Despite closing of Balkan-route: neo-fascist party bound to win 15% in German state-elections
by Ralph T. Niemeyer
Federal state elections in Germany are usually putting national politics made in Berlin to the test. Now, with elections in three federal states, namely Saxony-Anhalt (former East-Germany), Rhineland-Palatinate (former Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s homeland) and Baden-Württemberg (industrial and high tech heartland) a political earthquake is being expected as soon as the exit-polls of Sunday’s vote will be released.
It is widely anticipated that right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a partly neo-fascist and racist Euro-critical party, will win votes well above the 5% minimum threshold guaranteeing parliamentary representation in all the state parliaments for the first time. So far, the party founded by economic professors who opposed the European Stability Mechanism and the Euro, is only represented in the East-German federal state parliaments in Saxony and Brandenburg as well as the European Parliament.
In the latter, front-woman Beatrix von Stroch (MEP) made headlines by calling for a barbed wire guarded border to protect against the influx of refugees and when being asked whether she would support the use of a gun to enforce the border regime she said yes in a twitter chat and also fell not short of saying “yes” to ultimately shoot at women and children.
There was considerable outrage in the German public that remembers the barbaric border that seperated East- from West-Germans for more than 28 years until 1989 quite well and still bemourns the victims of the East-German border police shootings at the Berlin Wall every anniversary.
But, all even this scandal can not harm the rise of the party on which German mainstream media is reporting, although often with a warning underlying tone, at full scale thus making it popular for voters disenfranchised with the christian-conservative-social-democratic coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Logic of German voting patterns always went this way: the more media is warning of so called protest parties of the extreme right-wing, the more votes are being collected. Only the leftist parties are being widely ignored. None of the German private or public media dares to warn of Leftists, only in a way to discredit same.
But, not only media actively helped the xenophobic movement rise, but also well-known financiers such as August von Finck, heir of Mövenpick group and the Bank Merck, Finck & Co, which took over Jewish banks such as J. Dreyfus & Co or Rothschild during the NAZI-regime, grant their financial support to AfD.
There is a certain continuity to be seen: the Grandfather of August von Finck, Wilhelm von Finck (picture: right) has been an admirer of Adolf Hitler from the very early days on and financed the rise of NAZISM in the 1920ies and 30ies.
