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Anti-euro party set for gains in German state polls

14 September 2014, 16:38 CET
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(BERLIN) - Germany's new anti-euro party is poised to win seats in two eastern state elections Sunday, heightening an emerging threat for Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD), only formed early last year, looks set to enter state parliaments in Thuringia and Brandenburg, two weeks after it scored almost 10 percent in eastern Saxony.

Headed by economics professor Bernd Lucke, the ascendant party only narrowly missed out on entering the national parliament last September and won seven seats in European Parliament elections in May.

The AfD, which wants Germany to leave the euro and return to the Deutschmark, denies seeking right-wing voters but flirts with populist ideas on issues such as law and order, immigration and "family values".

Among its demands are a referendum that would seek to block plans to build a mosque in the eastern city of Dresden.

In the polls Sunday the AfD is set to draw much of the "protest vote" in the former East Germany, which still lags western states in wealth, jobs and wages 25 years after the Berlin Wall fell, analysts say.

Merkel, worried about the AfD's growing ballot box appeal, this week said that "we must address the problems that concern the people", including "crime and rising numbers of asylum seekers".

- 'Not a transient protest party' -

Analysts say the AfD is seeking to occupy the political ground to the right of Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) while keeping its distance from the far-right fringe, like the openly xenophobic National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).

"The CDU is slowly starting to understand what the AfD really is -- not a transient protest movement, not an 'NPD-light', but a party that is drawing significant support ... from former CDU voters" among other groups, said Werner Patzelt of Dresden Technical University.

The political scientist said it is too early to tell whether the AfD -- now in its political "puberty" and benefiting from a string of victories in a tight electoral calendar -- is here to stay.

But Patzelt pointed out that the AfD's central theme -- railing against eurozone bailouts and an emerging EU "super state" -- is unlikely to go away soon and that such fears are mirrored in other European countries.

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on Saturday dismissed the AfD as populists who offer simple slogans to fish for the votes of disgruntled citizens.

"Politicians who don't care about what can actually be done but who only stoke unease, I just call them demagogues," said Schaeuble. "You can't shape the future with them."

Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel of the Social Democrats (SPD) also lashed out at the newcomers, charging that "people who speak so negligently about Europe don't understand that millions of jobs depend on a functioning Europe."

- Far-left also eyes gains -

Also expected to make gains is the far-left Linke party, which groups former eastern Communists and anti-capitalists from western states.

Its top candidate in Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, 58, hopes to oust the CDU and head a coalition government with the centre-left SPD and Greens in what he calls a tripartite alliance of "colourful diversity".

It would be the first so-called "red-red-green" government in which the Linke would be the senior partner and would make a similar three-way alliance

thinkable at the national level one day.

The threat led Merkel to warn on the eve of elections that "Karl Marx would return" to the state government, nearly a quarter of a century after German reunification.

The SPD's leader, Gabriel, did not rule out such a Thuringia power pact for his party, which at the national level is the junior coalition partner to Merkel's CDU.

So far the SPD has rejected a national level tie-up with the Linke, whose policy positions include a basic salary for everybody, a ban on any German military missions abroad and the dissolution of NATO.

The SPD, meanwhile, looks set to again cruise to victory in Brandenburg, the state that encircles Berlin, which has been a Social Democratic bastion for 24 years.


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