The extreme right is strengthening in eastern Germany, where there will be three important regional elections in September, in a general atmosphere of unpopularity of the Government of social democrats, environmentalists and liberals of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. A poll by the Forsa demographic institute published this Thursday by the RTL network gives the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) first place with votes above 30% in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, the three eastern states of the country that hold elections. this year.
At the federal level, the AfD currently stands at around 23% in the polls, as the second party in preferences, only surpassed by the conservative CDU/CSU bloc (32%), and ahead of Scholz’s social democratic SPD (16%). . The ultra party has occupied second place for months, although before its figure was lower (19%).
This sustained growth of the extreme right worries the rest of the German political class in a week in which a journalistic investigation by the media Correctiv has revealed that some AfD politicians participated in a meeting of identity-based extreme right and neo-Nazis in which the main speaker, The Austrian identitarian Martin Sellner presented a project to expel non-native people from Germany.
At the meeting, which took place last November in a country hotel in Potsdam, Sellner spoke about what the Austrian Identity Movement (IBÖ) – of which he is a co-founder – calls ‘remigration’, which would mean forcing the population of foreign origin , including those with German nationality, to leave the country. He also mentioned the possibility of moving two million people to territories in North Africa, in cooperation with a third state in the region.
According to Correctiv, among the two dozen attendees were members of the AfD such as Gerrit Huy, MP; Ulrich Siegmund, head of the Saxony-Anhalt regional parliamentary group; and Roland Hartwig, personal assistant to party co-leader Alice Weidel. Alternative for Germany has admitted that those party politicians participated in the meeting, but denied supporting the idea of ??a mass expulsion of foreigners.
The AfD assured that Hartwig attended the meeting to propose the creation of an agency of far-right influencers as a promotion for the electoral events of the year, from the European elections on June 9 to the three German regional elections in September.
Saxony and Thuringia will go to the polls on September 1, and Brandenburg on September 22. According to the Forsa poll, in the triple meeting, the AfD would obtain 36% of votes in Thuringia, 34% in Saxony and 32% in Brandenburg, although the forecasts for the rest of the parties would arithmetically allow the reissue of the current ones. tripartite coalitions that govern Saxony and Brandenburg, but not in the case of Thuringia.
The AfD, founded eleven years ago, is under observation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s internal intelligence service.
