Is Europe Still Lurching to the Right? E. Germany Appears to Be

Looking for an alternative: AfD soars in East Germany polls

ahead of crucial regional elections

©  Reuters / Pawel Sosnowski

The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has received a groundswell of support in Eastern Germany, leading in polls just weeks before regional elections in three states. Support for major parties is at a historic low.

In an outcome sure to unnerve Germany’s more conventional politicians, a series of polls conducted in June and July has demonstrated that the anti-establishment force has moved to the fore in the former Eastern Bloc territory, where they enjoy steady public backing – all ahead of the crucial regional elections, two of which are scheduled in about a month’s time.

By contrast, the heavyweights of German politics – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their coalition partners in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) – are facing what might be called a near collapse of popular support in the same eastern regions. In the latest poll conducted by the Emnid Institute, AfD picked up 23 percent of the vote in the five East German states, narrowly beating out the CDU, which received 22 percent.

All other political forces are lagging: the Left Party (Die Linke) took third place with 14 percent backing, while the Greens nipped at their heels just one percentage point behind. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats, once considered one of Germany’s “people’s parties” – or factions enjoying the broadest public support – have dropped to fifth place in the East, earning a mere 11 percent of the vote.

Looming defeat

In the states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia, where regional elections are scheduled for the coming weeks, the CDU and the SPD are facing a real risk of defeat – from contenders on both ends of the political spectrum.

In Brandenburg, a Social Democratic stronghold ever since Germany’s reunification in the 1990s, the SPD is now poised to be dethroned by AfD, while Saxony will likely see a closer race against the CDU, which faces historically low support in the region. Thuringia seems to be divided between the two niche parties, the Left and the AfD, according to the latest poll.

The more establishment-friendly politicians are still attempting to reverse the trends favoring their competitors with tried-and-true tactics of comparing them to Nazis, or accusing them of exploiting Germany’s problems. Most recently, Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU) told the German media that AfD’s rhetoric is something that “we have previously heard only from the NPD” – an openly neo-Nazi party, which the German government has repeatedly sought to ban.

Yet, these strategies no longer appear to work – and the German establishment may only have itself to blame.

Out of touch with voters

As striking as they may seem, the poll results do not guarantee the AfD’s victory in any of the German states – even in the East. It would need to form a coalition in order to govern, but so far not a single party has expressed willingness to join forces and create a ruling bloc.

Besides, the party’s support is significantly less impressive on the national level. Throughout all of Germany, the AfD enjoys only 12 percent of support, falling far behind both the CDU (27 percent), the SPD (13 percent) and even the Greens (25 percent), who have seen an almost unprecedented surge in popularity over the last year.

AfD’s success in the East, however, can hardly be explained solely by the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments in that part of the country, regardless of how hard the German media works to portray the region as a hotbed of far-right extremism.

Germans in the east tend to be more concerned over migration, an issue that Merkel and other mainstream political forces have long tended to ignore, refusing to consider that the infamous “open doors” policy at the height of the 2015 refugee crisis may have been a mistake. The AfD certainly capitalizes on the regional feelings, but that alone does not explain the party’s support.

East German weariness of the old “people’s parties” may have something to do with the fact that their living standards have yet to match those in the West, thirty years after the German reunification. After years of establishment parties ruling over the East almost unchallenged, the region is still seeing sluggish economic growth, with an ‘Ossi’ earning 40 percent less than any other German.

According to some reports, it is this inequality between the East and West that has given both the AfD and the Left a boost. It might well be that the establishment parties have simply lost touch with their voters, who, in turn, have become disillusioned with the traditional forces and struck out to find an alternative.

Islamist who Planned to ‘Blow Up Police or Soldiers’ Arrested in Germany

Potential terrorists in Germany has now reached 1600

© Christian Charisius / Reuters

German police have detained a young man after finding chemicals used for making explosives in his apartment. The suspect admitted that he planned a bomb attack on police officers or soldiers, prosecutors and police said in a joint statement.

A German citizen, 26, whose name has not been revealed yet, was detained on Wednesday in the German town of Northeim, in the northwestern state of Lower Saxony. He is suspected of preparing to commit a “grave violent offense against the state” and of attempted murder, the statement issued by the regional police department in Goettingen and the regional Prosecutor General’s Office in Celle says.

Earlier, police raided his home and found various chemicals used to make explosives based on acetone peroxide – a highly explosive agent, which is difficult to detect and which was earlier used in a number of terrorist attacks across Europe, including the Brussels attacks in 2016.

The police officers also discovered “components that could be used for assembling an unconventional explosive device,” the statement said, adding that the details found in the suspects apartment particularly included “electrical components of a time fuse.”

According to the investigators, the suspect was actively preparing for a terrorist attack when he was captured. They also managed to find out that he was a member of a Salafist group – an ultra-conservative Islamist movement.

During his first questioning, the suspect admitted his guilt and said that he was planning to “lure police officers or soldiers in a trap and kill them with a homemade bomb.” The investigators have not revealed any further details about this case and have said that they are “at the very beginning” of the inquiry.

They also stressed that it is too early to speak about any possible accomplices of the suspect or about his potential ties with any known terrorist groups or links to any similar incidents.

Both police and the Prosecutor General’s Office called the operation “a great success in the fight against terrorism.”

“Police have acted professionally and consistently here and all necessary measures were taken in a timely fashion,” Uwe Luehrig, the head of the Goettingen police department, said in the statement, adding that police will use all available legal means to counter the terrorist threat.

Northeim pedestrian area

About 700 members of Salafist groups live now in Germany’s state of Lower Saxony alone, German media report, citing data provided by the regional office of the German domestic security service, the BfV.

Some 77 of them have traveled to Syria and Iraq, the intelligence data says, adding that about 50 of them are regarded as posing “an acute threat” to the German security and are subjects to “increased surveillance.”

Salafists in Germany is a problem that needs to be addressed urgently. They are still building mosques especially in former East Germany where their influence is growing. Salafists will not be absorbed into German society, they will never put German laws above Sharia and they have one goal - to subject the world to Sharia. Germany needs to shut down Salafist mosques as they did in France or they will pay a high price.

Two weeks ago, police detained two men suspected of terrorism in Goettingen. The investigators found combat weapons, ammunition, data storage devices and Islamic State flags in their apartment during the raid. One of the suspects was an Algerian, 27, while the second one was a Nigerian, 22.

The Regional Interior Ministry initiated deportation for both suspects but they legally challenged this decision, German media report. Their cases were eventually handed over to the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig.

In the meantime, the BfV once again warned that Islamist terrorists pose a significant threat to Germany. Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of the BfV, said this week that his service receives from two to four tips relating to some potentially dangerous acts a day. He also added that the number of potential terrorists and their supporters has recently reached 1,600 people.

That is a whole lot of people to manage! It would require a Communist-era Stasi-like force to keep track of them. I can't imagine that is something Germans want.

Northeim, Germany

Putin’s View of Power was Formed Watching East Germany Collapse

25 years ago Russia’s president was a KGB officer in the chaos of Dresden. This explains the hardliner he is today

An East German waves a West German flag in front of a group of East German
soldiers in Dresden in 1989. Photograph: Owen Franken/CORBIS

Mary Elise Sarotte - The Guardian

Twenty-five years ago this week tumultuous scenes were unfolding in the East German city of Dresden: inside the central station, tens of thousands of people clashed violently with police, army and Stasi forces. And the chances are high that a 36-year-old KGB officer named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would have followed the chaos with his own eyes.

The story of what happened in Dresden on 4 October was soon overshadowed by the peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall a month later. Yet understanding what Putin the KGB officer may have seen that day could hold the key to understanding how the Russian president sees the crisis in eastern Europe today. For someone who believed deeply in the cold war order, it was most likely an excruciating experience. It is clear that he returned home soon afterwards in disgust, full of bitterness that lingers to this day, with dramatic consequences. Thanks to surviving evidence from police, Stasi, and party files, as well as interviews, it is possible to trace Dresden’s descent into chaos over the course of 1989.

The Berlin Wall
By late summer in 1989 it was apparent that East Germany’s regime of hardliners, headed by Erich Honecker, was never going to follow the example of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and reform. As far as Honecker was concerned, the iron curtain should stay closed. But over the course of that summer the Hungarians had eased their border controls, and a massive wave of East Germans had rushed southwards to the border between Hungary and Austria to try to escape to the west: by mid-August, more than 200,000 East Germans were making their way through Hungary.

Berlin Wall, Brandenburg Gate

When Honecker forbade East Germans from travelling to Hungary, agitated refugees flooded the grounds of the West German embassies in Warsaw and Prague. About 5,000 crowded on to embassy grounds, huddling in the mud as cold, damp autumn weather arrived.

The situation rapidly became so desperate that East and West Germany brokered a deal: the refugees could go west, but on Honecker’s insistence they could do so only on sealed trains (a means of transport with tragic historical significance in Germany) that passed through East Germany first.

After recording their names, Honecker would then prove that he was boss by “expelling” them to West Germany – all the while they stayed on the same trains. On the night of 30 September about 5,500 East Germans made it to West Germany via this bizarre route. Honecker then closed the East German borders entirely, thus putting an end to the refugee problem once and for all – or so he thought.

Berlin Wall from the west. If the girl had done that on the
other side of the wall, she would have been shot and killed

Inside East Germany, just south of Dresden, more would-be refugees were stuck on the southern borders of their unloved state. Instead of going home, they started protesting in large numbers. And more East Germans managed to reach the Prague embassy before the borders were fully sealed. As a result Honecker had to allow more trains from what was then Czechoslovakia to West Germany, scheduled to roll through the centre of Dresden on 4 October.

With the borders now closed, this second set of overflowing trains became known as the “last trains to freedom”, and everyone wanted a ticket: 2,500 people flooded Dresden’s main railway station, blocking the tracks in the hope of getting on board; another 20,000 packed the area outside. For hours, the blockage forced the trains to wait south of the city centre. Panicked, the East German leaders contacted their Czech comrades, asking them to take the trains back, but Prague refused.

So the Dresden police and Stasi decided to fight through the night to clear the station. More than 400 East German soldiers, armed with machine guns, were sent to the city as well. Stasi files record that 45 members of the East German security forces were injured and at least one police car was turned over and set on fire. Protesters later recounted multiple incidents of police brutality, both on the streets and at hastily organised detention centres. It took until the early hours of 5 October to get at least three of the trains through. The rest had to be re-routed through other cities.

Dresden helped to set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the fall of the wall. One of Gorbachev’s senior aides, Anatoly Chernyaev, lamented the spread of “terrible scenes” of violence, damaging to the East German and Soviet regimes alike. The images worsened the split between Gorbachev and East Berlin, rendering them less capable of coordinated action in the face of protests.

Government and Wall toppled
Opposition leaders, for their part, made heroic efforts to guarantee that future protests would be nonviolent. They succeeded: when, on 9 October, dissidents squared off against state security forces in Leipzig, the sheer numbers cowed the state’s security apparatus without violence. The resistance movement then rolled northward over the entire country, eventually toppling the East German regime and the Wall.

Vladimir Putin

It is impossible to say with any certainty where Putin was during these events. He made sure he covered the tracks of his German posting by burning documents, partly to prevent them from falling into the hands of protesters.

But it is clear that he spent much of the late 1980s in East Germany as a member of the Soviet secret police, and there is no reason to think he was absent that October. Putin himself has recalled to interviewers in vague terms how he watched events unfold: it is a reasonable assumption that he saw crowds seize control in Dresden first hand.

Greatest tragedy
This event was a catastrophe from the point of view of Soviet loyalists, and few were more loyal than Putin. He would later call the collapse of the Soviet Union and its authority in eastern Europe the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Since he witnessed it with his own eyes, he has presumably never forgotten the experience.

Operational Code
The Dresden disaster must have had an enormous impact on him – and understanding that may help us to understand his actions today. Political scientists such as Alexander George have long theorised that world leaders function according to an internal “operational code” acquired during younger, formative years, which they then rely on to guide them years later when in power.

The events of 4-5 October 1989 may very well have helped to shape Putin’s operational code. His swift and aggressive responses both to the popular uprising in Kiev earlier this year and to the earlier demonstrations in Moscow suggest that they did. He saw the crowds seize control – and is not, to put it mildly, comfortable with that precedent.

Hardline
This analysis does not bode well for the future of the Ukraine crisis. The conflict in Ukraine, and the resulting wounds to relations between the west and Moscow, will fester as long as Putin remains in power, for operational codes rarely change once set. Having witnessed protesters first get the better of local authorities and then distant rulers, he will do whatever he deems necessary to prevent the same scenario from repeating itself.