New Statesman: With Germany’s political future in the balance, centrist “Merkel voters” will be crucial

 To understand the political dynamics, contemplate the historical choice at the heart of Merkelism. Between 1998 and 2005 a “red-green” coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens modernised the recently reunified country: liberalising the old federal republic’s conservative social policies; paving the way for a multi-ethnic conception of German identity; deploying troops into combat abroad for the first time since 1945; prodding industries towards a greener future; and introducing welfare cuts purporting to adapt the economy to globalisation. The fundamental choice made by Merkel’s four governments from 2005 has been to continue the country on that trajectory, rather than to deviate from it.

That explains Merkelism’s strengths: its moderation, the stability of its course and the cautiously progressive measures often purloined from the SPD (modern family policies, the minimum wage) and Green traditions (ending nuclear power, admitting over one million refugees). It also explains Merkelism’s weaknesses: its reactiveness and preference for the more comfortable work of bedding in previous reforms over developing new ones for the future. [...]

Merkel’s gambit will loom over the aftermath too, by shaping the range of possible coalition governments. First, the electoral cost of nabbing red-green “Merkel voters” has been the transfer of some right-wing voters to a party, the AfD, that is too toxic to include in coalition calculations. Second, the socio-economic shifts of the past two decades, expanding the pool of economically centrist but socially liberal voters, have benefited the Greens most of all. Both of these trends give the left, and especially the Greens, more paths to power and make the most likely outcome a mould-breaking CDU/CSU-Green coalition. An apt legacy for Angela Merkel.

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The Guardian: How Angela Merkel’s great migrant gamble paid off

 But Hallak is not a complete outlier either. More than 10,000 people who arrived in Germany as refugees since 2015 have mastered the language sufficiently to enrol at a German university. More than half of those who came are in work and pay taxes. Among refugee children and teenagers, more than 80% say they have a strong sense of belonging to their German schools and feel liked by their peers. [...]

The German phrase Merkel used, Wir schaffen das, became so memorable mainly because it would in the weeks and months that followed be endlessly quoted back at her by those who believed that the German chancellor’s optimistic message had encouraged millions more migrants to embark on a dangerous odyssey across the Med. “Merkel’s actions, now, will be hard to correct: her words cannot be unsaid,” wrote the Spectator. “She has exacerbated a problem that will be with us for years, perhaps decades.” [...]

Yet today Merkel still sits at the top of Europe’s largest economy, her personal approval ratings back to where they were at the start of 2015 and the polling of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), buoyed to record levels by the global pandemic. When Merkel steps down ahead of federal elections in 2021, as is expected, her party’s successor currently looks more likely to be a centrist in her mould than a hardliner promising a symbolic break with her stance on immigration. [...]

Many experts think that the integration classes that have been mandatory for refugees in Germany since 2005 are no longer fit for purpose, holding back those with academic qualifications while failing to offer real help for those who arrive without being able to read or write. The percentage of those failing the all-important B1 language test has risen rather than fallen over the last five years. And yet, Niewiedzial is optimistic. “Germany can be a very sluggish country, full of tiresome bureaucracy,” she says. “But it’s also able to learn from its mistakes and draw consequences from them.”

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The Guardian: Bild, Merkel and the culture wars: the inside story of Germany’s biggest tabloid

 Today Bild is paradoxically less influential than it was in the 60s, but more politically important. “I read it first in the morning because it is the agenda-setter,” says Josef Joffe, the publisher-editor of the liberal weekly, Die Zeit. “Politicos in Berlin probably read it first in the morning as well.” The paper enjoys a close relationship with the German political elite. The former German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was one of the best men at the wedding of former Bild editor, Kai Diekmann, and in 2008, Diekmann performed the same role for Kohl at his wedding. “Kohl rules with Bild,” the Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll wrote, and Kohl’s successor as chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, affirmed the practice: “To govern I need Bild, Bild Sunday’s edition, and the telly,” he once said. [...]

Reichelt’s agenda is marked less by novelty than by a chest-crunching resuscitation of Bild’s core commitments: pro-US, pro-Nato, pro-Israel, pro-austerity, pro-capital, anti-Russia, anti-China. According to the Bild worldview, the best way to counter the left is to portray its demands as totalitarian, and the best way to kill off the far right is to cannibalise its grievances. While Bild prints relatively little material that a supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would object to, Reichelt sees the party as a threat to his effort to remake the German political scene. “We want nothing to do with the imbeciles of the AfD,” he told me. “The way to destroy them is to make room for their voters in what used to be the political mainstream of this country.” [...]

As editor, Reichelt sees himself less as a news impresario than as an emotional entrepreneur. “Journalism is basically about emotions, as all of the other news outlets in this country seem to have forgotten,” he told me. Reichelt likes to point out what he sees as the shared delusions of the more “respectable” German press. He gave the example of Merkel, around whom he said the press had created an “elaborate mythology” that she has such natural wit and is extremely clever, whereas her skill lay in identifying the direction of the prevailing winds.

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The Guardian: Alleged AfD donor's firm gave money to Tory club

A company controlled by a property magnate who allegedly funded Germany’s main far-right party recently gave £50,000 to an elite organisation that donates large sums of money to the Conservative party. [...]

A series of German media reports have claimed Conle was the ultimate source of a donation of €132,000 (£115,000) to the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). German prosecutors are investigating AfD over the legality of the donation and its source. [...]

The low-profile Conle, 76, built up a property empire over many decades in Germany. He has also emerged as one of the biggest investors in London property in recent years, buying a series of historic buildings in the city centre. [...]

AfD produced a list of 14 EU citizens who it said had contributed to the donation. Some of the individuals claimed they had received money to lend their names to the donation.

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The Guardian Today in Focus: What's behind the rise of Germany's far right?

A terrorist attack in Hanau is just the latest incident of far-right violence in Germany in recent years. It left local residents outraged, with many questioning the effectiveness of the police and security services in the battle against far-right extremism.

The Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief Philip Oltermann tells Anushka Asthana that this latest attack comes at a worrying time for Germany. There is political upheaval as Angela Merkel prepares to depart as chancellor, and meanwhile the far-right AfD is making gains. He says that while many in Germany’s security services were focusing on the rising threat from Islamist-inspired terrorism, they have been accused of downplaying the threat from neo-Nazi groups.

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EURACTIV: Crisis-ridden SPD wins state parliamentary elections in Hamburg

With voter turnout at 62%, a large increase from the historic low in 2015, the city of Hamburg delivered a clear win for left-wing parties. While the SPD lost 6% of its vote share from the previous election in 2015, it remains the top party in the city by a wide margin. The election results indicate the likely continuation of the coalition between the SPD and Greens, and lead candidate for the Greens Katharina Fegebank would then continue on as the city’s second mayor.

The two parties further consolidated their majority, receiving a combined 63.2% of the vote compared to 57.9% five years ago. But the Greens will have a more prominent position now, having jumped from 12.3% to 24.2%. [...]

CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak called it a “bitter day for the CDU…there’s no way to sugarcoat it” and admitted that “what happened in Thuringia didn’t help.” Saarland’s state premier, Tobias Hans, called the Hamburg election “a result that must scare us, even as a federal party.” He went further calling the party “an up-to-date picture of lack of leadership,” particularly after the Thuringian crisis.

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Spiegel: The German Conservatives' Faustian Pact With the Far-Right

What happened in Thuringia this week -- where a center-right politician was elected governor with the help of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party -- was a milestone for the AfD. It was the first time the party, which has been criticized for being extremist and at times openly anti-Semitic, has helped to elect the leader of a state government. [...]

What remains is the embarrassment for mainstream conservatives, especially for CDU and FDP leaders in Berlin, who didn't intervene soon enough. What remains is the fact that conservatives in Thuringia allowed themselves to be seduced by the AfD. What remains is a triumph for Björn Höcke, the right-wing extremist state leader of the AfD in Thuringia, who made those on the center-right look like fools. What remains is the damage caused to liberal democracy. [...]

In their book, "How Democracies Die," Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt began with the chapter, "Fateful Alliances." This is how it usually begins, they write: Representatives of the current system ally themselves with its enemies in order to maintain their grip on power. That's how it was in the Weimar Republic, where Hitler wouldn't have stood a chance without an invitation from conservatives. According to Levitsky's and Ziblatt's analysis, this has also been the case in Brazil, Peru and Venezuela.

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The Irish Times: Germany has suffered a political earthquake. What happened?

He accepted, as the price for power, votes from the AfD. It began life as a euro bailout protest party but has over time radicalised into a hard-right party with an increasingly influential far-right wing. Thuringia’s AfD, and its head Björn Höcke, is head of this far-right wing. He calls himself a “social patriot” while critics accuse him of flirting with Holocaust denial and relativising Nazi crimes. As minister president, critics warn, Kemmerich will be dependent on this extremist support to govern.[...]

Because the Thuringian tremor could crack the federal government. Until now a gentleman’s agreement existed among all other parties not to co-operate with, or allow support from, the AfD. Chancellor Merkel described Wednesday’s vote as “unforgivable” and has demanded the parliamentary decision be revoked. Her successor as CDU leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, has attacked her party colleagues in Thuringia for breaking their own internal party agreement to boycott the AfD. [...]

With quiet triumph. After just seven years in business, it now sits in all of Germany’s 16 state parliaments and is the largest opposition party in the federal chamber, the Bundestag. In Thuringia it is the second-largest grouping. While the local CDU and FDP fear a snap election, the wrath of other parties and of local voters, the AfD can sit back and watch the drama unfold.

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The Economist: Germans still don’t agree on what reunification meant

Many observers say the debate grew louder three or four years ago. The most obvious explanation is therefore the migrant crisis of 2015-16. Petra Köpping, the integration minister in Saxony, one of the five eastern states established at reunification, says that when she tried to explain to her constituents why the state was helping refugees, some replied: “Integrate us first!” Many easterners resented the resources being devoted to help newcomers when they felt left behind. They also disliked the labelling of their complaints as racist.

But the refugee crisis merely triggered a deeper shift, says Christian Hirte, the government’s special commissioner for east Germany. One idea, floated by Angela Merkel, who as chancellor is east Germany’s best-known export, is that the east is undergoing something comparable to the experience of West Germany in 1968, when children forced their parents to account for their activities in the Nazi period. Now, the argument runs, young east Germans seek explanations for what happened to their parents in the early years of reunification. “The long-term wounds were concealed because people were absorbed finding a place in the new society,” says Steffen Mau of Humboldt University in Berlin. “Perhaps you need 25 years to realise this.” [...]

Such views tap into a feeling among many easterners that they have struggled to take back control of their own destiny. Ms Köpping says east Germans hold barely 4% of elite jobs in the east. Many rent flats from westerners, who own much of the eastern housing stock. “Sometimes east Germans feel that they’re ruled by others, not themselves,” says Klara Geywitz, a Brandenburger running to lead Germany’s Social Democrats. Nor have east Germans stormed the national citadels of power. Almost 14 years after she took office Mrs Merkel—and Joachim Gauck, president from 2012-17—remain exceptions rather than a vanguard. Rarely one to dwell on her origins, Mrs Merkel has lately begun to reflect publicly on the mixed legacy of reunification. “We must all…learn to understand why for many people in east German states, German unity is not solely a positive experience,” she said on October 3rd.

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The Local: Could Merkel’s Christian Democrats really work with the far-right AfD?

But on Monday an open letter signed by 17 local CDU officials and reported on by the Ostthüringer Zeitung, urges the party to start "open-ended talks" with the AfD. They consider it unthinkable that "almost a quarter of the voters" in Thuringia "should remain outside the talks". [...]

The AfD surged into second place with 23.4 percent, more than doubling its share of the vote since the last state election in 2014, while the CDU tumbled down to 21.8 percent, from 33.5 percent in 2014. [...]

The CDU previously ruled out working with the Left, but Thuringia CDU leader Mohring said he was open to talks with the party's local leader Ramelow.

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Politico: Far left and right outflank center in regional German vote

The far-left Die Linke party largely held steady to secure first place at 31 percent of the vote in the state of Thuringia, thanks in part to the popularity of state premier Bodo Ramelow, according to preliminary results. Meanwhile, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) once again demonstrated its strong support in the east of the country by surging ahead to finish second at 23.4 percent, more than doubling its vote share in the last election of 2014. [...]

The ballot in the state of a little more than 2 million is expected to have limited impact at national level as Thuringia is a rural region of small towns rather than teeming metropolises. However, the result means efforts to build a coalition will be fraught, testing party red lines. The prior coalition made up of Die Linke, the SPD and the Greens now falls short of a majority. [...]

All parties have ruled out working with the AfD. Its regional leader, Björn Höcke, is a right-wing firebrand whose controversial statements about the Nazi era have prompted some within the party to try to oust him from its ranks.

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The Guardian: The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

The spread of the belief that elites conspired to push Muslim immigration on their native populations is also the story of a conspiracy theory that was nourished on some of the very first blogs and message boards, started appearing in mainstream discourse after 9/11, and then took on a life of its own, even while the supposed facts behind it were exposed as ridiculous. It is a lesson in the danger of half-truths, which are not only more powerful than truths but often more powerful than lies.

Eurabia is a term coined in the 70s that was resurfaced by Gisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband. She wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”). In a series of books, originally written in French and published from the 1990s onward, she developed a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims in exchange for oil.

The original villain of Littman’s story was General Charles de Gaulle. It is difficult for an outsider to understand how De Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazis and was probably the greatest conservative statesman in French history, could be reinvented as the man who betrayed western civilisation for money. But Littman had lived many years in France, and the French far right hated De Gaulle, and indeed tried several times to assassinate him. Not only had De Gaulle fought the Vichy government, he had also admitted defeat in the long and hideously bloody war of Algerian independence – granting an Arab Muslim country its freedom at the expense of the French-Christian settler population, who had to retreat to France (and whose descendants formed the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front). [...]

The idea of the great replacement had its origin in a blatantly racist French novel of the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints, in which France is overthrown by an unarmed invasion of starving, sex-crazed Indian refugees when the French army is not prepared to fire on them. The moral of the book is that western civilisation can only be saved by a willingness to slaughter poor brown people. Steve Bannon, among the founders of the rightwing news site Breitbart and a former adviser to President Trump, has referred to it repeatedly. [...]

One of the many bad fruits of 9/11 was the new atheist movement, a phenomenon marked by mutual self-praise and undeviating hostility to Islam. Even if the ostensible target of much of the hostility was Christianity, the new atheists tend to consider Islam far worse and more “religious” a religion. The American writer Sam Harris’s breakthrough book The End of Faith from 2004 now reads like Bat Ye’or without the inconvenient scaffolding of easily disproved facts. “We are at war with Islam,” he writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists … Armed conflict ‘in the defence of Islam’ is a religious obligation for every Muslim man ... Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”

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The Atlantic: Why Doesn’t Steve Bannon Matter in Europe?

Yet after all that time, Bannon has little to show for his efforts. Though many far-right parties have made significant gains, further establishing themselves as permanent fixtures on the European political stage, the far-right surge that was expected didn’t come to pass. (This was reaffirmed in subsequent elections across the Continent, where although some parties underperformed, they at least demonstrated their relatively high electoral floor.) [...]

But perhaps the greatest inhibitor of Bannon’s success in Europe has been the very far-right parties he has professed to support. Though the former Donald Trump strategist has appeared alongside some of Europe’s most high-profile far-right leaders—from Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally in France, to Matteo Salvini, the head of the League and Italy’s erstwhile interior minister—few have agreed to unite under his nationalist banner. The Sweden Democrats expressed “no interest” in Bannon’s project. Vlaams Belang, a Flemish nationalist party, called the effort “poorly organized.” The Alternative for Germany said the interests of Europe’s anti-establishment parties are too “divergent” to be united. [...]

But it’s not just Bannon’s Americanness that makes some European nationalist parties resistant to working with him. Their reluctance also stems from what is perceived as a fundamental misunderstanding of the way these parties work. Though many of Europe’s far-right movements are united in their shared views on immigration, the economy, and the role and future of the European Union, these beliefs don’t always manifest themselves in the same political goals. Despite hopes that they would be a dominant force in the European Parliament after elections this May, right-wing populist parties instead had to settle for forming the fifth-largest grouping in the legislature—their national priorities took precedence over any broader project. (The current far-right grouping, led by Salvini, failed, for example, to persuade Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz to join it.) [...]

“The mere fact that you are writing an article about him, I think, is part of his personal strategy,” Eric Maurice, the director of the Brussels-based Robert Schuman Foundation, a European think tank, told me, “of trying to look like someone who is everywhere, pulling the strings, working on a master plan to put the far right … in power.”

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OZY: Why This German State Says 'Jawohl' to Migrants

For an industrial hub like Baden-Württemberg — home to auto majors Porsche and Mercedes and multinational corporations like Bosch, SAP and BASF — the approach makes sense, says Gari Pavkovic, head of the Department for Integration Policy of Stuttgart. Aging Germany has an estimated shortage of more than a million skilled workers.

These integration moves also coincided with another trend that runs counter to what’s happening elsewhere. While the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is rapidly gaining support in several states, from Brandenburg and Saxony to Thuringia, in Baden-Württemberg its popularity is declining. A September poll shows support for the anti-immigrant AfD at 12 percent, down from 15 percent in 2016. As mainstream parties in Germany and beyond struggle to stop the surge of the far-right, Baden-Württemberg is showing that the answer to bridging a divide between migrants and locals might lie not just in politics, but in economics. [...]

With Germany as a whole accepting far fewer refugees than it did in 2015, the numbers entering Baden-Württemberg have declined too. Still, in 2018, the state the size of Maryland accepted 11,000 migrants, mostly from Nigeria, Syria and Turkey — the U.S. plans to admit 18,000 in all, in 2020. Twenty percent of the population has a migrant background in Baden-Württemberg, located in the southwest of the country. In Stuttgart, it’s 50 percent. In comparison, Thuringia in the east counts just over 7 percent of its population as foreign-born. [...]

Deutsche Bahn too will only take trainees with sufficient language skills who have passed a psychological test and possess technical knowledge. They need to prove they graduated from a recognized school. For refugees fleeing a war, these can be tough hurdles. That’s where organizations like Caritas — which also helps refugees navigate bureaucracy, from getting educational qualifications recognized to obtaining a driving license — come in. “There are no limits,” says Lisa Maisch, a team leader of one home that houses 146 people. “We connect them or help them figure out ways to do that.”

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Associated Press: Germany honors resisters who tried to assassinate Hitler

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will speak Saturday at an annual swearing-in ceremony for some 400 troops before addressing a memorial event, paid tribute ahead of the anniversary to executed plot leader Col. Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators and highlighted their importance to modern Germany. [...]

The resistance against the Nazis only came to be “laboriously accepted” over subsequent decades, said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center, and even in the 1980s many believed its memory would fade away. Only in 2004 did a survey show that a majority of Germans believe the resistance to the Nazis is “important for our political culture,” he added. [...]

Tuchel said von Stauffenberg is a “symbolic figure” of the resistance, an officer who evolved from supporting Nazi policies to becoming a ferocious opponent of the regime after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. He acknowledged that the resistance within the German military was, in overall terms, tiny: 200 to 300 people were involved in the July 20 plot. The German military had some 8 million men under arms at the time, and only “a handful or two” of its more than 1,000 generals and admirals participated.

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Social Europe: East versus west? The battle within the far right in Germany

Yet, the story of the AfD is also one of significant regional differences. Ever since the party first participated in elections, it has proved much more popular in the eastern Länder of the former German Democratic Republic. Polls for the state elections in autumn 2019 in Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony show that it may even become the biggest party there, repeating victories from the European elections earlier this year.

Initially viewed as conservative or Eurosceptic, the AfD’s shift towards the populist radical right has only recently become more obvious and well-documented. This is partly because it was treated as a unitary actor across Germany, neglecting the splits within it from its outset. Although it gained the image of being a ‘professors’ party’ in its initial stage, particularly due to its co-founder Bernd Lucke, this does not describe the full picture. [...]

Instead of establishing the AfD as a potential coalition partner for the Christian democrats, its extreme-right Flügel’ (wing) has expressed support for fundamental opposition in parliaments and often joined neo-Nazis and hooligans in efforts to mobilise protests and express anger on the streets. The positions of the Flügel have become increasingly openly racist and anti-Semitic. The rhetoric often resembles that of the Nazi era, with Höcke’s remarks on the Holocaust memorial in Berlin in 2017 only one example.[...]

The annual study on authoritarian attitudes across Germany by Decker and Brähler illustrates this ‘demand side’. They find significant differences between east and west Germany regarding support for right-wing, authoritarian dictatorship, xenophobia and social Darwinism—all more widely supported in the east. In particular, the proportion of respondents agreeing to statements such as ‘Germany is overrun by immigrants to a dangerous extent’ is consistently higher in the former GDR.

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UnHerd: The far-Right’s appeal to resentful Germans

This was once the beating heart of East German industry, and it is here that the far-Right has enjoyed particular success in recent times. Support for the AfD in East Germany is on average more than double that in the West. In this week’s elections to the European Parliament, the AfD was the biggest force in Saxony, winning a quarter (25.3%) of the vote. The party also finished first in Brandenburg.

As with populist successes elsewhere, the reasons for the AfD’s rise are multifaceted. There is the decline of industry and resultant male resentment. There is the gap between the attitudes of younger city-dwellers and older voters toward multiculturalism and immigration. And there is a tired political establishment – in this case Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany – that has been in power for nearly a decade and a half. [...]

The difference in attitudes to immigration between East and West is significant. According to a recent survey, 66% of respondents in the former East German states are not satisfied that their immigration concerns are being addressed, compared to 46% in the former West German states. There are fewer foreign-born citizens in the East than in the West, yet anger about immigration runs deeper. According to data collected by victim counselling centres, five people in the east fall victim to far-right violence every day. In Saxony, 317 attacks were recorded in 2018, up from 229 in 2017. [...]

There are other factors at play in the party’s growth. The economy, for example. But often these are connected with immigration as low-skilled workers compete with immigrants for jobs. Though the AfD did well in areas with strong economic growth, support across Germany was typically stronger in areas with low household income. Those living in the former GDR are statistically several percentage points more likely to be living in poverty than those living in the west of Germany.

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The Local: The winners and losers: Six things to know about the EU elections in Germany

Meanwhile, voter turnout in Germany was significantly higher than in the previous European election, reaching 61.4% compared to 48.1% during the 2014 ballot, according to preliminary results shared by the German government. [...]

And she's right. Young people voted overwhelmingly for the Greens: about 30 percent of the under 30s voted for the environmental party. [...]

Dr Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin previously told the Local that the Greens' message was optimism and that was one of the reasons that the party has become so desirable to voters in recent months. [...]

Yet in Saxony, the AfD was the biggest force with 25.3 percent of the vote, followed by the CDU (23 percent) and The Left (Die Linke), with 11.7 percent.

In Brandenburg, the AfD was also top with 19.9 percent of the vote, followed by the CDU (18 percent). The AfD also performed well in Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania although the CDU came out on top in these states.

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The Guardian: Jews in Germany warned of risks of wearing kippah cap in public

Germany’s government commissioner on antisemitism has warned Jews about the potential dangers of wearing the traditional kippah cap in the face of rising anti-Jewish attacks.

“I cannot advise Jews to wear the kippah everywhere all the time in Germany,” Felix Klein said in an interview published Saturday by the Funke regional press group.[...]

Klein, whose post was created last year, cited “the lifting of inhibitions and the uncouthness which is on the rise in society” as factors behind a rising incidence of antisemitism. [...]

“Antisemitism has always been here. But I think that recently, it has again become louder, more aggressive and flagrant,” Claudia Vanoni said in an interview, adding the problem was “deeply rooted” in German society.

Antisemitic crimes rose by 20% in Germany last year, according to interior ministry data which blamed nine out of ten cases on the extreme right.

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openDemocracy: A pan-European radical right – contradiction in terms?

Although Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has confirmed it is sending a representative, Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front has said she will not be attending. Le Pen herself hosted a similar meeting in Nice in 2018, at which Geert Wilders from the Dutch Party for Freedom and several other influential radical right speakers were present, an event which indicated how hard it has been to create a pan-European radical right bloc. [...]

As David Barnes recently wrote here, narratives of European civilization have been both common and hard to sustain; Oswald Mosley’s post-World War II argument in favour of ‘Europe – A Nation’, which shares many similarities with today’s anti-immigrant discourses promoted by the likes of Salvini, found few takers, despite the fact that a notion of Europe having a homogeneous racial and cultural background was widely held across the continent’s radical right movements. [...]

Even if Europe’s radical right leaders share certain fundamental ideas, however, such as a belief in the need to defend the ‘white race’, a hatred of Islam, a desire to stop immigration, and a basic ultra-nationalist position, it is hard to see how the clash of nationalisms that conferences such as Salvini’s will expose can survive the experience. [...]

There may have been a sharing of ideas – a transnational fascism – but there was really no ‘fascist international’. Attempts to appeal to a basic ‘Europeanism’, centred on racial belonging and conspiratorial antisemitism, have historically proved insufficient to mobilise and maintain coherence across the continent, with nationalism proving far more powerful as an identity-building cohesive force. Perhaps the National Socialists came closest with their transnational membership of the SS (although this was not huge) and a racial ideology which found supporters in all European countries. Yet ultimately, as Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe write, ‘the vision of a fascist Europe proved to be a chimera. Fascists clearly espoused different versions of European unity.’

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