More than a million leftist activists took to the streets of Germany in protest over the weekend amid growing calls to ban the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as it surges in the polls.
In a welcome distraction for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government — which has become deeply unpopular over economic stagnation, mass migration and most recently a farmer uprising against its globalist agenda — the legacy media, political elites and activist networks have rallied around a common target, the AfD.
According to organisers, over 1.4 million people took to the streets in protest against the populist Alternative for Germany party over the weekend, under the banner of slogans such as: “Against Fascism, Populism and the Right” and “Demo against the right – not an inch from fascism”, broadcaster NTV reports.
The protests were urged on by Chancellor Scholz in an apparent attempt to change the narrative from his struggling coalition government.
“Right-wing extremists are attacking our democracy. We are all called upon to take a clear stand: for our democratic Germany. And for our more than 20 million friends, work colleagues and neighbours who have a migration background,” Sholz said in a video released on Friday.
“If there is one thing that must never again have any place in Germany, it’s the ethno-racial ideology of the National Socialists,” Scholz continued. “That’s exactly what the repulsive resettlement plans of these extremists are. The very thought sends a shiver down the spine.”
The mass protests across the country against the AfD came in response to a report published by the taxpayer-subsidised and Soros-funded non-profit Correctiv dubbed the “Secret Plan against Germany“. In the report, the left-wing research centre claimed that a November conference in Potsdam was attended by members of the AfD, alongside members of the centrist Cristian Democratic Union (CDU) as well as political activists, including Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner, whom Correctiv describes as a “neo-Nazi”.
The Correctiv report, which was based upon the claims of an “undercover” operative from the group allegedly speaking to participants of the meeting, asserted that Sellner laid out a “masterplan” to enact “deportations of people from Germany based on a set of racist criteria, regardless of whether or not they have German citizenship.” The report went on to draw comparisons between the meeting in Potsdam to the infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942 in which senior leaders of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime laid out plans for the extermination of millions of Jews in the Holocaust.
This assertion that deportations of German citizens were discussed at the November meeting has been disputed by several participants of the meeting, including former AfD parliamentarian Roland Hartwig, who now serves as the personal advisor to the co-leader of the party Alice Weidel. Hartwig maintained that the Correctiv report was “complete nonsense”, stating that Sellner did not call for the mass deportations of German citizens and that “if he had done so, I would have protested because it would have been unconstitutional.” The party has also noted that the meeting at the hotel in Potsdam was a private conference that was not organised or endorsed by the AfD.
A member of the centrist CDU party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel who also attended the event, Ulrich Vosgerau, also denied the veracity of the Correctiv claims, saying: “At least in my presence no one said anything like that.”
“What was actually discussed was the question of how to deport criminal aliens or rejected asylum seekers more quickly. But even the Chancellor is thinking about it,” he added in reference to Olaf Scholz’s vow to step up deportations following a series of anti-semitic incidents in Germany following the October 7th Hamas terror attacks on Israel.
Sellner has also denied advocating for such a policy at the conference, claiming that the Soros-funded organisation had misunderstood his conception of “reimigration”, which rather than advocating for the forceful deportation of German citizens with migrant backgrounds, calls for a range of policies to incentivise unassimilated ethnic groups living in Germany to immigrate to their family’s homeland, such as providing economic development and aid programmes in Africa.
Sellner has argued that the policy, alongside ending chain migration and deporting failed asylum seekers, is necessary for ethnic Germans to maintain their status as a majority voting power in the country while claiming that outward migratory flows from Europe could improve the economic situations in developing countries.
There has also been no suggestion from the AfD leadership of adopting a programme of deporting German citizens. Rather the party openly rejects any distinctions along racial lines, adopting a “civic nationalist” platform which states that the party is “unconditionally committed to the German nation as the sum of all persons who possess German citizenship.”
“Regardless of a person’s ethnic and cultural background or how recently or long ago they or their ancestors were naturalised, they are just as German in the eyes of the law as the descendants of a family that has lived in Germany for centuries, and enjoy the same rights and have the same obligations. For us, there are no first or second-class citizens,” the party platform states.
Ultimately the truth of what was said is unclear, and the claims and counter-claims appear to amount to he-said-she-said discourse, for now.
Nevertheless, the report has spurred on calls for the AfD to be banned to supposedly protect democracy as the party has surged to around 23 per cent in the polls, surpassing all three parties in the coalition government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which has come under heavy criticism over failures on the economy and mass migration.
Earlier this month, the leader of Scholz’s Social Democrat Party (SPD) in the German Bundestag parliament, Saskia Esken argued that a ban on the AfD should be considered given that the party is “clearly anti-democratic“.
Last year, the government-funded German Institute for Human Rights (DIMR) claimed that banning the AfD would be justified on the basis that the party is opposed to the “free democratic basic order”.
The calls for the party to be banned come ahead of regional elections in the German states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia later this year, all of which are expected to see the AfD make significant gains and potentially even take control of local government posts. The AfD is also expected to be a big player in the upcoming EU Parliament elections in June.
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