German anti-immigration party split as co-leader resigns
Posted by admin978 on January 30, 2022 · Leave a Comment
Regular H&D readers will know that the German anti-immigration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was originally a eurosceptic party focused on a Thatcher-style tax-cutting, state-shrinking, anti-Brussels agenda: a more moderate version of UKIP.
After Angela Merkel’s infamous championing of asylum seekers during the immigration crisis of 2015 – summed up in her phrase at a press conference on August 31st that year: “We can do this!” (i.e. Germany can admit millions of ‘refugees’) – AfD rapidly became more of an anti-immigration party than a eurosceptic party, and began shedding its more moderate conservative activists including several MEPs.
Even so, there have always been deep ideological divisions within AfD. One wing – actually called Der Flügel (“the wing”) – is much closer to explicit racial nationalism and sometimes approaches ‘forbidden’ historical questions. The most prominent Flügel leader is Björn Höcke, AfD leader in the central German state of Thuringia (once part of communist East Germany), where the party is especially strong.
In 2020 Germany’s domestic security service BfV (equivalent to Britain’s MI5) announced that the Flügel was under surveillance as a potential threat to the democratic order.
Until this week the most prominent figure in AfD’s ‘moderate’ wing was its national co-leader Jörg Meuthen, who has now resigned not only from his leadership post but from the party.
Meuthen claims that he was losing the battle against the Flügel faction and that as a result AfD was no longer clearly a “democratic” party.
“The party’s heart is beating very far to the right today, and permanently at an elevated rate. I do see quite clear totalitarian echoes there.”
These are very strong words to use (especially in a German context) about a party of which you were co-leader until the previous day!
Many observers predict that Meuthen will join forces with the main German conservative party CDU, which recently elected a new and more ‘right-wing’ leader, Friedrich Merz. If so, this would be a significant boost to the CDU, which polled a record low vote in last year’s federal election.
Meuthen has suggested that as it becomes more radical, AfD will only be relevant in the more economically depressed and radicalised regions of the former East Germany, including Höcke’s Thuringia and the neighbouring state Saxony.
This split has been brewing for some time, though until recently it seemed more likely that the Flügel would be expelled rather than the ‘moderates’ resigning. A crucial role has been played by the middle ground of the party, including co-leader Alice Weidel, who seems to have sided with Höcke and the radicals.
Alongside recent developments in France, Spain and Portugal, Meuthen’s resignation is one of several significant changes on the European ‘far right’, which will be analysed in the March edition of Heritage and Destiny.