BERLIN: The Alternative for Germany (AfD) claims to be a force of “patriots” but some of its new lawmakers have shocked with xenophobic and revisionist comments and have been linked to far-right groups.
The AfD is the first hard-right nationalist party to enter the German Bundestag in large numbers in the post-World War II era, an epochal event that stunned most Germans.
Since the party’s breakthrough in Sunday’s vote, the country has been scrutinizing the biographies of the often little-known newcomers, elected on a platform of rejecting migrants, Muslims and Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Among them are police officers, prosecutors and judges, academics and business leaders, soldiers and scientists, a one-time radio host, an undertaker and a former fighter pilot.
A disproportionate number are from Germany’s ex-communist and poorer east, where the AfD was the number one party for male voters and won outright in the state of Saxony.
The AfD rails against “traitor” Merkel as public enemy number one, for opening German borders to an “invasion” of more than one million migrants since 2015.
Some MPs have links to PEGIDA, short for Patriots Against the Islamization of the Occident, a street movement that emerged in the Saxony state capital of Dresden.
Other lawmakers have reported links to shadowy fraternities, football hooligans, Russian ultra-nationalists and the nativist Identitarian Movement, which is being watched by the BfV domestic security service.
One has reportedly driven a car with “AH1818” on its number plates, the Tagesspiegel daily wrote — neo-Nazi code for Adolf Hitler’s initials, followed by the number of those letters in the alphabet, listed twice.
And Jens Maier, a judge in Dresden, has drawn fire for voicing a degree of understanding for Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, reportedly saying that he had acted “out of desperation” over multiculturalism when he killed 77 people in 2011.
Still giddy from the election, which made the AfD Germany’s third strongest party, its 93 freshly baked lawmakers gathered this week in a modernist concrete-and-steel annex building to the glass-domed Reichstag that is still pockmarked from Word War II battles.
Lawmaker number 94 stayed away — Frauke Petry, the former face of the AfD, had theatrically walked out of a party press conference the day before to protest against its bitter infighting and radicalization.
Co-Leader Beatrix von Storch, picking up her new parliamentary ID card, said it was time for the party to “get to work.”
Asked whether the AfD, with slogans like “Bikinis not Burkas,” is far right, she replied: “We want to cap refugee numbers, we are against Islamization, we want to preserve our culture, we want to protect our borders.
“We are for the classic family unit, we don’t want a United States of Europe, but a Europe of fatherlands. I think these are perfectly normal topics.”
The MPs include at least 13 with ultra-right views, 30 “nationalist-conservatives,” and 18 comparative “moderates,” according to a count by Die Zeit weekly, which said the allegiances of others were unclear.
Among the new MPs is Leif-Erik Holm, 47, a former radio host who has claimed Germany is being turned “into a caliphate,” and who ran against Merkel in her Baltic Coast electorate.
Merkel lost a lot of votes, he said, but “beating her would have been the icing on the cake.”
Some members are veterans of the AfD’s founding days in 2013, when it railed mainly against eurozone bailouts to crisis-hit Greece.
Others call for tougher law and order, traditional “family values” and fighting against what they consider a left-leaning establishment spreading its lies via a complicit media.
On the far right, leaders have shocked with taboo-breaking comments that challenge Germany’s culture of atonement over World War II and the Holocaust.
One is co-leader Alexander Gauland, 75, a defector from Merkel’s conservative bloc, who has urged Germans to be proud of their veterans from two world wars.
Another, Martin Renner, has criticized Germany’s “guilt cult.”
Asked about the comment, he stuck by the phrase but added that he had only learnt later that it was commonly used by the far-right and anti-Semitic NPD party.
Dozens of members are close to regional party leader Bjoern Hoecke, who has demanded “a 180-degree turn” in Germany’s culture of remembrance and called Berlin’s Holocaust monument a “memorial of shame.”
Anti-migrant, revisionist: Germany’s hard-right AfD
Anti-migrant, revisionist: Germany’s hard-right AfD
Terror at Friday prayers: Witnesses describe blast rocking Islamabad mosque
- The Daesh group has claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist communications
ISLAMABAD: A worshipper at the Shiite mosque in Islamabad where dozens of people were killed in a suicide blast on Friday described an “extremely powerful” explosion ripping through the building just after prayers started.
Muhammad Kazim, 52, told AFP he arrived at the Imam Bargah Qasr-e-Khadijatul Kubra mosque shortly after 1:00 p.m. (0800 GMT) on Friday and took up a place around seven or eight rows from the Imam.
“During the first bow of the Namaz (prayer ritual), we heard gunfire,” he told AFP outside the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) hospital, where many of the wounded were brought for treatment.
“And while we were still in the bowing position, an explosion occurred,” he said.
Kazim, who is from Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan and lives in Islamabad, escaped unharmed, but accompanied his wounded friend to the PIMS hospital for treatment.
“It was unclear whether it was a suicide bombing, but the explosion was extremely powerful and caused numerous casualties,” Kazim said.
“Debris fell from the roof, and windows were shattered,” he added. “When I got outside, many bodies were scattered... Many people lost their lives.”
The Daesh group has claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist communications.
Another worshipper, Imran Mahmood, described a gunfight between the suicide bomber, a possible accomplice and volunteer security personnel at the mosque.
“The suicide attacker was trying to move forward, but one of our injured volunteers fired at him from behind, hitting him in the thigh,” Mahmood, in his fifties, told AFP.
“He fell but got up again. Another man accompanying him opened fire on our volunteers,” he said, adding the attacker “then jumped onto the gate and detonated the explosives.”
As of Saturday morning, the death toll stood at 31, with at least 169 wounded.
The attack was the deadliest in the Pakistani capital since September 2008, when 60 people were killed in a suicide truck bomb blast that destroyed part of the five-star Marriott hotel.
Lax security
Describing the aftermath of the attack, Kazim said unhurt worshippers went to the aid of those wounded.
“People tried to help on their own, carrying two or three bodies in the trunks of their vehicles, while ambulances arrived about 20 to 25 minutes later,” he told AFP.
“No one was allowed near the mosque afterwards.”
Kazim, who has performed Friday prayers at the mosque “for the past three to four weeks,” said security had been lax.
“I have never seen proper security in place,” he told AFP.
“Volunteers manage security on their own, but they lack the necessary equipment to do it effectively,” he said.
“Shiite mosques are always under threat, and the government should take this seriously and provide adequate security,” he added.
