climate plans.
Although the AfD’s newfound momentum is causing a certain level of panic in German politics, Germany is far from unique: Far-right parties are on the rise across Europe. In neighboring Austria, the populist, far-right Freedom Party of Austria has led the polls since January and recently joined several state-level governments. Since last fall, like-minded parties have ended up leading governments, as in Italy, under the Brothers of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and become formal or informal junior governing partners in right-wing coalitions, as in Finland and Sweden. France’s National Rally, under the second generation of Le Pens, continues to cause ulcers every general election—and now has challengers from even further right. And in Spain, which heads to the polls in parliamentary elections later this month, the ultra-right Vox party is on track to gain seats and potentially end up in the country’s next governing coalition.
